female: Make your body look big, arms way up high.

Like this.

Like this, honey.

Like this, big, big.

male: Let's keep going, keep going, keep going.

Dan Flores: If you want to know what it's like to really be an American, I suggest you learn something about the coyote.

Coyotes have been living in close association with people as far back as we can come up with any evidence for it.

Miguel Ordeñana: People hate coyotes.

They love coyotes.

Coyotes are this controversial animal that acts as this conversation starter.

Camilla H. Fox: What might be perceived as aggressive or bold behavior is actually just a lot of misunderstanding of coyote behavior.

Alan Salazar: Most tribes in California, we use the animals as teachers, and they taught us important life lessons.

Emily Lindsey: Something very catastrophic happened 13,000 years ago, but coyotes managed to make it through.

Dan: The federal government spent more than $500 million trying to completely eradicate from the continent and yet it now exists in nearly every city in the United States.

Here is a creature that can resist everything we can throw at it.

[music] [coyote howling] [music] John Contreras: My name is John Contreras.

[speaking foreign language] Over there.

I'm a clear from here in this land from Torres Martinez.

In our creation, one of the main beings, it happens to be coyote himself.

The very first coyote creates this game.

In the game, they have to guess the possession of the star and he pulls a star from the sky.

"If you miss me, then the prize is I get to take one of your eyes.

If I miss you, then you can take one of my eyes."

Coyote starts using magic.

So if they guess right, then he would blink his eye, then the star would shift in the earth and move to another spot so it looked like they missed.

Every time they miss, he would take their eye and put it in a clay jar.

Started to stack up and stack up 'cause everybody was losing.

Ferret is out there and he sees that he's using his magic to cheat.

He's like, "Coyote, I've come to challenge you."

And then the ferret captures the star, so he would win all their eyes back.

Ferret took coyote's eye.

And so then coyote says, "Well, I have two eyes.

Let's do this again."

And he takes the last eye of coyote.

Ferret said, "Well, I don't want him to try to trick people and do these things."

So that's why he had killed him.

So that becomes the end of that very first coyote.

Dan: The oldest literature in North America is coyote literature.

My name's Dan Flores.

I'm a former professor at the University of Montana, but primarily a writer.

Coyote kind of occupies this rare position of being this deep time Paleolithic deity that helped humans understand who they are.

Coyotes have been living in close association with people as far back as we can come up with any evidence for it.

Here in New Mexico where I live, we have a spectacular national park called Chaco Canyon that was a huge city, at the times as many as 30,000 people 1,000 years ago.

Chaco was an urban setting that provides archaeological evidence that coyotes were in that city 1,000 years ago.

In the suburbs around the Aztec capital of Tenochtitlan more than 1,000 years ago, there were coyotes living in the midst of human villages, towns, and cities.

Alan: Do I have guns for these permits?

Yes, I do.

I apologize.

That's the coyote spirit right there.

Right there, that's the coyote spirit.

I'm fast runner, also known as Alan Salazar.

I'm from the villages of Paseknga, Chaguayanga, and Tapo.

For 13,000 years, the Chumash lived in harmony with animals big, small, in between, animals we ate, animals we just admired.

When you look at all of our traditional stories and myth and legend, you can learn a bunch of important survival lessons from coyotes.

They've survived longer than just about any of the animals.

They're one of the oldest carnivores that have been able to survive ice ages and a lot of things that even we didn't survive.

[music] Emily: Emily Lindsey, associate curator and excavation site director at the La Brea Tar Pits.

The La Brea Tar Pits is the most important ice age fossil site on earth, and it's because there is this one point in mid-city LA where a fault just happens to contact one of these underground oil fields and that oil seeps up along the fault line and it forms these shallow, sticky pools and for the last several tens of thousands of years anything that has walked in, flown in, or been blown into these shallow, sticky pools has gotten stuck and preserved forever.

Scientists like me can come here and excavate essentially an entire ecosystem from the past trapped in time.

Something very catastrophic happened here 13,000 years ago that really impacted the large fauna, but coyotes managed to make it through.

We were able to determine exactly when the extinction event happened here because we stopped being able to get radiocarbon days on any of the large extinct species.

So ancient bison, giant ground sloths, saber-toothed cats, dire wolves.

They all go out by 13,000 years ago, but we're still getting coyotes in the deposits after that.

This is--would be probably a dire wolf jaw here, but that's a--or could be coyote.

This might actually--this might be a coyote, which I wonder if that's why we cleaned it off like that.

The thing that happens here that's really surprising is that right at this time of the extinction, when humans show up and start spreading around, they are bringing with them the most powerful tool that people have ever invented, and that's fire.

We know how to control it.

We use it to cook our food.

We use it to have light.

We use it to stay warm.

We use it to control the ecosystem to benefit us.

That was not beneficial to a lot of these large animals that maybe aren't particularly adaptable, but coyotes respond really well to fire.

That's another reason that they were very successful in surviving the catastrophic changes that were happening at the end of the ice age here in LA.

Regan Dunn: The tar pits preserve things so intricately, and because it's so well preserved, we can do all kinds of geochemical sampling that tells us about the climate, tells us about growing season conditions and that helps inform where-- you know, how coyote lived.

My name is Regan Dunn, and I'm assistant deputy director and associate curator at the La Brea Tar Pits.

We have coyotes represented in our entire 60,000 year-long fossil record.

Through this time of dramatic change with the fires and the change in the vegetation, coyote persists.

Just by living in those ecosystems, the coyotes are recording that climate event in their tissues.

We can use the signals captured in those survivors' teeth to reconstruct those ancient environments.

Here are drawers and drawers and drawers of our coyote specimens.

Here's an example of a coyote jaw that has been intensively studied here at the tar pits.

From this hole, scientists have been able to see the chemical signatures that are preserved in these bony tissues so we can see dramatic change in the environment.

We can also know its age using carbon-14 dating.

Some of our colleagues have been looking at the surfaces of the teeth in a microscopic level to see what this coyote's last meal was.

You can see scratches and pits to understand if this coyote was eating grass, hard foods, nuts, and that kind of thing.

Coyotes are remarkable in that their diet can be very flexible.

They're sort of smallish in size and basically they can eat anything that humans eat, and they have the mechanics to do it.

They have the right teeth that can accomplish crushing any kind of food item, grinding vegetation even.

And through time, that makes them a very adaptable species.

Emily: Coyotes are flexible eaters.

They can exist in a wide variety of ecosystems, a wide variety of habitats.

They are social.

They increase their reproductive rate under stress, but I think something that's really been key to their survival and continuing to thrive in LA is that they are comfortable adapting to human-modified environments and living in close proximity to humans.

Samantha MJ Johnson: This is real easy to learn.

This is what we teach a lot.

It's also how I did this one here.

This was made out of raffia.

It's actually pretty old at this point.

I think it's like a good 2 or 3 months and haven't taken it off.

My name is Samantha.

I'm Gabrielino-Tongva, and we are here in Siban'gna, which is the ancestral village.

Now known as San Gabriel by most people, but this is Tongva land, has always been Tongva land, and always will be Tongva land.

In western science, usually our data and our successes are tracked through spreadsheets and published papers and very quantitatively down to the number; but in indigenous science, it's qualitative and it's done over very long periods of time.

And so our data is tracked through story.

When we learn from our grandparents what things generally looked like, that's also the stories that they carry on from their grandparents and what it generally looked like before.

And so in that way we're able to keep track of hundreds of years of qualitative data.

In our language, coyote is 'iitar.

With coyote being here for as long as it's been here, we've had this relationship with 'iitar.

For as long as Tongva people have been here, we've had a relationship with our animal and plant relatives, and coyote is no exception.

In the stories, usually the coyote is supposed to tease the humans to help us reflect on the things that we do that might be kind of ridiculous to our animal relatives.

Coyote tells us more about ourselves than it does the coyote.

There's something wonderful about that.

[music] Kat: Gigi, go potty now.

[dog yelps] [growling] Scott: Shoo, shoo!

[explosion] [music] Nick Simon: I went to the American Film Institute.

I started in 2006, graduated in '08 and learned pretty quickly while I was there that if you were going to direct, you needed to learn how to write.

In 2011, there was a Santa Ana windstorm that knocked out power in Silver Lake Hills.

We lived there at the time.

My wife, she was walking our dogs one day and these coyotes, like, followed her home with our dogs and she was pretty shaken up by it.

As we were sitting there for 3 days in the blackout, I remember going, "This is an interesting story for, like, a home invasion story.

What if it was coyotes in the city?"

I feel like a coyote gets a bad rap, right?

I don't have real issues with them.

I mean, they're not as dangerous as wolves, but they're still dangerous.

And they're more domesticated than wolves.

You don't see people, like, rescuing coyotes and, like, living with them 'cause they're too independent.

But, like, are they the cockroaches of the canine family?

If I'm walking my dog now, I'll know if there's, like, a den in, you know, people's bushes.

They'll have a den in people's yards, which is really kinda crazy.

And they're so acclimated towards people here.

My dog now is a little bit bigger than the ones that were followed home.

So they don't bother with them.

Why are coyotes not afraid of humans in Los Angeles?

They'll look at you and they keep moving.

You know, they don't care because all the people will feed them and people are nice to them until they kill their cat and then it's a--you know, a thing.

[speaking foreign language] Miguel: My name is Miguel Ordeñana.

I'm a senior manager community science here at the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County.

When I was around 12 or 13 years old, my very first pet, a cat named Whiskey, was killed by a pack of coyotes.

It was devastating for me, but at the same time I was like, "Do I hate coyotes now, or what is my perspective?"

And so it really was this moment of growth and transition looking back, although at the time it was horrible to experience that.

It really allows me to be able to talk to people of all backgrounds about coyotes, regardless of where they're coming from, with empathy for people who lose their pets to coyotes, who have conflicts sometimes with coyotes.

And so that's been in me kinda since I was a little boy.

And so I'm really grateful for those perspectives.

That empathy has been a gift.

Coyotes are this controversial animal that acts as this conversation starter to really show people what's really going on regarding animal behavior--or coyote behavior, how they're really navigating through the urban environment, what we still have to learn about coyotes.

So people will come away from that conversation not necessarily wanting to hug a coyote but at least having a respect for coyotes and a willingness to coexist and tolerate them.

[music] Dan: The reason coyotes sometimes attack dogs and cats is because coyotes set up territories in urban places just like they do in rural places, and whenever they see a dog or a cat inside their territory they often think of it as a competitor predator inside coyote territory.

And so they will attack a dog or a cat because they regard it as a competitor, not because they regard it as a food source.

One of the things that those of us who are advocates for coyotes contend with is people coming to us endlessly and talking about the death of their pets or what they believe is the death of a pet because of the presence of coyotes.

When I question, "Well--so did you find the animal?"

And if they did, I will say usually, "Well, that possibly was a coyote, because coyotes usually will not take away a cat or a dog and eat it."

But if they didn't find an animal and just assume that it was a coyote, I often offer another suggestion.

Great horned owls are tremendous predators of small animals.

There is in fact a great horned owl roost in Washington State with more than 70 cat collars at the base of that particular roost.

[music] Roland Kays: My name is Roland Kays.

I'm a professor at North Carolina State University and a scientist here at the North Carolina Museum of Natural Sciences.

So we heard a lot of people talking about the coyotes eating their cats.

Sometimes they think other animals are eating their cats, like fishers, which are a big weasel species that has also recently started colonizing urban areas in the northeast.

So we decide to do a little experiment.

We put out a fake cat on a camera trap.

This is this little robotic cat that you can buy online, and we put a camera trap on it to see what would happen.

And we thought, you know, maybe we get a coyote or a fisher attacking it and instead we actually got this great horned owl that swooped in and landed on the cat and actually attacked it and then flew away, trying to carry it away.

Do you want me to grab the cat?

It's a little cut up actually.

Dusty.

This is Dusty 'cause he tended to get dirty.

This is the little robotic cat.

It's kind of motion sensitive, and when it's on it'll meow and turn its head.

And so this is what we had a great horned owl grab and try to fly away with.

Niamh Quinn: You had your glasses in your hand earlier on.

You looked like so nerdy scientist.

You were like this with your glasses.

My name is Niamh Quinn.

I am a human-wildlife interactions advisor with the University of California's division of Agriculture and Natural Resources.

My thing is that we can prevent coyotes eating our cats by keeping our cats inside.

I think that what's happening is that we as humans are the ones that may potentially be creating the conflict, but we are also the ones that have the ability to change the situation.

Jason Acuña: I'm Wee Man.

We're gonna talk about coyotes today.

Christine Wilkinson: That, I need that.

Can we get that right now?

William King: Niamh is a PhD scientist for UC ANR.

Niamh: With UC ANR.

William: And she specializes in rodent, uh... Niamh: Stuff.

William: She specializes in rodents.

Jose is a professional skateboarder, coyote enthusiast, coyote artist.

Christine: Nice.

William: Yeah, coyote advocate.

Myself, I'm a coyote advocate, photographer, video-er, and amateur researcher, will say.

Christine is a very accomplished scientist, PhD-- Christine: I love these intros.

William: Curator at the Natural History Museum of LA.

Jason is a philosopher, skateboarder, and coyote expert.

Christine: Nice.

William: With the exception of coyotes during pupping season, the only time I see conflicts is a person glued to their phone, dog off leash, and it kicks off.

The only time I've seen where they get trippy with a person at all really is pupping season.

Every time there'll be at least one adult coyote kind of escorting past the den.

It's a trip.

I've seen that many times.

Jason: I saw one guy was walking two dogs and coyote 20 feet behind followed him the whole time, and the guy was just walking away, walking away and the guy kept yelling, yelling.

Everybody's brow was like, "Dude, just run.

Just, you know, or act--get wild."

Niamh: People don't understand that feeding coyotes is actually worse than not feeding them.

It's a misdemeanor usually.

Christine: There's a state law.

Well, San Francisco has law.

Niamh: There's a state law.

And there can be municipal laws against feeding of wildlife, which I actually think are a really good idea because I think it's easier for the municipalities then to enforce those laws.

Christine: But they won't, though, is the other thing.

Niamh: And then the other problem is then with the state laws a lot of the time, like, it'll go up to, like, a courtroom and a judge won't want it and it gets kicked out.

And so, like, there is no consequences of it.

And, like, sometimes a ticket's not gonna help either, but I think that education would be better, some sort of a wildlife program.

Almost like traffic school for wildlife essentially.

Christine: There was a coyote named Carl in San Francisco.

He was illegally hand-fed by a woman suffering from homelessness for many years.

When she passed away, he moved over to Golden Gate Park and he started unusually bold predatory behaviors toward toddlers likely because he was receiving these rewards from people for a long time, and it became so close to being a serious contact between Carl and toddlers that they lethally removed Carl.

Unhoused folks are facing all the things that society has done to them.

Coyotes are in these spaces as well, and that can either be fine, you know, -ish, right?

For them to live together, or it could turn into coyotes receiving rewards from people because these people don't have support and maybe that then translates into a conflict later on.

My work really is about showing these shared well-being between people and wildlife and how if we're thinking about equity for people we're also thinking about how we can coexist with wildlife and share these spaces in a way that's sustainable and resilient.

Gabrielle Crow: I always find it this is my favorite time of year just because everything's so green, and you can see the lupine that's popping up, and it's just very special to be able to be here in this space.

This is the tribal land that got repatriated back to the Gabrielino-Shoshone Nation in 2022.

My name is Gabrielle Crow.

I am the co-chair as well as the secretary of environmental sciences for the Gabrielino-Shoshone Nation of Southern California.

There was arguments to be able to build a swing at this little park that's up here.

They weren't gonna add a swing there because coyotes can come and bite kids there.

That whole fear-mongering and, like, the idea behind that it's already rampant in the neighborhood.

That's why we just follow rules like, well, you can put your dog on a leash 'cause we're not at a dog park and because there are coyotes around but not because of the fear, like, a coyote's gonna come and bite you.

It's just more of out of respect.

Like, I actually more afraid of what someone's dog is going to do to the coyote versus the coyote coming.

As long as we keep enough of a distance, then they do their own regular thing.

[music] male: Professor in his natural environment.

Dacher Keltner: Just working hard with my little... My name is Dacher Keltner.

I'm a professor of psychology at UC Berkeley and author of "Awe: The New Science of Everyday Wonder and How It Can Transform Your Life."

When we encounter vast things, it reduces anxiety, it reduces depression, it makes you feel connected to people, it reduces loneliness, it reduces political polarization.

It's good for your heart.

It's good for your inflammation and immune system.

Here in Berkeley, California, when I go hiking in our regional parks I see coyotes, and one time I saw a cluster of them.

And you could tell, like, they were collaborating with each other and they were a pretty tight little community, and what that experience teaches us is humility and reverence.

There are forces in nature that are bigger than us.

You know, there are forces in life that are bigger than us.

The mind's higher principles and concepts like fairness and interdependence and sharing, we learn from nature.

[music] Samantha: One thing that's really common for indigenous scientists, including myself, is that I'm pretty careful about not using the word nature.

In western culture we've used nature as a word to separate ourselves from the environment and the world that we live in, but we as humans are a part of nature.

I believe that the word nature is kind of this illusion that's meant to separate us from the thing that gives us life.

[music] Gabrielle: Coyotes have such resilience that through thousands of years and all this colonization that's happened over the last, like, 500 years, that they're still here and they're still in a lot of numbers.

Looking at it from that indigenous perspective, that we live in reciprocity with them.

We take what we need.

We give back.

And so that's the concepts that we're learning here.

We have neighbors that think we're doing activities that actually are attracting the coyotes when it's actually just the opposite.

We're just making sure that we're getting out of the coyotes' way and they're able to have their normal behaviors and their normal activities.

[music] Samantha: I believe as an indigenous scientist that we have overlooked the intelligence of many animals and many plants for a very long time in Western science.

And when you remove coyote from their ecosystem, then you risk collapsing that entire ecosystem.

Coyote can be in inconvenient places, so can humans.

Maybe it's a sign that we need to work better with our animal neighbors in order to reduce the chances of things happening that we don't want to happen.

[music] Tom Harris: These are FoxPro.

You learn how to blow air across this vibrator.

And you first have to learn how to... [coyote calls] and then you wanna go ahead and call them.

You'd learn to say huck... [coyote calls] And then you put those in there in a high pitch.

[coyote calls] [music] Tom: The Native Americans called them God's dogs, 'cause they cleaned up everything.

They're like a vulture, coyote is.

We used to have pens over here, and we had some mares that were foaling, and then just as soon as they foal we have the afterbirth and they're gonna come in and eat that because they'll eat everything from soup to nuts.

You know, the coyotes, they'll also run a new foal.

Coyotes were running them probably about 2 o'clock in the morning and can--here we have a foal that had run into one of our panels and got its head hung up and died.

So that was a $5,000 bill if you were to charge that for the foal, because that's what the stud fee was.

I'm not out here to try to get rid of them all.

We coexist.

So if I can run them off, I'm happy.

[music] John Chester: You guys holding on?

all: We are.

Yeah.

John Chester: I'm a really bad driver.

Where's that coyote?

Oh, coyote.

Get that coyote.

Get that coyote.

Get that coyote.

Where is it?

Oh, yes.

You're a good guardian.

My name's John Chester.

My wife Molly and I started a biodynamic and regenerative farm in 2011.

We documented that journey in a film called "The Biggest Little Farm."

What the film documents is how this reawakening process eventually starts to find some form of balance, but it does require you step back and have a wider perspective on the importance of embracing a biologically-diverse living system.

The coyotes will play with the dogs.

They'll run up to and then run away and run up to and run away, and she's trying to take a piece out of them.

The coyotes are really smart, man.

They got all the time in the world to plan and scheme.

When you look at it from an economic perspective, I can tell you for sure coyotes save us a lot more money than they do cause us problems.

In 1 year we probably lost $18,000 worth of chickens, and that was from coyotes.

At the same time, we were also spending about $100,000 a year for three guys to catch about 10,000 gophers.

So if I can kinda work where I've trained up that alpha to sort of stay away from the chickens, he will develop skills to hunt elsewhere and generally that ends up being more gopher hunting and squirrel hunting, which offsets and mitigates a pest issue for us.

It's a little bit kind of like the mafia.

Like, you kinda wanna have a relationship with the mafia boss.

He gets what he needs, and you kinda get what you need from the relationship.

I wanna make sure that I don't have a new mafia boss moving in making stupid mistakes.

I wanna have the one that's training the pups to kinda hunt in the way that's beneficial to the farm.

Now, do they occasionally make mistakes?

Sure.

But when I look at the economics of what, say, the 15 coyotes, there's three different packs, provide to this land, it's $50,000 at least in squirrel and gopher mitigation every year.

If you add that up over 10 years, that's already half a million dollars just from what the coyote does.

So that really sort of offsets the damage that they do.

Now maybe I may lose 5 or 20 chickens or something like that, but it's not to the degree that we were losing before if we're getting the ecosystem service that the predator provides by living here.

There's so much more to gain from trying to figure out a way to coexist with these systems than to fight against them.

[music] Camilla: Well, I grew up with a father who studied both domestic and wild canids.

So here with our pet ,Tiny.

She was orphaned as a timber wolf when she was just weeks old, and she imprinted on our family and became our alpha pack leader.

Every night we would go down to the local park and we would howl with her.

I believe my experience living both with domestic and wild canids is really kinda the base of why I'm doing the work I'm doing today.

Camilla: I'm Camilla Fox.

I'm founder and executive director of Project Coyote and author of "Coyotes in Our Midst."

Project Coyote comes in to help agencies and communities with coexistence plans, the resources, the tools that they need so that we can better coexist with coyotes and other wild animals, and we can recognize the importance that they have in our urban ecosystems.

We now understand the absence of coyotes in certain areas led to the increase of foxes, raccoons, and even cats, and the increase of these mesocarnivores actually had a significant negative impact on the songbird populations.

Presence of coyotes ensures that there are a greater diversity and abundance of small mammals.

[music] Javier Monzón: I have a feeling that that area will be better covered by the camera.

Jose, let's try that area here.

Get lower, get lower.

Might be getting your head.

Get--yeah.

There you go.

Man, you would be a really tall coyote.

Javier: As a biology professor, I kind of wear two hats.

I teach biology, and I do research in biology.

[music] A surprising thing that we see in our trail camera photographs is carnivores like bobcats, coyotes, and mountain lions are using the same trails as humans but just at different times of the day.

We usually get these animals photographed just hours apart from a family walking with a pet or with small children, and that's great, because that demonstrates that we are coexisting with these carnivores, that they largely want to avoid us.

They have very little interest in us.

Urban coyotes have shorter flight initiation distance than rural coyotes.

They flee from an approaching human at shorter distances.

What this tells us is that they can habituate or get used to humans.

[music] Samantha: This space also reminds me of the story of the coyote in the river.

It's about a coyote who thinks that he's the fastest in his village.

One day he's walking by a river and he goes, "I'm so much faster than this babbling brook.

I'm way faster than you, river."

The river speaks back to him and says, "Okay, let's race.

Let's race to the end of the ocean."

The coyote starts sprinting along the side of the river, and the river just keeps babbling on.

He's running 'cause he's starting to get tired from sprinting, and the river just keeps babbling on.

And eventually he starts walking because he can't run anymore, and the river just keeps its same pace babbling on.

The coyote notices that he's been beat and walks away with his tail between his legs.

I still think a lot about that story, what exactly it means.

I think it means that we're never going to outpace what the elements are going to do naturally.

Water, fire, wind, earth, they're always going to be bigger than us, and we have to respect them.

John Chester: There's actually so much to be learned from the coyote and the way that it survived, you know, being hunted.

One of the most hunted and hated little creatures, at least in the United States, yet all that's happened is the population size has grown and now it shows up pretty much in every state except for Hawaii.

I think we need to understand more deeply what that power of resilience is within that coyote.

Dan: Our first acts upon arriving in North America are to start making war on the predators and trying to get rid of them.

I mean, the first environmental act that the English established in North America in the year 1630 is to place a bounty on wolves to start trying to destroy the American wolf population.

And when they encountered coyotes, the idea is the coyote is just another kind of wolf and so we need to wipe this animal completely out as well.

And they pretty much are able to do so with wolves by the 1920s.

The government turns to what the Bureau of Biological Survey, this is the forerunner of the Fish and Wildlife Service, argues is the arch-predator of our time, our time being the 1920s and on, and that arch-predator is the coyote.

By the 1950s, we have spent more than $500 million of taxpayer money trying to wipe out coyotes, have killed an estimated 8 1/2 million of them, have invented all kinds of new poisons to do so, and yet by the 1950s, not only are coyotes not gone, they have now spread out of the west and are colonizing across the south, across the midwest, through Canada, and began entering the states of the northeast and colonizing southward.

Roland: Coyotes have spread into Central America, starting in Mexico.

They crossed the Panama Canal, and we found out that they're all the way up to the edge of the Darién Gap.

The Darién Gap is this part of Panama that's between Central America and South America, and it's a really wild place.

There's no road that goes through there.

This is a big forested area full of jaguars, and this is where we found the coyotes seem to have stopped for now.

We don't know how long it's gonna last, and honestly I would never bet against the coyote.

I expect the coyotes are gonna run along the beaches and colonize South America.

And if that happens, it would be unprecedented honestly in millions of years since we've had a large mammal that's moved from North America into South America.

Dan: We decide to start trying to wipe out an animal like coyotes before we ever do any kind of scientific study at all to figure out what role these animals actually play and maybe how long they have been affecting the ecologies of the continent that we old worlders inherited from the native people.

Camilla: In many areas where wolves have been removed, coyotes have moved in now as the apex predator.

As that apex predator, like wolves in Yellowstone, they can have a very significant impact on the ecosystem.

[music] Camilla: When we look at the classification of coyotes in many states, they are often non-game furbearer.

Some are designated as nuisance animals, and all those classifications essentially mean they're not game, they're not important.

And very often in most states they can be killed 24/7 with almost any method imaginable, and that may be trapping, poisoning, snaring, aerial gunning, bounty hunts, killing contests.

Our state agencies often even don't track or monitor how many animals are killed each year.

So we estimate on average that at least half a million coyotes are killed in the US alone, and that averages at least one per minute.

[music] Jenn Guess: So here at California Wildlife Center, our goal is to provide state-of-the-art care for every single patient that comes through our doors.

I would say 99% of our patients come to us because of human impact.

When it comes to coyotes specifically, they're all human impact.

I do feel like that if people understand the natural history of coyotes, understand how they are good for the ecosystem, and understand how to peacefully coexist with our wild neighbors, that we can create a society where coyotes are not in conflict with people.

We never recommend that members of the public call trappers or exterminators to get rid of problematic coyotes.

We recommend that people learn how to coexist with the existing pack.

When trappers and exterminators come out, they take one member of the pack, which causes chaos and disruption within the pack.

And when a pack is stable, they usually have a fewer number of pups each year, but during the chaos more females will breed, causing more pups.

[music] Dairen Simpson: This coyote collar is like a fighting collar.

It's got spikes on the back.

I have had my dogs beat up by coyotes.

This helps them a lot to where they can't get a neck grab on them.

Dairen: My name is Dairen Simpson.

I'm a predator capture specialist.

I've been in this line of work for 35 years.

I was a government trapper for about 15 years.

Lot of coyote work.

Lot of coyote work.

Eventually I switched over to doing nothing but conservation capture, which means you're not killing anything.

This one here is rubber lined.

However, it's constant pressure because these springs are trying to close.

The animal steps on the trigger and it jumps up and catches them by the foot, and it causes numbness.

When the animal gets numb, they chew what they can't feel.

They don't chew to get away, they don't have that reasoning ability, but they chew what they can't feel.

You talk to a guy who's an aerial gunner and you go, "How many coyotes you killed last year?"

"Oh, we killed 1,000."

"Okay, how about year before that?"

"Oh, we got 1,100."

"How about the year before that?"

"Oh, 1,000."

You spending 200 bucks a coyote, but what are you gaining?

You're not cutting it back to nothing.

They justify it because the only good coyote's a dead coyote.

Several of my friends are stockmen.

I told them, "If they don't touch your livestock, leave them alone.

They end up protecting your interest."

And that's a hard one to sell.

[music] John Chester: I don't judge another farmer for shooting a coyote.

Every time you shoot coyotes, you're just creating an incentive for that pack to have more coyotes next year.

When you hear those howls at night between two different packs, they're taking a census.

The female will have a larger or smaller litter based on the number of coyote packs around them and their assessment of food availability.

So if you create a power vacuum where you kill all the coyotes on your farm, you're gonna introduce a whole host of new predators to take their place.

When we become afraid of experiencing loss, it could be economic loss or loss of the animals because of coyotes, that fear response often turns into us reacting in a more combative way.

But what I feel is that the antidote to fear is curiosity.

So if you can become deeply curious about why these creatures are doing what they're doing or even how they may be benefiting the land, you can start to see ways to thread a line of coexistence together that has value.

[music] Jason: There's days we'd go, not one coyote.

William: But we still won, 'cause you're sitting there in nature just chilling.

Niamh: Do I look like a coyote?

Christine: Yeah.

Oh my--oh, what is this coyote doing?

Oh my god!

Go away, coyote!

Go away!

Go away!

Keep going!

Okay, I feel better.

[music] Christine: You shouldn't just haze coyotes because they exist.

Hazing is if a coyote is actively approaching you, which usually means it's been fed, and in a situation where you're not right next to its den, right, 'cause that's a normal behavior for a coyote when it's denning, then you should haze a coyote.

When I say haze, I mean acting big and loud, shouting, "Go away, coyote," et cetera.

And don't just be like--do that for a second and then be like, "Okay."

You know, like, you gotta wait until the coyote exits the area, and we have--the science around whether hazing works is still, you know, sort of in flux, but there's some evidence to show that that really does work to get a habituated coyote at least a little bit farther away from you so that you can exit a situation.

Dan: Everybody wants to be scared, but the truth is these are not animals that are a threat to us at all.

I mean, poor little Kelly Keen, the little 3-year-old who wandered into her driveway one morning in Glendale, California, back in 1981 and was killed by a coyote biting her, I mean, that's the only human death of which we have any record in the United States.

I mean, we have one episode in Canada in '29 of a young woman who's 19 years old who was killed by coyotes, although it looks like the animals that probably attacked her were animals that were part feral dogs.

Dogs are far more dangerous to people than coyotes.

In Canada, 300,000 people had been bitten by dogs in a particular year in the early 21st century and three people had been bitten by coyotes in that same year.

Roland: By looking at all these stories, we were able to determine what some of the risk factors were that would be more likely to promote a coyote attack, and the number-one thing is people feeding coyotes nearby, right?

That seems to draw coyotes in, and it seems to lessen their fear of people nearby.

One of the most dramatic cases was in Victoria Park in Vancouver, where over the course of the year coyotes attacked over 40 people 40 different times, which was really crazy, right, when we're trying to figure out what's going on and eventually the police caught this couple that had been feeding coyotes the entire year.

And so this one point, like, really shows how important it is to not feed coyotes, 'cause if you're doing that you're putting your neighbors at risk.

[music] [music] Alan: There's a story that I tell.

I wrote a book about it, "Coyote Rescues Hawk."

Hawk is captured by the swordfish, who are very strong and very powerful.

Pelican and cormorant offer to go back and rescue hawk, but eagle thanks them then says, "No, I'm gonna ask coyote.

Coyote is very intelligent, very clever."

He jumps out of the tumult and dives to the bottom of the ocean.

"I've come to get hawk."

"Well, we're not gonna give him back.

He's ours now."

And coyote says, "Well, I'm a great long-distance runner.

I'm thinking maybe we should have a race to see who gets to keep hawk."

They start their race, and the swordfish is swimming off.

So he gently bites onto the tail of one of the swordfish.

They don't even notice that they're pulling coyote up to the top of the water with them.

When the swordfish get to the top of the water, they jump like 30 feet out of the water and dive back in.

And coyote jumps out of the water with them, and before he dives in the water he howls three times.

[howling] A dolphin comes up behind him and she gives him a big old push and coyote goes 30-40 miles an hour past the swordfish and gets to the bottom of the ocean first.

The swordfish are very angry that they were outsmarted by coyote, but he did win the race, and they agreed whoever wins the race gets to take hawk.

They paddle back to the village, and eagle is very glad to see his nephew, that he's still alive.

And they listen to coyote exaggerate about how he beat up the swordfish.

They know he's telling stories, but because of his cleverness they know that's how he was able to outsmart the swordfish and rescue hawk.

[music] Javier: Urban populations of coyotes are fragmented.

They're small, and they're isolated.

The urban infrastructure and then in particularly roads and in particularly highways reduces gene flow, which is the free movement of individuals.

Coyotes naturally are highly mobile and they naturally have high rates of gene flow across long distances, but in cities there tend to be a lot of barriers to their movement.

So with less gene flow, we have these isolated populations that are more likely to lose their genetic diversity.

Design elements of urban spaces can benefit both humans and wildlife.

For example, we can create micro corridors such as culverts or vegetated medians in the streets that will connect city neighborhoods to larger natural reserves.

Miguel: This exhibit here is dedicated to telling the story of P-22, which is a story of beating the odds about survival, which anybody can relate to.

This exhibit does a great job at showcasing the barriers that freeways can create.

You're seeing what they're confronted with when they get to the edge of habitat in front of freeways.

[horn honking] Miguel: When they're confronted with a barrier like this, they have to second-guess whether or not they're gonna risk their lives and cross to get the resources that they need or somehow try and figure out a way to make it work on one side of the freeway.

And they pass on that message to future generations, and it influences their genetics over time, it influences their behavior and their relationship with people.

So it really kinda showcases why wildlife crossings like the Annenberg wildlife crossing are so critical.

[music] Miguel: A ten-lane freeway, it's a formidable barrier.

Biologists with the park service and other conservancies have been advocating to build some sort of corridor, whether it was a tunnel or a bridge.

All the GPS points of coyotes, bobcats, mountain lions clustering at the edges of this location on both sides of the freeway, they knew that this was the spot because animals are going to the edge of the freeway and turning around.

Beth Pratt: My name is Beth Pratt, and in "The New York Times" article this week, they called me chief wrangler of this project, and I think that is apt.

You know, I've been working on this since 2012, working with some incredible partners to make this happen.

What we did, knowing we had to reconnect an entire ecosystem, was design pretty much the seamless landscape that blended in and mimicked, recreated the native landscape.

We have to ensure that wildlife have connected landscapes to stay healthy for a number of reasons, including genetic sustainability.

[music] Alan: I wanna ask the sky people, Mother Earth, to all of our ancestors to guide us today, to open our minds, to open our hearts to travel on this bridge in a good way, with good thoughts and positive energy.

Miguel: He's doing, yeah, a blessing before we get started here to make sure we start off on the right foot and making sure that there's indigenous ecological knowledge being provided as far as what plants we're using and the cultural significance of those plants.

Alan: The miner's lettuce, acorns, the wild berries.

There's dozens and dozens of native plants that we've lost that we need to revitalize and bring back.

Francis Appiah: Here we are.

We standing on a crossing that people thought it can never be.

One of the key species that gonna benefit from this project is coyote.

People keep asking us, "Why are you bringing carnivores to come and eat our children?"

And then you have to, you know, advise them, "They are not here to eat, they passing by.

Close your doors.

Take your animals home.

They are not gonna eat your children."

A year ago I was standing down there.

One coyote was using the undercrossing, but cars were coming.

So I have to stop the cars for the coyote cross.

One guy rolled the window down, said, "Thank you, but you have to be here all the time."

So safe passage for all wildlife is what we're doing, and coyote is included.

Miguel: Coyotes are good for the most part.

They're pretty resilient.

They've been here since the ice age, but yeah, they have some sensitivities, and we could do a better job at coexisting with them and making sure that they have a more humane and positive future here in Los Angeles with us.

Beth: There's plenty of open space in California.

It's just it's so fragmented.

We need hundreds, if not thousands, more crossings across California.

That's what animals need to thrive and have a future.

[music] [music] [music] Contreras: You can watch them now, and not only just coyote but all animals.

And watch their mannerisms and what they do, then you can understand them.

And if they're doing something that gets them into trouble, then don't do that.

If it is something that's harmonious and keeps them balanced, then that's setting a good example.

Regan: Coyotes like this one survived with its cunning and cleverness.

We also have these abilities, and so it's no real surprise that coyotes and humans live side by side.

Coyote really offers a promise and a partner to go through these changing times.

Miguel: Coyotes have been here for a very long time.

We are in their home as visitors, and they are gonna be here no matter what.

Samantha: Despite efforts to erase us completely, both us and 'iitar, we're still here.

The ability to eat junk food and joke around with your family and spend time in places that you might not have otherwise, I think, is both a sign of resilience for the urban native people here and for 'iitar.

Alan: In almost every city in America, almost every city, coyotes are there.

They are one of the few animals that have been able to figure out how to live with humans even when the human population changed from one that wasn't hunting them that much to one that is hunting them a lot.

Camilla: While some people still understandably fear the first coyote that they've ever seen, once they are educated about the amazing life history and behavior of that animal and come to understand it's actually a native species with a very important ecological role, we see that people want our wildlife treated with respect, with humane methods, and ultimately a recognition that they are part of our communities, whether urban or rural.

William: Coyotes are here to stay, obviously.

People have tried everything they can to try to get rid of them.

The coyotes adapt to any of it.

Just give them their space.

They'll give you your space, and you're gonna coexist with them peacefully.

John Chester: I think coyotes really sort of test us to either take a stance of control or one of curiosity.

Gabrielle: What happens to the environment when you remove the keystone species?

What does that look like now when we're looking towards modern science and solutions and rebuilding, and how do we live in harmony with all these different organisms and relatives that live with us?

Alan: Every time an animal goes extinct, you and I as humans are closer to extinction.

We need them more than they need us.

We're not at the top of the ladder.

We're not the rulers of this world that some people think we are, that everything is here for us.

John Chester: I feel that there is incredible hope because the resilience of the system that we live within has so much more to offer than we really give it credit for.

Dacher: In general, the effects of nature on our brains and bodies is just good news.

We learn our moral principles.

We learn our ethics, concepts like fairness and interdependence and sharing.

You're like, I'll share.

I'm part of a collective.

And what do I need to do as part of a collective or an ecosystem or-- It's just I need to share, I need to cooperate, I need to give resources.

[music] Dan: The best lesson to take from coyotes is to be fascinated by this animal.

That's our most intriguing American creature bar none.

Despite our attempts to make every part of the country civilized, we still have some wildness left and that's something to celebrate.

The coyote's story is by no means over.

It's still unfolding in front of us.

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