July 5, 2005. Field update: I have my PhD!, we captured a new coyote, this page is about to drastically change due to the unfortunate actions by a minority of people intentially trying to kill our study animals and/or ruin our research and outreach efforts.

On June 21, 2005 I successfully defended my PhD and now am officially Dr. Way. I am in the final edits of my dissertation and will soon post it once I submit the final version to the graduate office at Boston College. This dissertation attempts to bridge the fields of science and education - obviously with the recent poisonings we need to educate many people about living with coyotes. It is actually pretty simple. Consider the statistics:

• 5 million (yes 5 million) people are bitten by dogs in the United States a year.
• 1000 people go to the emergency room every day (yes every day) as a result of dog bites in this country.
• The health care costs are in the hundreds of million dollars as a result of dog bites.
• 15-20 people die (yes die) every year in this country because of dog maulings
• Literally a couple of coyote attacks (bites) make national front page headlines
• 1 person in recorded history (all of recorded history) has been killed by a coyote - a 3 year old out in California in 1983
• On the cat side of things, in the past 13 years in Massachusetts 117 cats, 7 coyotes, and 7 dogs have tested positive for rabies. That means that we are 16.7 times more likely to come across a rabid cat than a coyote (or dog).
• Cats should be left inside regardless if coyotes are an issue: disease, cars, other predators including dogs, and people (I once found a cat that was killed by a paintball) all can kill cats.
• Cats, next to humans, have caused the second most amount of extinctions that we are aware of. This is an amazing statistic which means that cats are amazing predators and can take well over their fare share of animals, just like coyotes do.
• I am not a do-gooder or tree-hugger. My family has had cats and dogs and I love them. But what I listed were downright facts. Simply keeping cats inside and leashing dogs can prevent many problems from never occurring. For instance, letting a 15 pound poddle outside unattended in a wooded area (even where there are houses) at 1 AM is just not a wise idea. We can't blame the coyote for that - we need to blame ourselves if something unfortunate occurs. However, physically going outside with and leashing that 15 pound poodle is a great idea if it needs to go out at one in the morning.

I think it is time that we learn to live with these animals in Massachusetts. We should be amazed to live next to such a beautiful and shy predator. It makes the land more healthy and wild. I just came back from a one and a half week trip to Yellowstone National Park. Out there people need to fear people, dogs, grizzly bears, black bears, elk, bison, moose, cougars, and many other things well before coyotes (and wolves). Canids do not show an interest in people unless we feed them. However, this lack of interest might mean that a coyote trots right by you while looking for ground squirrels to eat. People that I were with would literally barely look at those coyotes from 30 feet away as they were looking through spotting scopes about a mile away for wolves and grizzly bears. They laughed when I told them how people back east call the police when a coyote trots through their backyard. Personally, I think it is pretty pathetic that 1 150 pound animal (us) is so scared of a 35 pound animal that lives near us in 49 of the 50 states (Hawaii excluded) yet rarely causes more problems than interacting with our pets because we leave them outside alone or unattended.

Enough preaching.... However, I am going to drastically change my updates for the time being. I know there are people that deliberate hunt coyotes near where I track and obviously poison them also. Our goal in this project is to help the coyotes by distributing accurate information and collecting sound science on them. As ridiculous as it sounds - I have literally come across peole standing next to or very near one of my traps with a loaded weapon. When asked what they were doing, they said, Hunting coyotes, what else! On the education side, I thought that this website would be a wonderful way to inform people of our research. However, as good as an idea as it sounded to me I was wrong and it sure is saddening that there are a few bad apples out there causing me to not spread our outreach to the majority of people that seem to care.

You can help! Call your town, local or state wildlife officials and tell them that coyotes aren't a big deal. Tell them that you support no hunting on a species where there is active research taking place (which is usually a fraction of a state for any given species) - for instance, in the town of Barnstable and adjacent towns on Cape Cod where we have a long-term study going on the species. Because coyotes are territorial, hunting them is purely recreational, meaning that if a hunter does get one of our coyotes, another one, formerly excluded by a territorial resident, is able to settle in that area. Frustrating for us, that animal is usually not collared following the death of a collared resident. Frustrating to the people killing that coyote did nothing in the long-term to reduce or control coyote numbers in a local area.

To finish with a positive note: we have captured a new coyote and I will not reveal any details other than it was a 14 pound male pup. We gave him an expandible collar and obviously hope that he grows into it in the next few months. We are excited to continue our research and outreach. Hopefully he will live long enough to one day have a territory of his own. We would be honored if he (through his collar) would provide us that data and no doubt many thrilling nights of tracking.