Justin Brown is a wildlife biologist living in Los Angeles, California. He's been tracking coyotes in urban areas for 15 years, and he's always been fascinated with them. In this episode, he tells us about his first encounter with a coyote, and the amazing things he's seen them do in urban environments. He also talks about one of his favorite coyote sightings of all time, and why he thinks they should have their own TV show. This episode is brought to you by Anchor.fm and produced by Riley Braydon and the Los Angeles Natural History Museum. Music by PSOVOD and tyops. We'd like to learn a little bit more about you, the listeners. Please take a few minutes to fill out this brief survey. We'll get back to you with the results at the end of the episode. Thanks to everyone who submitted their responses and we'll get them on the show next week. Peace, Love, Blessings, Cheers, and Cheers! -Jon Sorrentino and Sarah Hopkins Music: "Space Junkie" by Jeff Kaale (1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20, 21, 22, 24, 25, 26, 27, 28, 29, 30, 31, 32, 34, 35, 36, 37, 38, 39, 40, 41, 45, 42, 44, 47, 45 , 45, 47 , 47, 48, 45 Theme song by Ian D, Theme Song by Jeffree Starretta (Music: "Goodbye" by Fountains (feat. ) by Haley Shaw (featuring ) is outtrooper ( ) is a song written & produced by and is out! & by . is ( ) (c) by (song by ) and ( , in honor of our new album, . ( ) by , edited by ), (libby_ ( ) ( ) ( ) & has a song is out now! (and we hope you enjoy this episode is out on , and we hope it helps spread the word about it! ) . Thanks again for all the love and support is out there! and we really appreciate all the support we get from you!
00:01:46.000I've been working with them now for almost 15 years, actually a little bit more than that now.
00:01:50.000And I've seen them do some amazing things.
00:01:52.000I mean, they're able to live in some of the most urban environments we can imagine.
00:01:55.000I mean, I'm tracking them right next to, I don't know if you know where the Westlake neighborhood is in downtown LA, but I have a coyote running that neighborhood, which when I first drove through there, so I worked in Chicago for a long time.
00:02:04.000We were tracking coyotes in some incredibly urban areas there, like right along Lakeshore Drive in Chicago.
00:02:10.000But in Chicago, there's some green spots where when you get down in LA, there's not a lot of open spots.
00:02:15.000There's some little vacant lots and stuff.
00:02:17.000But I tracked this coyote for about nine months down there in that area, and she was just amazing.
00:02:35.000Well, people have always had a weird relationship with coyotes.
00:02:37.000I had Dan Flores on the podcast last month, who's the author of Coyote America, and he's a wildlife historian and has just some amazing insight into the relationship the coyotes had way back with the Native Americans.
00:02:52.000They thought they were gods in a lot of ways.
00:02:55.000Yeah, I actually listened to your podcast with Dan.
00:02:58.000Dan's got some pretty interesting facts just in his book in general, things I didn't actually know about before.
00:03:03.000It's kind of nice to have a historian tie in some of the facts.
00:03:06.000I get asked lots of questions about where the coyotes came from, how they're moving around.
00:03:11.000And so it's nice to have something like Dan's book to kind of reference people to.
00:03:15.000I think most people in the downtown LA probably welcome something like a coyote because it's kind of cool, you know, to have this thing hanging around you, as long as you don't have a dog or a cat that it snatches.
00:04:15.000As far as I know, there hasn't been anywhere that coyote actually, like, draw blood on the dog, so it's almost more like it's like, get the hell out of here.
00:04:39.000We've actually been doing this study, working with a bunch of citizen scientists, and I don't know if that's the story you read or not, but we're basically having people collect coyote scat from around downtown L.A., And we're actually breaking the coyote scat up to look what's in it.
00:04:51.000And we're seeing a huge variety of things.
00:05:20.000Well, I've had them in my yard for a long time, and one of the things that surprised me is how much coyote scat that I find with berries in it.
00:05:27.000Like, I didn't know that they were omnivores.
00:05:34.000I mean, they eat pretty much everything.
00:05:36.000Yeah, I mean, coyotes can take advantage, and that's why they're able to live amongst us, I mean, because even when there's not a lot of prey available, they're able to take advantage of these different fruiting trees.
00:05:45.000Yeah, you know, I was talking with a friend about it, and he was saying that he hates them, and, you know, he wants to kill them all and all this stuff, and I was saying, but, yeah, but ever notice that you don't see any rats?
00:05:57.000Like, it's so rare that you see a rat or a mouse in my area, and I think a big part of that is because you hear coyotes all the time, and I think they're eating them all.
00:06:06.000I mean, they definitely take advantage of them.
00:06:20.000So this one that got to downtown LA, do you know when it arrived?
00:06:26.000I don't know when it arrived, so I kind of drove through there looking to see where I might be able to collar a few animals so we could kind of see what's going on and how these animals are persisting down there.
00:06:42.000So, first we have to capture them, so we'll put out traps, we'll capture them, and then once I get them in a trap, I'll go out with a pole, I'll pin them to the ground, and then I'll hold them down.
00:08:10.000Like, people don't realize that raccoons are predators.
00:08:13.000Yeah, well, they're definitely omnivores, just like the coyotes are.
00:08:17.000They actually eat a lot of fruit and stuff.
00:08:19.000Part of them living in an urban environment is they're just taking massive advantage of our garbage.
00:08:25.000I've seen amazing photos of 13, 14 raccoons in one garbage can all feasting down.
00:08:31.000I have chickens in my backyard, and this one raccoon was by my chicken coop the other day, and I flashed a light on him, and he walked towards the light.
00:09:05.000People feel like these animals can't fend for themselves, which is ridiculous because they're not able to make it there because we're feeding them.
00:09:12.000They're making it because there's resources for them to take advantage of.
00:09:15.000Yeah, I would imagine they probably play...
00:09:17.000I mean, like I said, I think in my neighborhood they do play an important part of keeping the rodent population down.
00:09:23.000But in downtown, there's got to be a ton of rodents as well.
00:09:27.000I mean, downtown, for people who don't know, is like the only area in all of L.A. that really looks like a city.
00:09:34.000I mean, like I said, I drove through there.
00:09:36.000I mean, after tracking coyotes in Chicago, I didn't think they'd be in some of the areas they are in LA. They seem to be everywhere I look.
00:09:42.000I get photos of coyotes on our cameras or get people reporting them to us.
00:09:47.000And this one that's in downtown is just a single coyote by herself?
00:10:14.000So they just find these areas where people aren't?
00:10:17.000Yeah, and so before we collared them, the one thing I always heard is, oh, the coyotes are coming in from Griffith Park, or they're coming in from Elysian Park and coming into our communities, and they're just here for a night or two nights, causing problems and leaving.
00:10:27.000Well, that's not what we're seeing, definitely.
00:10:29.000Once we threw these collars on these animals, we're like, no.
00:10:46.000I mean, it depends on your perspective.
00:10:48.000I think it's bad when people think we need to feed them, we need to do these things like to encourage them and make them more comfortable with us.
00:10:55.000That's not a good thing because that's when bites and that kind of stuff happen.
00:11:00.000When it comes to the coyotes and stuff living in these urban environments, it's really all about us.
00:11:04.000It's more about managing people, getting people to quit feeding them or quit.
00:11:08.000I mean, one thing I encourage people to do is scare the stupid coyote off.
00:11:11.000Because there's lots of people that have little issues that occur with the coyotes.
00:11:15.000Their cats get taken or the coyotes start just sitting there watching them.
00:11:19.000I had somebody complain recently because the coyote was sitting behind their yard looking at their wife in the jacuzzi.
00:12:19.000One of them, he or she essentially, what you would say, honeydicked my dog and tricked my dog into, do you know what it's like when a chicken molts?
00:12:30.000Yeah, I actually have chickens as well.
00:12:41.000If you let them sit in a cage for a few days, they figure out that they don't really have an egg, and then they go back to their normal behavior.
00:12:48.000So this coyote was too small to knock over the cage, but my mastiff...
00:13:40.000I was playing like Monopoly or something with my wife and my kids.
00:13:44.000We're sitting in the living room and I see the coyote running across the backyard with the chicken in its mouth and hopped over this five-foot fence like it didn't even exist.
00:14:56.000It's a hard one to answer because we don't know because they are pack animals.
00:15:00.000So you could end up with easily, it could be just two animals in an area or it could be Two adults with seven young, or it could even be five, six, seven, ten adults together with a pack of young as well.
00:15:13.000Because a lot of times the young from the year before may not disperse.
00:15:16.000If there's enough food available, they'll keep hanging in there until they are able to find their own territory.
00:15:21.000So whenever someone would give an estimation, it's really just a rough guess?
00:15:27.000A lot of times what they'll do is they'll just try to be like, okay, this is how big of an area coyote uses, and then be like, okay, there's this much area.
00:15:34.000In LA and throw a number out there, but there's a lot of variables that come in.
00:15:38.000And do you feel like the numbers increased over the past few years?
00:15:43.000Definitely not over the last few years.
00:15:45.000It's possible over the long run because I know there are some reports of places that there weren't coyotes.
00:15:49.000Like the Baldwin Hills, there was some work done where they identified all the different animals there and coyotes weren't in their list.
00:16:08.000Yeah, and with coyotes they leave enough scat different places.
00:16:10.000Like if they were looking hard for them they would have found them.
00:16:13.000How can you tell the difference between coyote scat and dog scat?
00:16:16.000Usually, so dog scat is almost always just dog food, and these coyote scats end up getting more spiraled inside, and so they'll be really tapered on the ends where dog scat can be tapered, but it's usually just drastically different.
00:16:35.000It's partially just the way their digestive system works, and they're getting all this hair in there because they're eating these animals, and so it gets more and more spiraled as it comes out.
00:16:42.000And we can tell them apart from like bobcats, because bobcats kind of get this, they're more almost, I don't want to call it a pellet, but they're smaller segmented, and they're kind of just one side's concave and one side's convex of each pellet.
00:16:54.000That actually can be more difficult for some people than the dog and the coyote.
00:16:59.000I found some mountain lion shit once in Santa Monica, not in Santa Monica, excuse me, Santa Barbara, and it was very disturbing because it was a rope, like a fat rope of hairy shit.
00:19:05.000I mean, what's amazing, he's running in Griffith Park.
00:19:07.000He never leaves the Griffith Park general area because he's blocked by freeways, and yet there hasn't been any conflicts with him and people besides the time he got underneath that guy's house.
00:20:15.000But when you compare that to mountain lions in our main mountains, we usually think two mountain lions can live in the Santa Monica Mountains, which is about 150,000 acres.
00:20:23.000So his range is pretty small, 4,300 compared to about 75,000 acres.
00:22:04.000I mean, Places like Chicago with coyotes, I mean they'll go through and do removals like a lot of the landowners will do removals and the coyotes just come back pretty quickly.
00:22:21.000I read a really disturbing article about mountain lions where they were talking about the number of mountain lions that get killed every year by There's professional mountain lion hunters that the government hires because they're preying on cats and dogs,
00:22:36.000and they said that 50% of these animals, this was around the San Francisco area, that 50% of their diet was domestic animals, like domestic cats and dogs.
00:22:47.000Yeah, I'm not familiar with that one, but we definitely haven't seen that with ours.
00:22:51.000So this one has just got a good supply of deer, and that's just what it's eating on a regular basis?
00:23:03.000The other thing that was really disturbing about that article, because the author was trying to make a connection between missing children.
00:23:11.000They were talking about several cases over the years where children were missing and never found again, and these are the same areas where these mountain lions were roaming, and they were wondering whether or not that had been the case.
00:23:23.000Yeah, I mean, I think it's probably more likely human-caused than wildlife-caused.
00:23:28.000I mean, we're way creepier than these animals are.
00:23:31.000That's true, but do you remember about two years ago, there was a case in Cupertino, right near the Apple Campus, where a mountain lion attacked a kid?
00:23:40.000And the father had to fight the mountain lion off.
00:23:43.000I mean, these stories definitely pop up every once in a while, but we also have lots of places where there's lions and there's no issues.
00:24:54.000They're not that fearful of most things.
00:24:56.000I mean, a lot of times when people see the lions, they don't run, and so people freak out, but that's actually not that uncommon for them just to kind of sit there and look at you and judge your situation.
00:25:04.000Yeah, try to figure out what they can do with you, or whether or not they should eat you.
00:25:08.000Hope that's not what they're thinking, but...
00:25:26.000No, and off the top of my head, I mean, it might have been that apple thing, or there was an attack in Orange County quite a while back, but that's really it.
00:25:36.000It's not that common, especially for not the number of lions that are here.
00:25:39.000There's a mountain lion in San Juan Capistrano that's been attacking this farm.
00:25:44.000A buddy of mine, Ian McCall, who's a UFC fighter, has a friend who owns this farm.
00:25:49.000And this mountain lion has been hitting this farm every now and again.
00:25:53.000And the other day it killed 37 ducks and a goat.
00:26:03.000So what we usually see with them is, I mean, because...
00:26:06.000They almost always eat what they kill.
00:26:07.000It's just when they kill something in a farm, they usually end up being uncomfortable afterwards because we come in, we see the situation, things change, and so they don't come back because they'll feed on a deer for a week or more.
00:26:28.000Yeah, there's times when they get in pens with bigger animals too, things like llamas and stuff, where they'll end up killing multiple animals just because they get in this pen and all of a sudden they're jumping around making all these noises and so then the animals get excited.
00:26:42.000I mean, it's just like dogs that get in after chickens.
00:26:44.000All of a sudden, the dog goes in and kills the whole flock of chickens.
00:26:57.000I'm guessing if that's what you're talking about.
00:26:58.000Is that the one that killed the bunch of llamas and the woman got a depredation permit to kill the mountain lion and then people freaked out and started sending her death threats?
00:27:09.000It's like it was really creepy listening to this woman's position because she didn't know what to do because she lives there, she's got this farm, and this big old cat just keeps coming in and fucking up like ten llamas in a setting.
00:27:22.000Yeah, so us and National Wildlife Federation actually started working with her to try to help pin her animals up better because a lot of it just comes to making sure your animals are secure at night.
00:27:36.000And it doesn't take anything that complicated.
00:27:37.000We actually held a workshop for people in the local vicinity and we'll be holding more to teach livestock owners how to secure their animals so that that stuff doesn't happen.
00:27:45.000Is there a way they can do something that emits a sound or something that scares them off?
00:27:52.000So there are some devices out there that are being tested and being used in some vicinities, but nothing's 100%.
00:27:58.000The problem with a lot of devices is you've got livestock moving around, so they're going to be triggering the devices all night.
00:30:56.000So, it's so fascinating, because California is such a unique area in that we are very urban, you know, but we're real spread out, and we've got the Santa Monica Mountains right there, like in Topanga, right there.
00:31:11.000I mean, I have a buddy who lives in Topanga.
00:31:13.000You go in his backyard, you would swear to God you're in Colorado or something.
00:31:17.000I mean, it seems like the wilderness, you know?
00:31:28.000So, obviously, the Santa Monica Mountains are just there south of the 101, basically.
00:31:33.000So, the park is basically from the Hollywood Hills, out to Point Magoo, and then incorporates most of Malibu, and then it goes a little bit up in the Simi Hills.
00:31:41.000But the mountains themselves are mostly south of 101. This is such a unique place to live that we're so sort of surrounded by nature in a lot of ways.
00:32:20.000I mean, with coyotes, a huge amount of the issues are because somebody next door to you is feeding them, and so the coyotes hanging around.
00:32:26.000Is that really common, like the people leave out food?
00:32:28.000Yeah, sometimes it's intentional, sometimes it's not.
00:32:31.000Like feeding your dog outside, it's never a good idea.
00:34:15.000It's a great video because these people from their car are filming this coyote that's right there on the street in busy LA and it's just staring at people chewing on this cat.
00:34:27.000We played it for Dan Flores and Dan has the opinion, he's of the opinion that a lot of these cats that are getting killed by these coyotes, like here's some coyotes just wandering across the street.
00:34:38.000I mean this is really crazy because this is as urban as it gets.
00:34:42.000I mean busy street And this coyote's just hanging out.
00:34:46.000And so these people followed this coyote all around the street.
00:36:53.000Just with tracking these animals, I've been to a bunch of places where people feel like they need to put dog food or cat food out on the street just for the coyotes or the skunks or the raccoons or whatever.
00:37:02.000They're feeding something intentionally out there and then the coyotes are taking advantage.
00:38:32.000The solution is just to sort of mitigate their impact on us?
00:38:35.000Well, I think we need to change what we do, yeah.
00:38:37.000I mean, it's about not making sure we don't have food out there.
00:38:39.000I mean, the more food they have, it's been shown coyotes can increase their litter sizes, and so they produce more coyotes.
00:38:46.000And so it's really about trying to reduce the amount of food that we are responsible for.
00:38:51.000That's also what I read in Dan Flores' book, that the more we impact the coyotes as far as people trying to push them out and pressure them, the more they produce extra babies.
00:39:03.000Especially if they do that roll call thing when they scream out in the night and you hear them, which is amazing.
00:39:08.000That is one of my favorite things about coyotes, man.
00:39:10.000When I'm out at night and you're sitting on the deck having a cup of coffee or something, you hear...
00:40:05.000I've got all these things that coyotes could affect me as well, but I also realize that there's things I can do to make sure that they're not going to...
00:40:12.000Get to my chickens, or they're not going to get to my dogs.
00:40:15.000Well, I have a puppy right now, and that's my big fear.
00:40:18.000It's because I have a golden retriever puppy, and he is like...
00:40:21.000Golden retrievers, I don't know if you've ever had one.
00:41:11.000Yeah, because we've actually looked at some of that and it's just like that relationship's not as simple as just like they're gonna go after the dogs.
00:41:17.000No, they play around together, but then they'll kill him and eat him.
00:43:17.000It's probably being moved between the different populations.
00:43:20.000So, I mean, luckily, if we vaccinate well, we can reduce that spread.
00:43:25.000But people have to be good about vaccinating their animals.
00:43:28.000So, do you guys have a mandate, like, when it comes to studying coyotes and when it comes to dealing with them?
00:43:34.000Like, what is the overall emphasis on?
00:43:37.000Is it on just understanding their range, where they are, or do you try to do something with them?
00:43:42.000So, our role is to try to help protect wildlife within National park areas.
00:43:48.000And so what we try to do is we try to get as most understanding we can so we can help reduce conflicts, help reduce disease transmissions, help just basically help the whole ecology of these animals to make sure there's not things coming into our populations that are going to end up affecting them.
00:44:05.000It's interesting because I would think when people start cutting budgets and they start looking for, like, well, where can we reduce spending?
00:44:15.000There might be a few people that come along and go, hey, why do we give a shit about these coyotes?
00:44:21.000I mean, that always comes up any time budgets are dealt with.
00:44:25.000But for us, the important thing for us is just to make sure that we do everything we can to protect our resources within our park.
00:44:32.000And so we've identified that this is a potential risk for our local wildlife, and so that's why we've started studying the things like the mountain lions, the bobcats.
00:44:41.000So our park is completely surrounded by urbanization.
00:44:46.000Our mountains are about 50% of it is privately owned and so there's a lot of chances for development so it's important for us to understand how development is affecting the wildlife so we can help try to mitigate that in the future.
00:45:00.000Now when you're dealing with these animals and you're collecting data and information do you guys share it with people that maybe other peers that you have that work in much larger areas and do you find like similar patterns and similar similar results?
00:45:16.000So we generally share through scientific publications.
00:45:18.000This is usually how stuff is shared kind of between us.
00:45:21.000That being said, we definitely talk to other parks like Yosemite.
00:45:24.000I just recently went there to help them do some raccoon stuff.
00:45:27.000And so we will definitely share information to try to help deal with similar issues.
00:45:31.000So I was up there for about three or four days, and we talked about lots of different things.
00:45:36.000But one of the things they've had with coyotes is people feeding them out of the car.
00:45:39.000So like people drive through, they'll take food because the coyote's hanging off nearby, and they'll throw it out the car to the coyote.
00:45:44.000Well, a coyote got so habituated to that, it would just be coming up to every car and start jumping up on cars.
00:46:23.000And I definitely noticed that even like with trapping and stuff when we're trying to capture these animals I feel like there's times when they definitely kind of avoid the area because some of these animals have been on the air for years and so we we try to capture them as many times as we can to keep them on there so our collars only generally last somewhere between a year and three years depending what kind of collar we put on them and so a lot of times we want to keep them on long term so we actually understand the whole life cycle what's going on and so we'll go in and try to capture them again but they're there's they're smart they kind of learn to avoid once I start going into an area.
00:46:52.000Well, according to Dan Flores, a big part of their cleverness and also their adaptability comes from them being preyed upon by gray wolves and their relationship with gray wolves.
00:47:02.000The gray wolves had left and then come back to North America and in the meantime, coyotes had kind of thrived.
00:47:08.000And when they came back there was a period of thousands of years of them being preyed upon by these gray wolves.
00:47:13.000So they've adapted all these different sort of mechanisms in order to stay alive and to avoid predation.
00:47:21.000And one of them being that they expand their range.
00:47:23.000So as we've tried to kill them, One of the things that Dan was saying is that when they do that roll call thing, if someone's missing, the female will actually have larger litters, and then they'll expand their range.
00:47:35.000So when you shoot one, you think like, well, we're keeping the coyote population down.
00:47:39.000No, you probably raised it up by like 10-15%, and you expanded their range by a few miles.
00:47:46.000I don't know if it's just based off the calling.
00:47:48.000I've heard that before, and there's some dispute about whether that's the full case or not, but definitely because there's lower numbers, there's definitely more food resources available, and so it makes sense that they would then reproduce more, because we definitely know if food resources go up, coyotes can increase their numbers, so...
00:48:02.000Oh, that's interesting, because he was saying that it's a direct result of them being preyed upon.
00:48:10.000I mean, shot or killed or, you know, removed.
00:48:14.000I mean, truthfully, it doesn't matter how the animals, how the population decreases.
00:48:17.000The fact is that it's down, so then prey numbers go up.
00:48:21.000And so then there's more prey, and so then they reproduce more.
00:48:25.000Because Dan was implying there's a direct correlation between there's a physiological event that happens inside the female that when the population grows smaller, their litters grow larger in response to the population being smaller, not necessarily in response to the increase of food supply.
00:48:42.000As far as I know, the only things I've read, it's usually they associate it somehow with food supply.
00:48:47.000So it's probably maybe a combination of those factors?
00:49:47.000I mean, anytime you get in these urban environments.
00:49:49.000One thing I always like to say is the Westlake neighborhood, it's one of the most dangerous neighborhoods for pedestrians, yet this coyote's running this neighborhood all the time, and it didn't have any signs of ever being struck by a car.
00:50:01.000Do you think the smartest coyote is smarter than the dumbest person?
00:51:57.000I mean, obviously these moose, in the winter, the snow gets deep, so they're definitely, they can get stuck in things and that type of scenario.
00:52:04.000How do they know that it's coyotes that killed them and not wolves?
00:52:56.000On the coyotes, I usually do somewhere around six.
00:53:00.000And then I'll do these little bouts where I'll do 20 minute locations a day.
00:53:04.000And so then I'll get more intense data.
00:53:05.000And then I can map out like where they come up to roads or where they do different things, where they're feeding.
00:53:11.000So yeah, you can get some pretty detailed data on how they're moving.
00:53:14.000So what kind of a battery source are you using on these collars that you can get such a long, like how long does a, like if you stretch it out the longest, how long can they last?
00:53:23.000So there's different sizes of collars.
00:53:25.000And so like the lion collars are, they can be 2D cell batteries in them, which are just lithium cell batteries.
00:53:32.000And those go about two years with a 2D cell battery.
00:53:54.000So that's how like a lot of these observations I've talked about, that's how I see them is because they have that little beacon that goes off in the collar.
00:54:00.000And so I can track them with that antenna and see where they are and get pretty close to them and see what they're doing.
00:54:37.000We've gotten lucky one time, and he was actually down in a hole, and me and Jeff were actually there, and we darted the thing, and it just fell asleep in the hole, which was pretty sweet.
00:54:45.000So you saw in a hole, like a hole in the ground?
00:54:48.000It was kind of a drainage channel was kind of eroded away, and he was kind of down in this, and there was a bunch of brush covering it, and so he felt pretty comfortable, I guess, and he just stayed there.
00:56:57.000And so he was explaining that he saw it.
00:57:01.000We don't have many cats that are up there near the five, so he could have probably just looked at that map that you guys put up there, and it could have easily been one of those cats.
00:57:09.000Because there's just not many up in that area that we have collared.
00:57:12.000But they do occasionally get hit by cars, right?
00:57:14.000Yeah, that's actually one of our biggest causes of mortality these days, is them getting hit by cars.
00:57:47.000Yeah, so this overpass will be big for mountain lions, but also lots of other wildlife in our mountains.
00:57:54.000So we have seen that the 101 freeway is a major barrier to gene flow, and so things like, even coyotes, even though they'll be able to live in this super urban environment, That 101 and the development along 101 is serving as a barrier that they're not getting across regularly enough to keep the population genetics up.
00:58:10.000So genetic diversity south of the freeway is a lot lower than genetic diversity north of the freeway.
01:01:59.000Yeah, it's really fascinating to me how the whole thing is sort of like a balanced system, and they all sort of keep each other in check.
01:02:09.000You know, California's a good example of that, because it's one of the few states that has a large, healthy mountain lion population, but they don't allow hunting of mountain lions.
01:02:19.000So because of that, you have less deer.
01:02:22.000And people will complain about that, hunters, but also because of that, you have less car accidents with deer.
01:02:27.000Like, if you live in, like, I have a buddy who lives in Iowa, you have to drive slow.
01:02:31.000Because the fucking deer are just jumping out in front of the road every 50, 100 yards.
01:02:35.000I mean, it's crazy how many, especially during the rut when they're breeding and they get silly.
01:02:40.000You see just dead deer every couple miles.
01:02:42.000You see a dead deer on the side of the road.
01:02:44.000Yeah, I mean, we're a lot different, obviously, than the Midwest, like you're talking about, too.
01:02:47.000We've got a lot less vegetation and a lot less rain, so we have a lot less of that good quality vegetation for the deer.
01:02:52.000So our deer numbers are also going to be in check, partially just because we don't have the...
01:02:57.000The highest quality habitat for deer in most of our areas.
01:03:00.000They're just eating grass and stuff, right?
01:03:08.000There's a lot of, like, deer brush and just lots of variety of type of browse.
01:03:12.000I mean, you walk through there, there's tons of different varieties that they eat.
01:03:15.000We actually have a couple deer radio collared right now that we're following, and they're always browsing on something when I see them, usually something taller.
01:04:32.000So it's really about, like, arching that shot in there really softly, hitting them as soft as possible, and then a lot of times they don't go very far.
01:04:59.000Like, how do you sight in a scope for something?
01:05:02.000For people to know what we're talking about, like, if you shoot a rifle, a rifle, a bullet goes very fast, so you could shoot out to 100 yards, and it essentially is going to go exactly where you're aiming at.
01:05:12.000But then when you go to 200 yards, it gets a little tricky, and you have to adjust your scope, because it'll drop a little bit.
01:05:17.000You get to 300 yards, it'll drop a little bit more.
01:05:20.000400 yards and out is where it gets really weird, like you're dealing with wind drift, you're dealing with drop, so I would imagine that a dart is not going very fast, so it probably drops quite a bit.
01:09:07.000Is that just like you just want a good study number?
01:09:09.000That, so we're looking at roadways and trying to identify crossing points for, I mean, we're not just doing deer, we're doing other species as well.
01:09:16.000But we're trying to identify where we can make improvements, things like that wildlife overpass in other areas.
01:09:42.000It can be anywhere from, I think, the caller's 60 points a day down to, I think, my low is 8 points a day.
01:09:48.000And so it'll give me an idea of where the deer are approaching the roadways and how they're moving relative to the roadways so we can help come up with mitigation to improve their ability to get across.
01:11:27.000This population's been kind of isolated for a long time from others, but California generally is not thought of to have monster bucks, even though there's plenty of mule deer in this state.
01:13:35.000So if you took a fully developed frog and put it there, probably wouldn't know what to do with the area, because it would be a new area for it.
01:13:42.000Yeah, this isn't my project either, so I'm not 100% on it, but from my understanding is that they will try to move back towards their natal range, and then they don't end up making it.
01:13:51.000So it's better to do the tadpoles or the eggs.
01:13:55.000And then they'll hopefully stay there.
01:14:07.000I mean, we like to think we understand all this ecology and all that, but it's complicated, right?
01:14:12.000We don't know the interaction between a lot of these species, so a lot of it's just trying to make sure that our full suite of species is there so our ecosystem's acting as healthy as possible.
01:14:21.000So when you reintroduce the red frog, will there then be subsequent studies about the impact of the reintroduction of the red-legged frog?
01:14:52.000If I did, though, if I said, listen, man, I'm going to give you an unlimited budget to take care of this wildlife as you would see fit, what would you like to have done?
01:14:59.000Well, one of the first things would be that wildlife overpass you see.
01:15:02.000At least if you're talking about doing things for what's good for the local ecology here, that would be probably the highest thing on my priority list because that is something that's not just affecting one species, it's affecting everything that's within our mountain range, which is fairly large, 150,000 acres.
01:15:18.000That there's just completely being disconnected from other wildlife.
01:15:21.000So to me, that's our number one thing.
01:15:24.000The other thing is, so we have lots of issues with these poisons.
01:15:27.000I would try to find alternatives to these poisons that are being spread throughout the environment because that's a major issue for our wildlife.
01:15:36.000When you see the mange that's on that cat, and you think that that all comes somehow or another from rat poison, like, what happened to rat traps?
01:16:04.000There's all sorts of weird effects that you can get from poisons.
01:16:07.000Yeah, and we don't even understand the effects.
01:16:09.000We put tons of toxicants out there that we have no idea the actual long-term effects or how it's going to change things.
01:16:16.000I mean, like these rat poisons, there was a long time they said it wouldn't move up the food chain, but we are quite clearly seeing it move up the food chain.
01:16:22.000To have a mountain lion die of rat poison is crazy.
01:17:07.000Well, that was actually in Dan Flores' book, is that they had developed certain types of coyote poisons that were slow-acting, so that they could trick these coyotes into eating this stuff, and the other coyotes wouldn't know where the coyote got sick from, because it took so long for them to die.
01:17:23.000It wasn't like strychnine, where you eat it, you watch the other one die, and that's also what rats do.
01:17:29.000Did you ever see that rat documentary on Netflix?
01:17:31.000I heard you mention it, but I still haven't seen it yet.
01:17:38.000Like, when they show the amount of rats that are in New York City, and they show all the people dealing with them, and they show them in the sewer system and everything, it's mind-boggling.
01:17:49.000And then they talk about how the rats will literally send a young dumb rat over to the poison, and they watch that rat eat the poison and die, and they're like, fuck this rat here, and they all take off.
01:18:00.000Like, they've got a whole system for dealing with poisons.
01:18:03.000Yeah, well, because they did the same thing with rat poisons, from my understanding.
01:18:06.000They kind of come through different morphs of the poison to try to make them last a little longer because the rats will do the same thing the coyotes do and learn not to eat it.
01:18:28.000I mean, I've been in little intersections down in LA at night and just rats, it looks like the ground's moving at times in these crazy locations.
01:18:35.000Like most of the places you go, you don't see that many rats.
01:18:37.000But then all of a sudden you'll hit this, call it a honey hole for rats.
01:18:56.000I'm I'm filling up my car, and I go over to this payphone to make a call.
01:19:00.000In the time it took me to walk from the pump to the payphone, I'm watching rats jump onto the wheels of my car.
01:19:09.000They're jumping on the wheel and crawling up and down.
01:19:13.000I don't know if they're looking for food or they're looking to get in the engine for warmth or whatever, but apparently people have a real issue with rats getting inside the hood of their car and nesting.
01:19:25.000They, like, climb in there for the heat, and they stay warm inside the hood of your car.
01:19:41.000I'm talking five, six, seven rats just hopping up, and another one would hop up, and one would hop down.
01:19:46.000It was terrifying, because I was trying to figure out, okay, am I going to be driving, and there's going to be a rat on the floor, and then I'm going to hit the gas instead of the brakes, and I'm going to freak out like a little girl?
01:20:00.000I mean, and it's another, essentially, we don't like to think of them as a wild animal, but a rat is a wild animal that lives in this weird symbiotic relationship with people in urban environments.
01:20:13.000That is the one species that's probably more adapted to us than the coyotes are, obviously, because they are able to live in almost everywhere that we live.
01:20:21.000Yeah, and they serve a purpose in some sort of a weird way.
01:20:25.000I mean, if they were removed, I wonder what the impact would be.
01:20:29.000Yeah, I mean, I'm sure we'd probably have more nesting birds and some of that kind of stuff because we know that rats definitely impact bird species.
01:20:37.000There may not be, if there wasn't rats, whether coyotes or some of these other small predators would be around the urban areas because they're obviously another prey source.
01:21:09.000As far as we know, there's not anybody really against it.
01:21:12.000There might be a few people in the nearby community that's worried about more mountain lions coming in or something, but we don't think that's a realistic thing because our population's at holding capacity from as far as we understand.
01:21:22.000So we don't think that's going to be a major issue.
01:22:37.000They're doing fundraising, trying to get people to kick in.
01:22:40.000I believe the Annenberg has already offered to donate a million dollars matching, so they've got to raise another million to get that amount.
01:23:05.000I mean, habitat protection is just obviously incredibly important if we want to keep all of our species.
01:23:09.000So protecting more land is always a valuable thing to make sure, or at least to make sure what development we do is done in a proper way.
01:23:17.000Now, when you say protect more land, would that be like buying up available private land when it comes for sale and then turning it into public land?
01:23:50.000They're really smart with that because I think Boulder is an amazing place in that they've really recognized that they have this incredible sort of beautiful little community that's surrounded by this inescapable beauty of the mountains, the Rockies.
01:24:05.000Well, you don't get much more beautiful place than around Boulder, so that makes sense.
01:24:09.000I mean, if you want to keep your communities the way they are, you kind of have to protect some of the land.
01:24:12.000Yeah, they're not into anybody developing there.
01:24:14.000They're like, nah, no, let's not do that.
01:24:17.000It's really wise of them, but it's amazing that they've managed to go so long without being co-opted by money, you know?
01:24:26.000Yeah, I mean, that's kind of the name of the game.
01:24:28.000I mean, obviously we need developments because our populations keep growing, so to me...
01:24:33.000It's not always realistic to say we need to protect every piece of land we can protect, but what development we do, we need to do it smart and make sure that things are protected in the proper places.
01:24:42.000Is there any other wildlife issues in and around this area that are being addressed right now?
01:24:59.000I mean, there's always the little nuisance issues that everybody's trying to deal with where a coyote is in somebody's yard or going after dogs or whatever that we try to deal with.
01:25:07.000But those are the two major ones would be connectivity, habitat loss, and then just poisons.
01:25:13.000And are there a lot of raccoons in this area?
01:25:42.000Raccoons can occur within our mountains, but they do seem to be more focused near roadways and some of that stuff, taking advantage of whatever resources are there.
01:25:51.000Well, they're big garbage hunters too, right?
01:25:53.000They definitely take advantage of garbage.
01:25:54.000They'll also eat lots of fruits and stuff.
01:25:56.000So some of the scats you see in your yard that you think are coyotes, they could be raccoon as well.
01:26:54.000Yeah, one night I actually had, we were sitting in the house, me and my wife just hanging out, and all of a sudden I hear my chickens going crazy out there, and I'm like, we both got up and took off running.
01:27:02.000We have a lot of feral cats around our house, and I was like, oh, these dink cats are in there.
01:27:05.000We go looking around, our chickens are flying all over the yard, because we hadn't gone out and closed the door yet, because my chickens can kind of free-range my yard.
01:27:12.000And we're looking around, we don't see anything.
01:27:13.000All of a sudden I open up the coop door, and there's a big old possum just sitting there grinning at me.
01:27:20.000It didn't affect, didn't grab one of my chickens, even though one of my chickens was just sitting there, like, looking at it and squawking.
01:28:22.000There's so many different and such a wide variety, especially when it comes to birds.
01:28:27.000You know, one thing that I see a lot of is there's a lot of hawks in my neighborhood, and we did this thing in our backyard where we had a wrought iron fence, and we changed part of it and put a glass fence, and these hawks hadn't figured it out, and they would swoop down and slam into the fence headfirst.
01:28:44.000We KO'd quite a few of these poor hawks.
01:29:10.000There's some other little characteristics that I'm not as good with, but they're significantly larger than like the red-tails, which would be the one you'd be most likely to confuse it with.
01:29:18.000Yeah, it's just the wide variety of different raptors and these...
01:32:30.000Yeah, I mean, I think that's a big thing about coyotes, too.
01:32:33.000And I wish some of these short-sighted folks that don't want them around because they're worried that they're going to get their dog and all this different stuff.
01:32:41.000Like, man, we're really lucky that we can see these things.
01:33:01.000I talk to one person that's like scared to death of this thing and the next person's like it's the coolest thing they've ever seen in their life.
01:33:13.000I identify more with the people who think it's cool.
01:33:15.000It's just Like we were talking about, we're really lucky.
01:33:18.000We live in a very unique area in that we have this big city, huge city, and then just outside of it, we have all this wildlife, like real, legit wildlife.
01:33:28.000You can get from downtown LA to 100% wilderness in an hour.