Coyotes at bay
Is Don Rumsfeld advising the Hull Board of Selectmen or has the Bush administration's belief that there is no such thing as an overreaction to any threat, real or imagined, just trickled down to the locallevel? The question naturally arises after the decision last week by officials in the seaside town to declare a state of emergency because a coyote walked across an elementary school playground.
The declaration did not trigger the mobilization of the National Guard; it was designed only to expedite approval for whatever state permits might be needed to deal with the coyotes. Whatever the intent, the effect of such a measure is to spark panic and undermine educational efforts that would allow people and coyotes to coexist peaceably.
We had better learn to live with them. Coyotes are well established everywhere in Massachusetts, from the Berkshires to Cape Cod. As development has boomed, the forestland in which the animals lived has dwindled, sending them into suburban areas in search of food. Massachusetts led the nation in the percentage of forest lost to development between 1982 and 1997, according to the Massachusetts Audubon Society, which estimates that 40 acres of open space fall to bulldozers every day in the Commonwealth.
We are reaping what we sowed.
Coyotes were still a curiosity in these parts in 1982, when our late Globe colleague Peter Anderson wrote "In Search of the New England Coyote," the first book on the topic. Anderson, for 17 years the chronicler of all things rural in this region in his Off the Road column, dated the 1940s as the start of the migration of the coyote from the Great Plains through Canada to New England. (A coyote was trapped in Amherst in Western Massachusetts in 1936, but wildlife biologists concluded that it was either an escapee from a traveling zoo or someone's idea of an exotic pet.)
A normally shy and elusive predator, coyotes have become bolder as they have come in contact with humans while scavenging for food. Garbage from unsecured trash cans and pet food from outdoor bowls have supplemented a diet that, in the wild, includes rodents, squirrels, grasshoppers, watermelon. In a group, coyotes can bring down a small deer or a lamb and, because a predator does not distinguish between a pet cat and a wild rabbit, domesticated animals are vulnerable if left to roam free.
The fear that a coyote could attack a young child at the Jacobs Elementary School ought to trigger caution, not hysteria. No one wants to put at risk a kindergartner who might mistake a 40-pound coyote for a German shepherd and attempt to pet it. The coyotes living in the brush adjacent to the school are probably attracted to the schoolyard for the same reason seagulls are often seen circling playgrounds well inland -- all those discarded recess snacks.
Breaking up their dens to drive them deeper into forestland, blasting horns to push them out of residential neighborhoods, and cutting down the sumac and wild brush in which they hide are temporary solutions. Bringing back outlawed leg-hold traps to destroy them resurrects practices of animal cruelty better forgotten. Only more thoughtful development will provide a permanent solution.
Humans need to be as resilient, and cleverer, than the coyotes. In the West, ranchers weary of losing livestock to coyotes have imported llamas to protect their herds. On small farms as close to Boston as Dover it is not unusual to see a llama guarding a field of sheep. Their cry alerts the herd if a coyote is near and their kicks can send him scurrying back to the woods.
It is probably as unnecessary for the Hull School Committee to invest in guard llamas for its elementary school playgrounds as it was for the selectmen to declare a state of emergency. Some caution and some common sense ought to be enough to keep the coyotes at bay.
Eileen McNamara is a Globe columnist. She can be reached at mcnamara@globe.com. 
