NYPD lose elusive coyote to the wilds of New York City

http://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2015/apr/22/new-york-city-coyote-police-chase-upper-west-side

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Police pursued a hairy, feral suspect for three hours through the thickets of a New York park before dawn on Wednesday, eventually bringing out a helicopter and cornering the fugitive near the granite mausoleum of Grant’s Tomb. The coyote got away.

Police first received a call about a coyote around 5.30am, the NYPD said, and proceeded to send regular officers and a team from special operations to Riverside Park on the Upper West Side of Manhattan. They entered the terraced park along the Hudson River at around 87th street, then began edging north through the rocky, forested terrain.

The coyote eluded them. It snuck south first, then scrabbled north again to 91st street, the Daily News learned from police sources. The coyote was seen sunning itself on a rock as the sun came up, the officials said, apparently mocking their attempts to capture it.

Seemingly dispirited by the chase, police called it quits by 7.20am. The 24th precinct asked anyone in the area to call 911 if they saw the animal. They called in a helicopter with thermal imaging capabilities. Eventually, the animal was sighted at 8.20am – the coyote had slipped north to 113th street. The hunt was back on.

Glimpses of the beast revealed to police the scale of their challenge. One officer told a CBS reporter that he had seen an animal that looked like a “medium-sized dog”. “It’s real big,” an officer told the Daily News. “It’s a pretty good-sized coyote.”

Another officer told DNAinfo that he had stared down the predator: “He was 10 feet from me. Then he walked away.”

“Use caution,” urged the police, in case anyone nearby might be new enough to New York to think you can ever safely touch the animals, human or otherwise.

Twenty minutes later, as officers tiptoed through the brush, they learned of another sighting. The coyote was even farther north – another 10 blocks, near the edge of the park and the tomb of Ulysses S Grant.

They kept looking, the coyote kept dodging, and eventually the largest, most sophisticated police force in the United States gave up, despite having committed hours of manpower, five police cruisers and a helicopter to the adventure.

“The coyote is deeply nestled in the brush. NYPD operations have concluded,” tweeted precinct captain Marlon Larin at 9.40am. “It went deep into the shrubbery and we lost visual contact, so we let him be,” Larin told DNAinfo.

U/D NYC: The @NYPDnews reporting they can't find the Coyote spotted in the park All units leaving the scene. pic.twitter.com/f0s6x3zbIC

The fugitive animal is the fourth coyote to have made the news in New York City in recent months, and the second to have been seen in Riverside Park. In January, officers tranquilized and captured a female coyote at a basketball court there, after tracking it through the park. It was then given to animal control and eventually released into a Bronx park.

Last week officers armed with dart guns and pole-length snares chased a large coyote around Chelsea, in downtown Manhattan, eventually cornering it at a church and also releasing it into the Bronx. In March another animal wandered out on to the roof of a Queens bar, then roamed Long Island City for a few hours.

Coyotes were first seen in the New York area in the early 1990s, researcher Mark Weckel said, but sightings have remained extremely rare: “Coyotes do a very good job of avoiding us at all costs.”

Weckel, a co-founder of the Gotham Coyote Project, said that coyotes are concentrated and breeding throughout the Bronx. Cameras placed by Weckel and his colleagues have filmed pups at play in most wooded areas of the borough. “It’s not a surprise obviously that a Manhattan coyote causes a spectacle,” he said. “Bronx coyotes really go under the radar for most of the year.”

The string of sightings is likely seasonal, Weckel said, as young coyotes leave their families and venture out in search of a new home. Those who go north find the forests of Westchester; those who go south discover the dense urban canyons of New York.

Coyotes have succeeded in the city in part because they adapt well, and “save for humans they’re at the top of the food chain”, Weckel said. Opportunistic omnivores, they eat small mammals (including rats) as well as fruits and seeds; they also in part compete with foxes and raccoons, the latter of which can sometimes be an aggressive and invasive nuisance.

The city parks department plans to leave the animals largely alone, which is the advice biologists give to humans who encounter the canids. “Coyotes fear us, naturally, and we have to keep them wild,” Weckel said.

People should not approach, feed or attempt to touch coyotes, which can sometimes behave aggressively near humans and dogs. In April two New Jersey men were attacked in separate incidents by coyotes, a sign both of the animals’ expanding range and that both humans and eastern coyotes remain unaccustomed to each other.

Nor do biologists recommend that the species become familiar. Weckel said humans should “act big” and make noise, neither fleeing from nor approaching the animals. People should also tightly close their garbage tins and keep small pets close, the same defenses one would take to protect against raccoons and urban foxes.

Like other wild animals, coyotes should not be fed by humans, who by doing so could change the coyote’s behavior in harmful ways for both species.

As for the Riverside coyote still at large, police have asked residents of the neighborhood to keep an eye out for it, but did not respond to questions about the operation or new plans to find the coyote.