Atlanta Coyotes Wearing GPS Collars

One of the 20 collared Atlanta coyotes stops just long enough for a quick photo on a trail camera.

You don’t have to search long to find parallels and common denominators between the major U.S. cities of Los Angeles, Chicago, New York and Atlanta. Employment opportunities, major sports teams, the availability of the arts, diverse populations and progressive attitudes are the reason that many give for making these cities home.

There is one little-known common denominator that all those cities share that stuns many non-residents. Each of those major cities has coyote populations.

The canine species once known as the scourge of the West long ago began expanding its range westward and eastward across the U.S. Its incredible ability to adapt to any habitat has made it just as comfortable in a major U.S. city as a rural farm anywhere in America.

The City of Los Angles has fought a war with coyotes for decades. It is not a war that humans are winning. City records show that during one two-year period, coyotes killed 949 pets in the city. 

Chicago was late in getting its coyote population. It now has a coyote population estimated at about 4,000.

Coyotes first appeared in New York City a little more than a decade ago and now have populations in Queens, the Bronx and Manhattan.

And now it’s Atlanta’s turn to address a coyote population, while it is currently a population that isn’t causing too many problems.

WRD, in conjunction with the University of Georgia, is two years into a five-year study of Atlanta’s influx of coyotes. The study focuses inside the I-285 perimeter. To date, 20 coyotes have been trapped and outfitted with radio collars to track their movements. Coyotes will continue to be trapped and outfitted with radio collars throughout the study. 

There has only been one known encounter thus far with one of the collared coyotes. That coyote was seen on a trail camera.

Kaitlin Goode is the WRD Urban Program manager and is the WRD point person on the urban coyote project. She says it’s way too early to draw any hard conclusions about the coyote population in Atlanta, but some things are becoming evident.

“We occasionally get a call that a coyote killed someone’s cat or tried to attack someone’s dog, but they are not high numbers,” she said. “The numbers of those complaints don’t seem to be increasing. We’re mostly getting calls from people who may have seen a coyote on their doorbell camera.”

Goode is unsure how long coyotes have been in the city limits of Atlanta. She said the purpose of the project is to be proactive and to develop a thorough understanding of the situation, so WRD can educate a public that often has no idea what to do when it sees a coyote in a city setting.

She said she has been in contact with wildlife biologists in Chicago, and it may be possible that Atlanta could have an advantage over other large cities.

“Atlanta has a number of waterways crisscrossing through the city,” she said. “Atlanta is sometimes known as the city of trees. Coyotes seem to be using these tree-lined waterways as their travel routes instead of neighborhood streets as they do in other cities.

“That lessens the encounters between humans and coyotes.”

If one thing has become evident with coyote populations in major cities, it’s that coyotes are there to stay. Humans and coyotes must learn to co-exist.

Goode said it is important for people to understand that coyotes are basically fearful of humans and will avoid contact if all possible. They usually become dangerous to humans only if forced to defend themselves.

The study in Atlanta will soon begin to take scat samples to determine what it is that coyotes feed on in the city. Goode suspects she already knows. She said coyotes are omnivores that primarily survive on small mammals like rats, chipmunks and rabbits, all of which are plentiful in Atlanta. They’ll also eat things they can find in gardens, like fruits and vegetables. They love persimmons.

“They will eat cats, but dogs are usually too large for them to bother with. And it’s important to know that they don’t want to eat your children.”

The purpose of the project is to understand the magnitude of the coyote population in Atlanta and to develop good information to share with the public, she said. The study is likely to find the steps that work in other large cities will work in Atlanta.

Coyotes are primarily nocturnal and most of the major problems in large cities have occurred when people are walking neighborhoods at night. If a dog is not on a leash, it may try to attack a coyote that it encounters. Many of the coyote bites to humans have occurred when trying to rescue a dog from a fight with a coyote.