Coyotes are omnivores, like teenage boys they can eat anything that someone else prepared and made available. Urban Los Angeles coyotes have an abundance of easy pickings: fallen fruit, human’s trash, pet food, and small mammals. Knowing what they eat helps biologists understand how the animals live in LA and guides humans in avoiding conflicts involving their pets and trash bins.
Earlier this year, the Urban Coyote Project asked for volunteers to be trained in collecting scat and then picking apart dried, sterilized coyote poop to determine what LA’s coyotes have been eating. I described the call for CitSci volunteers in May. Over 25 intrepid SoCal citizen scientists rose to the challenge and have been working on the Project since June. In August, they first inspected the collected scat so LA’s findings are preliminary. A similar study in Chicago found that contrary to popular myths, Chicago’s urban coyotes mostly eat small rodents (42%), fruit (23%), deer (22%), and rabbit (18%).
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The first step for volunteers was learning how to distinguish coyote scat from dogs. One hint is the varied food bits left in the scat like seeds, teeth, fur, and bits of bone. Dogs tend to eat the same food all the time and produce uniform poops, but coyotes eat what they find so their scat shows a diversity of foods. Dog poop can be similar in size but is more log-like, while coyote scat has tapered ends. Because most LA dogs are small breeds, coyote poop is generally larger.
A few trained volunteers scavenge LA for coyote poop. They wear tee shirts labelled National Park Service Volunteer so observers don’t report them to the police for playing with poop and poking at it with popsicle sticks. (Apparently Los Angeles has some limits to acceptable behavior.) When a sample is determined to be coyote, it is put in a plastic bag and labelled. A small sample from each collection is placed in a test tube for genetic testing to ensure it is coyote.
The collected scat samples are baked dry, then packed into panty hose and cleaned in a washing machine before volunteers begin their close inspection. They use tweezers and picks to separate the scat into pieces and look for hints of what the animals ingested such as dirt, insect parts, seeds, bones, teeth, and fur. Volunteers have found guava, barbecue chicken, cat food and rodents like gophers.
Urban pets, so far, do not appear to be a significant part of Los Angeles coyote diets. THE VIDEO BELOW PRESENTS THE PRELIMINARY FINDINGS.
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