U of M study focuses on Minnesota's urban coyotes

CATHY WURZER: Perhaps you've heard this sound recently.

[COYOTES BARKING AND HOWLING]

Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Coyotes. In late spring, coyote pups spend their first few weeks of life hunkered in dens, some of which are tucked in Minnesota's various urban parks. And the pups are just about ready to make some moves, leaving the den with their parents for a new home base.

A research team based at the University of Minnesota is monitoring some of these animals to learn more about how coyotes, foxes, and humans all interact in the Twin Cities. Geoff Miller has been working on this project as a PhD candidate since it began about four years ago. And he is on the line. Hey, Geoff. How are you?

GEOFF MILLER: Hi, Cathy. It's great to be here today. I'm doing well.

CATHY WURZER: And thank you for being here. I appreciate your time. Thank you. So I might be among the few who are a bit surprised that we have a lot of coyotes and foxes right in the Twin Cities metro area.

GEOFF MILLER: Yeah, we've got a very healthy coyote and fox population here in the metro. So I've been working on the Twin Cities Coyote and Fox Project since it was started in 2019. It's funded by the Environment and Natural Resources Trust Fund.

And our goal, really, on this project was to get some baseline data on the movement patterns of coyotes and foxes in the Twin Cities metro area and really dive into their world by deploying some GPS collars on them and, yeah, really tracking their movements. We're also seeing what kind of diseases they carry and really, yeah, diving into some of their habits in urban areas.

CATHY WURZER: Are these animals in the core cities, or are they more in the exurban areas?

GEOFF MILLER: So both. One fun fact I love to share with people is we've tracked both coyotes and foxes. We have two species of foxes in the metro, actually-- gray foxes and red foxes. We've put collars on all three of these species, and we've tracked all three of them within half a mile of US Bank Stadium in downtown Minneapolis. So these animals are about as urban as it gets.

CATHY WURZER: I'm kind of surprised that the urban environment-- it doesn't seem like it would be very hospitable to these animals.

GEOFF MILLER: Yeah. So the landscape of Minneapolis and Saint Paul is actually pretty amenable to these animals. We've got a lot of green spaces. We have the Mississippi River going straight through downtown Minneapolis and downtown Saint Paul. And these animals can use the green spaces along these river corridors and even some of the wetlands that are interspersed throughout the cities as retention ponds as habitat.

And they can live pretty normal lives, as far as wild animals' lives go. They can raise pups. They can have their pups disperse and go start new families out in either other parts of the city, or some even disperse outside of the cities and end up as far away as Wisconsin.

CATHY WURZER: So what are coyotes and foxes doing this time of the year? Obviously, they've given birth already to their pups.

GEOFF MILLER: Yeah. So foxes give birth to their pups, which we call kits, in about mid-March. And so people first start seeing them in around mid-April. And people see fox kits a lot more than they see coyote pups. Coyotes tend to find the least accessible areas for people and their pets to actually have their dens. So they'll try to find really wooded areas that are either on steep slopes or somehow not accessible to people to keep their pups.

And in these areas, they can kind of distance themselves from people and especially pets. So coyotes are often concerned about dogs because they kind of perceive them in the same way that they perceive wolves in wilder environments-- as a potential threat to their pups. So people often get approached by coyotes this time of year. And they often interpret it as being maybe stalked by a coyote or something like that.

But what's actually happening there is an escorting behavior that coyotes do, where they'll follow people until they're well away from the den where they're keeping their pups. And that's gonna be-- that kind of peaks in mid-May. And you'll see that behavior going until June.

CATHY WURZER: Wow. OK. I'm curious, then, about the foxes. How do they interact with the coyotes? Is there a relationship there that's a little fraught? Do they compete? What is that about?

GEOFF MILLER: Yeah. So foxes are a different story. So like I was saying, coyotes try to find ways to distance themselves as much as possible. A lot of the red foxes that we've tracked actually specialize in using highly developed areas rather than the larger green spaces we have in the metro. And they especially specialize in using residential areas.

So we think that they actually get some benefits from doing this in the form of protection from coyotes. So coyotes are both an ecological competitor, and in some cases, they can be a predator. For an example of what I mean, every year we get reports of people who see baby foxes piling out of maybe a hole in their backyard or a hole under their shed. And at this stage, they're really vulnerable to predation by coyotes and even predation by other things, like owls and hawks.

On more than one occasion, we've had videos sent to us of foxes coming up and barking at people's windows. And when the person goes to their backyard, they get there in time to see a coyote trying to dig out the den where the fox kits were being kept. And the person ends up scaring away the coyote and effectively saving the fox kits' lives.

So this is a way that people in urban environments actually protect foxes. And foxes also use neighborhoods to take advantage of the prey populations we have here of rabbits and squirrels. But we think they're really using neighborhoods to form a protective barrier between them and these top predators in urban environments.

CATHY WURZER: God. They are smart, aren't they? Wow. I understand that you're asking folks to send in scat samples to help you learn what these animals are eating. I'm assuming there's got to be some interesting messages that you're getting back from individuals. How is that going?

GEOFF MILLER: So that's going-- well, as you might guess, it's hard to get buy-in for people to go out and pick up scat samples. But we have a process for it. If you go to our website, can find us at tccfp.umn.edu. Or you can just google the Twin Cities Coyote and Fox Project.

We actually have a bunch of ways that people can get involved. As far as citizen science, we have an iNaturalist project as well, where we've had over 1,700 observations from citizens across the metro area. So you can report sightings. You can report coyote howling. That's really helpful for us to target animals to track in the future.

As far as the what we're finding in coyote diets and coyote and fox diets, we haven't actually done the analysis on the scat samples that are coming in. But I can say we do see all kinds of interesting things, just anecdotally, that these animals are eating. So they're eating what you might expect, like mice and rabbits. But they're also eating things like fruits and insects. And you sometimes see weird things like coffee filters that an animal has eaten.

CATHY WURZER: Oh my goodness.

GEOFF MILLER: And even in one case, I was tracking a coyote that was-- this was in the winter. I was tracking it and came across a pile of red stuff on the ground. And I thought maybe it was blood from a small mammal, but it had actually gotten into a bag of maybe Flamin' Hot Cheetos or Doritos. And it was just bread crumbs from something it had found. So they're eating all kinds of things out there--

CATHY WURZER: I'm sure.

GEOFF MILLER: --in the urban environment.

CATHY WURZER: Geoff, thank you for your work. And thank you for your time today. I'm sorry. We've run out of time. Best of luck.

GEOFF MILLER: Thank you. Thanks, Cathy.

CATHY WURZER: That's Geoff Miller, a PhD candidate with the U of M's Twin Cities Coyote and Fox Project, here on MPR News.