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| Beats walking! |
When city
tweets need protection from cats, who do they call? Coyotes of course. It is well known that coyotes are staging an invasion of sorts as the adaptable canines move into urban neighborhoods.
US Person can testify to the
strange, eerie yipping of coyotes at night from a nearby urban ravine. A new study by Professor Stan Gehrt of Ohio State University says feral and outdoor cats take extra precautions to steer clear of coyotes which see them as prey or unwanted competitors. As a result of dodging their own predator, free-roaming cats do less damage to other wildlife in urban green areas; they also live longer and are healthier. Free-roaming cats partition their use of urban habitat leaving the natural areas in cities to the coyotes. Thus, wildlife living in the green zones benefit from the coyotes presence by their suppressing cat predation. Nature is re-establishing normal preditor-prey relationships in a landscape that has been almost completely created by man.
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| Where's my beverage? |
Gehrt and his colleagues studied 39 feral cats near six parks and nature preserves in Chicago. They found that study cats avoided coyotes' core activity areas in green remnants and restricted their core activity to more developed parts of the city near homes and shops. Coyotes do traverse more developed areas
[photos], but these are not part of their core areas because coyotes tend to avoid humans. Core activity areas are those places within a home range where the animal spends most of its time performing living functions such as hunting. Cats, who have a seven thousand year history of human association, are habituated to living near human activity. In other words, cats know that humans provide a degree of protection from larger predators as well as food. The research shows feral cats are less diseased and short-lived than often portrayed by germ phobic humans. Study cats were trapped, examined, blood samples taken, and fitted with radio collars. Blood samples indicated the cats had little exposure to feline AIDs and feline leukemia virus. The study also determined that altered cats were even healthier than those still sexually intact. Subject cats had only a 20% mortality rate over two years despite high traffic volumes and a large number of coyotes, a survival rate that surprised researchers.
Chicago has one of the densest populations of coyotes ever recorded in an urban area. The coyotes studied are already a part of Gehrt's long-term
Cook County, Illinois Coyote Project underway since 2000. The "ghost of the plains" has transformed itself into the "ghost of the cities", a testament to the specie's intelligence, adaptability and fortitude.
