The Survivor
Photo by: John Tangney
Whenever we may read about one of our fellow humans who have overcome great hardships and have moved on to contribute to our larger human community, we admire their tenacity and resilience.
However, many people in our communities do not view wild beings who have overcome great hardships and challenges to their survival in the same way. In our culture today, much attention is focused on species who are struggling to survive and whose numbers are dwindling, namely endangered species. Rightly so.
But there is ONE who has triumphed over adversity, threatening dramatic changes in Earth’s history, and extreme persecution in our time. That ONE is Coyote. Coyote has survived and is flourishing. Do we admire them for their success or do we punish them instead?
Coyotes, like their fellow marine predator, the shark, have continued to reinvent themselves with each challenge to their survival: the sharks have been at it for 150 million years, and Coyote for 5 million years. Shark scientist, Jon Long, has written that sharks do so by “developing new ways to be opportunistic rather than becoming too specialized.” This he suggests is the Key Secret to their survival success.”
So too, Coyote! Ongoing research of our Native Wild Dog is showing us how resilient they are: if one of their wild prey is not available, they will find another, adapting to all the extremes of the changing seasons and diverse habitats.
A second astounding manner, in which these two amazing carnivores triumphed, was their ability to regulate their size according to the prey that was available. Jon Long writes that earlier in shark history they were much smaller than they are today, but when large prey became available to them –like whales and dolphins – their bodies became immensely larger.
So too, Coyote! Ancient large Coyotes with large jaws and sharp teeth hunted large prey. Large jaws salvaged from the Rancho La Brea tar pits in California are evidence of this. But then the large species of the Pleistocene vanished and as Coyote began to prey on smaller animals, their jaws and their bodies became smaller. Again, amazing resilience!
Having survived, Coyote has the potential to be of service to ecosystems of North America, playing their invaluable role as Apex Predator in many terrestrial landscapes.
Can we come to understand what they bring to our humanity? How can we not!
