Coyote America: A Natural and Supernatural History"With its uncanny night howls, unrivaled ingenuity, and amazing resilience, the coyote is the stuff of legends. In Indian folktales it often appears as a deceptive trickster or a sly genius. But legends don't come close to capturing the incredible survival story of the coyote. As soon as Americans-especially white Americans-began ranching and herding in the West, they began working to destroy the coyote. Despite campaigns of annihilation employing poisons, gases, helicopters, and engineered epidemics, coyotes didn't just survive, they thrived, expanding across the continent from Anchorage, Alaska, to New York's Central Park. In the war between humans and coyotes, coyotes have won hands-down. Coyote America is both an environmental and a deep natural history of the coyote. It traces both the five-million-year-long biological story of an animal that has become the "wolf" in our backyards, as well as its cultural evolution from a preeminent spot in Native American religions to the hapless foil of the Road Runner. A deeply American tale, the story of the coyote in the American West and beyond is a sort of Manifest Destiny in reverse, with a pioneering hero whose career holds up an uncanny mirror to the successes and failures of American expansionism. An illuminating biography of this extraordinary animal, Coyote America isn't just the story of an animal's survival-it is one of the great epics of our time."--Site web de l'éditeur. |
Contents
INTRODUCTION | v |
CHAPTER 1 | 21 |
CHAPTER 2 | 53 |
CHAPTER 3 | 81 |
CHAPTER 4 | 113 |
CHAPTER 5 | 151 |
CHAPTER 6 | 189 |
CHAPTER 7 | 209 |
EPILOGUE | 233 |
| 249 | |
| 257 | |
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Common terms and phrases
agency Amer American ancient Animal Damage Animal Damage Control archpredator avatar Aztec became become began biologists bison bounties bureau called canids canine Canis century Chicago Chuck Jones cities colonizing continent Courtesy Dan Flores coyote population Coyote stories coyote’s creatures culture decades deer desert dogs early East ecology Endangered Species Endangered Species Act environmental eradication Europeans evolution evolutionary extermination famous federal Fish and Wildlife genetic golden jackal gray wolves Grinnell howl human hunters hybrid Indian jackal Joseph Grinnell kill Leopold living mammals Mexico million modern mountain mule deer Murie national parks naturalist night Nixon North America otes packs percent Plains poison prairie wolf predators prey pronghorns pups ranchers red wolves scientific scientists seemed sheep Southwest strychnine survive Texas things Thomas Nuttall turn urban coyote West western wild canids wild coyotes Wildlife Services Wile Wile E wolves and coyotes writer Yellowstone