Nine might not seem like all that many given the fact that Carrero and her colleagues spend most of their time walking the parks, but it suddenly becomes a lot when you compare it to the number of sightings scientists Mark Weckel and Chris Nagy have had between the two of them: five. Many of her colleagues haven’t ever spotted a coyote, but Carrero estimates that she’s seen the animals nine times during her tenure with the park service. “We saved the rabbit’s life,” she says, chuckling. Once, she saw three pups playing in Pelham Bay Park another time, she and two workers scared two coyotes away from a rabbit the canids had likely been hunting.

She isn’t just on call to help relocate coyotes from residential backyards to wooded park lands-she’s also spotted them on the trails of parks in the Bronx. And Carrero-who was born and raised in the Bronx and has been with the park service for 15 years-has had plenty of confirmed encounters with the animals. Since that day 10 years ago, coyotes have firmly established themselves in New York City they’ve been spotted everywhere from the Upper West Side to Battery Park City, from the rooftop of a Queens bar to Rikers Island, and they’re breeding in the Bronx’s parks. Coyotes just aren’t in New York City.’” But with this sighting, there could be no doubt: Though the animals' presence in the Bronx had not yet been confirmed, Carrero was looking at a Canis latrans. Back then, “it wasn’t confirmed that here,” she says. At the time, she wondered, Could that be a coyote? Then she second guessed herself.

“It wasn't nervous or excited-it seemed to move with a sense of purpose, knowing exactly where it was going.” A year earlier, she’d very briefly seen a similar looking animal in Pelham Bay Park. “It didn't have a collar and it didn't move in a way that dogs move,” she says. But as she watched the animal, the New York City Department of Parks and Recreation ranger could tell that it was no dog. The more the merrier.' And yes, he really said that.Ten years ago, Jessica Carrero was walking in the Bronx’s Van Cortlandt Park when what looked like a dog burst out of the woods and ran down the trail in front of her. 'And we're basically looking to collect as many samples as we can get. It's a commitment of a few days a month, for up to two years. 'We are looking for around 20 volunteers to help collect poop,' Brown said, 'and then we're looking for another 10 to 20 volunteers to help us analyze what's in the poop.' 'Is it fruit from people's trees, rats, possums, skunks, raccoons, people's cats?' Brown asked. NPS biologist Justin Brown says 'there's been a lot of work done in a lot of suburban settings,' where coyotes move back and forth from natural areas into urban areas, but there really hasn't been much work done at all on coyotes that live completely within the urban matrix, in little parks and vacant lots, and places like that.'īrown says researchers need to know how these urban coyotes survive, and so they need to know what the animals eat, which can be determined from the coyotes' scat. But now, as part of their urban coyote study, they're turning to a much more habitat-fragmented swath of urban LA that runs from Boyle Heights to Beverly Hills, including East L.A., Echo Park, El Sereno, Hollywood, Lincoln Heights, Los Feliz, Mount Washington, and Westlake. and discovered they ate lots of rabbits (appropriately), mice, backyard fruit, and the rare pet cat.

But if poop's not a problem for you, the National Park Service needs you.įrom 1996 to 2004, National Park Service researchers from the Santa Monica Mountains National Recreation Area studied coyotes in the suburban Conejo Valley - Agoura Hills, Thousand Oaks, Newbury Park, etc. If you're coprophobic - afraid of feces - stop reading now.

Coyote poop