The Shocking Vastness of Prairie , Part 3

In this series from Stuff to Blow Your Mind, Robert and Joe discuss the vast North American grasslands of which poet William Cullen Bryant wrote, “These are the gardens of the desert, these the unshorn fields, boundless and beautiful, for which the speech of England has no name — The Prairies.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:03):
Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind production of iHeartRadio.

Speaker 2 (00:12):
Hey you welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind. My
name is Robert.

Speaker 3 (00:15):
Lamb and I am Joe McCormick, and we're back today
with the third part in our series on the prairie,
the temperate grassland ecosystem of North America. In Part one
of this series, we talked about what defines the prairie
and kind of what sets it apart from other ecosystems
similar grasslands and stuff, And we discussed the question why

(00:38):
historically were prairies not just covered in trees. What keeps
a prairie from becoming a forest. The answer to that
was interesting and a little bit complicated, but it involves,
among other things, climate and rainfall, the presence of particular herbivore,
something we're going to revisit today, and very importantly fire

(01:00):
frequent fires. After that, in part one, we talked about
grizzly bears of the prairie. Maybe a surprising concept. Grizzly
bears are now mainly associated with mountains and forests, but
they were once an apex predator of the North American
grasslands before they were driven out by humans in the
late nineteenth century, and we looked at some fascinating encounters

(01:23):
with prairie bears in the journals of the Lewis and
Clark expedition. In part two of the series, we talked
about prairie madness, which is not a recognized medical condition today,
but a historical cluster of psychological symptoms, including depression, forms
of anxiety, and general psychic distress, reported by some European

(01:44):
American settlers in the Great Plains in the nineteenth century.
At the time, these symptoms were at least in part
blamed on environmental factors of the prairie itself, things like flatness,
long sight lines, cold winters, and un ceasing winds. But
we also acknowledged some other things that could have contributed

(02:06):
to these symptoms as well, you know, things as diverse
as loneliness and isolation, domestic violence, generally harsh living conditions,
all lots of things that could have made life hard.

Speaker 2 (02:17):
Yeah, Plus perhaps over reporting of these conditions as well,
and the fact that it became basically a literary trope
unto itself totally.

Speaker 3 (02:26):
Yeah. And then after that we talked about an interesting
type of prairie feature, a physical feature called mima mounds
named after the formations found at a place called the
Mama Prairie in southwest Washington State. That you can find
these things in a lot of places. They're not only
in Washington State, they're in I think most states west
of the Mississippi. These are interesting because of how they look,

(02:49):
but also because there's a mystery about how they form.
And we got into several different hypotheses that are sort
of in the mix to explain them, including everything from
glaciers to gophers, and that question is not settled yet.
And so we're back today to talk prairies yet again. Now, Rob,
we both have sections focusing on animals historically associated with

(03:12):
the prairie today, do you mind if I kick things
off today talking about itchy buffalo.

Speaker 2 (03:18):
Absolutely, this is great. This is a great topic, and
it concerns like one of the most well known prairie
animals of all time, the bison. Yeah.

Speaker 3 (03:29):
So it is commonly estimated that before the nineteenth century,
before the bison were systematically brought to near extinction, especially
by commercial US hunters who were encouraged and supported to
over harvest by policies of the United States military who
were trying to weaken the planes Native American tribes. At

(03:51):
the time before they were brought to near extinction, there
were somewhere between thirty and sixty million bison in North America,
so incredibly dominant life form on the North American continent.
They were the most numerous and the most geographically widespread
of all the large terrestrial animals on the continent, and

(04:12):
they were of course a key part of the way
of life of plains Native American tribes. And they were
also a keystone species for the prairie ecosystem itself, meaning
that sort of in the same way that prairies depend
on fire to maintain their native biodiversity, they also depended
on bison. Bison are interesting natural ecoregulators. They sort of

(04:38):
shape and maintain the ecosystems that they live within. And
there are several examples of this, just a few that
there are more than the ones I'm about to mention,
but a few that I was reading about before we started.
There is research showing that areas of prairie that have
been grazed by bison may actually be more resistant to

(05:00):
because bison preferentially eat taller grasses that are less drought tolerant,
but might outcompete short grasses during wet times, so the
grazing leaves a greater mix of shorter, more drought tolerant
grasses behind. Also, in a previous episode, we talked a

(05:21):
lot about how fire is a crucial element that protects
eastern tall grass prairie from being colonized by trees. But
fire is not the only factor that plays here. It
turns out that bison also protects the prairie from encroachment
by woody plants and trees, especially trees like cedars, and
this is through several mechanisms. One is just sheer mechanical attack,

(05:45):
like bison will aggressively rub their horns or bodies against
young trees, often stripping bark or severely damaging or even
killing trees in the process, especially areas that are heavy
you know, where herds are moving through. The trees will
suffer a lot from this. Young trees also suffer from trampling,

(06:07):
you know, seedling or sapling trees suffer from trampling and
from grazing because grasses bounce back from trampling and grazing
better than the tree seedlings do. Especially when this happens
over and over repeatedly. But there's another way that I
want to talk about that bison alter and regulate the
landscape they live in, and this is by wallowing. So

(06:33):
this is not a new subject on stuff to blow
your mind. I think even just in the past couple
of years, we've done several episodes that touched on animal
wallowing or dust bathing behavior. I don't remember all the
contexts in which it came up, but it's it's been
on our minds recently.

Speaker 2 (06:49):
Yeah. Yeah, like dust is a way for animals to
mechanically remove parasites from their bodies.

Speaker 3 (06:56):
That's a big one. There are actually multiple reasons animals
go for dust bathing. I remember actually now that came
up in the context of us talking about dietamacous earth.
We went on a tangent about like birds.

Speaker 2 (07:09):
Dusty and particularly we'll use it as a mechanical means
of removing barosyites. But then when you get into things
like elephants and so forth. Yeah, different different dose scenarios
come up, for sure.

Speaker 3 (07:21):
Yeah, thermoregulation, all different kinds of things. And I'll talk
about reasons that are hypothesized why the bison do it
as well. But wallowing in bison is defined as a
behavior in which the bison they first expose the bare
ground by repeatedly pawing, horning, and trampling the earth. And
then once an area is formed where the plant cover

(07:44):
is cleared, the bison then roll around in the patch
of dry exposed soil. So you kind of strip away
the grass. You've got a bunch of bear earth now,
and then you roll around and roll on your sides,
you rub your head in it, just generally just getting
your body up in there. Now, Why do the bison
do this? From what I can tell, this is still

(08:06):
being researched, and there are multiple explanations. But I was
reading an article from the US National Park Service that
summarize some of the main ideas here. And the main
ideas include A big theme is getting relief from skin
to irritation, which could have multiple causes. One is the

(08:27):
need for shedding of the winter coat. So the warm
months come on and you have some leftover winter fur
that you need to rub off. You know, it's heating
up and that's going to be very itchy and uncomfortable,
and rolling in the dirt can apparently help the bison
shed its winter fur. I think that might also be
a reason why they preferentially like really rub hard against

(08:49):
like young seed or trees and stuff. You know, they're
trying to shed that winter coat. Also, rolling in the
dirt or dust can create a layer of dirt on
the fur or the skin that can serve as protection
against or at least reduce irritation from ectoparasites like lice, ticks,

(09:09):
and biting flies. So here we're back to a parasite explanation,
like you just mentioned with birds. And I think this
works by several mechanisms. You know, the rolling can, for
one thing, just like get stuff off of you and
you know, like knock it off. But also I think
having the dust on there like interferes with these small
arthropod's ability to stay in your fur and get what

(09:33):
they need there, Like the dust can kind of be
suffocating to them.

Speaker 2 (09:36):
And yeah, I remember is discussing the dust in and
of itself could be thought of as kind of a
mechanical insecticide.

Speaker 3 (09:42):
Yeah, in some cases, like it's not all going to
be like you know, little razors like dietamacious earth, but
it still might.

Speaker 2 (09:49):
End on what the parasites happen to be for sure.

Speaker 3 (09:52):
Yeah, totally, but it can help with that, we think. Also,
wallowing can be a social behavior that facilitates types of
communication between bison, particularly relating to competition between males during
mating season, which is called the rut. This is in summertime,
so during the rut, males who are sexually mature ready

(10:15):
to mate, will engage in aggressive or competitive wallowing. One
such behavior is that a male bison will pee in
the wallow, will urinate in the wallow, and then roll
around in it, and this is in service of advertising
their physical condition or fitness. It's like smell my pee. Obviously,
I am quite the cash. Bison also like to lay

(10:41):
on the exposed soil of a wallow during hot weather,
and this is thought to help them cool off because
the exposed soil in the wallow is typically cooler than
the surrounding grass, which I think about it grass as
a kind of insulating quality. You know, it can kind
of like trap air wow.

Speaker 2 (10:59):
So you Yeah, it's easy to see footage of bison
and be familiar with bison and not think of them
as the type of species that would end up like
creating a little like pocket area that can that has
multiple uses for them. Some of which you know, may
be social. This is pretty amazing.

Speaker 3 (11:19):
It is really interesting. So, yeah, they create these wallows
and then also they can return to the same wallows
over the years and like enlarge them and keep using
them over time. So it's a a cross generational development
project for some of these pits.

Speaker 2 (11:34):
You know, just the itching side of things alone. I
was just thinking about this earlier. Like, we as humans
are have so many benefits when it comes to to itching.
You know, like a number of species out there have
various things they can and will do to mitigate parasites

(11:55):
and mitigate itching, but like we could do all of them.
Like we you know, we can scratch you with hands.
We can scratch pretty much every part of our body.
We don't have to lean up against trees. And if
we do well, we've already taken a piece of a
tree and made it into a tiny little hand that
we can scratch that one part in our back with.

(12:15):
We have, you know, all sorts of medications as well
that we can turn to. Like we are better prepared
than any other species on earth to deal with itchy skin.
Where has a creature like the bison, it's going to
have fewer tools at its disposal, but those are still
going to be very important tools in order for it
to alleviate these symptoms. Yeah, totally.

Speaker 3 (12:38):
I think about this sometimes, just how much itchiness there
is in nature beyond the human realm, and.

Speaker 2 (12:44):
When we itch, we hate it understandably, but we just
were blessed that we have so many different levers we
can pull when we do itch.

Speaker 3 (12:52):
Well, you know, it's hard to remember this when itching
is really driving you crazy, but if you can keep
it in mind, it's for your own good, your body
trying to protect you. It's letting you know something's wrong
need some attention. Yeah, kind of like pain in that regard. Yeah,
thank God for pain. But anyway, So a cool thing

(13:14):
about bison wallowing, A really interesting thing about it is
that bison wallowing behavior actually creates a sort of feedback
loop with the land and the ecosystem itself. So places
where bison wallow become bison wallows wallow as a noun,

(13:36):
which a bison wallow is a bowl shaped dip in
the earth where the soil is exposed. As bison used
these exposed patches of earth, time after time, the soil
becomes packed down, it becomes disturbed like they you know,
disturb and sort of turn the soil a little bit,
and so they uproot some plants that could be there.

(13:59):
But then they also pack down the soil and the
wallow then becomes a place where other interesting changes to
the prairie can happen, Like these wallows become tiny contained
ecosystems in themselves. Different plant species can take root, plant
species that might not be able to get a foothold

(14:22):
in the already fully you know, grass covered areas in
the surrounding landscape. So this creates opportunities for different types
of plants to come in and you know, let their
seeds come down and take root. The wallow can also
fill with water, becoming a mud pit or a pond,
and then these little ponds on the prairie can become

(14:45):
important sources of water for animal life, both vertebrates and invertebrates,
and for plants. Like some prairie plants that require more
access to water can survive because of these wallows turned
in into ponds, and then because different plants can survive
within them, wallows create points of plant diversity compared to

(15:08):
the rest of the landscape. So the overall prairie has
more plant diversity because of what can survive in the
wallows that couldn't survive outside of them. One thing that
is kind of cool is that you can find archaic wallows,
Like sometimes they get kind of covered over, but in
some cases ancient bison wallows can still be found as

(15:30):
depressions in the land or small areas filled with different
patches of plant life than the surrounding field. Rob, I've
got one picture in the outline for you to look at.
That is a picture taken in Haskell County, Kansas in
eighteen ninety seven of somebody just standing in front of
this giant buffalo wallow. It's pretty cool looking.

Speaker 2 (15:50):
Oh yeah, yeah, it's big ground and intention it.

Speaker 3 (15:53):
Looks like a meteor impact site or something.

Speaker 2 (15:55):
Yeah yeah. If you didn't know what you're looking at,
you might think there was some sort of cosmic cause
for this.

Speaker 3 (15:59):
Yeah, aliens yet again. Yeah, UFO has proven disprover except
but so here, I'd like to mention a paper that
I thought was interesting. It's a paper called Spatial and
Physical Characteristics of Bison Wallow's in the Flint Hills of
Kansas by some researchers named Eva Horn Pam Blackmore, Nora Imbello,

(16:22):
Jeffrey Taylor, and Adam Skibby published in the journal Ecosphere
in twenty twenty four and the author's first sentence in
this paper, I think is a really interesting framing of
what the prairie is. What is its nature? They write, quote,
North American tallgrass prairie is an ecosystem defined and maintained

(16:46):
by disturbance, primarily consisting of climatic variability, frequent fire, and
the presence of large herbivores. Isn't that interesting? I mean,
this has been coming through in a It's kind of
an undercurrent in everything we've talked about already in this
series that what makes the prairie able to survive as

(17:07):
prairie are things like fire and these you know, big
in some ways, you could think of them as destructive
herbivores that are you know, like disturbing and turning the
soil and packing it down in places and causing damage
against these woody plants. And also these harsh climate conditions
like you know, not as much rainfall as a forest

(17:29):
environment might get, or maybe just swings in climate conditions
across the seasons. All of these chaotic and destructive elements
are what make the prairie able to survive as the
thing that it is.

Speaker 2 (17:43):
That is fascinating especially you know, you look at images
of the prairie and it just it seems vast, eternal.
It seems like something that is in and of itself
like the natural way of things and has to be
just purely protected from disturbance. But there is a balance
here that it seems to demand a certain amount of

(18:04):
disturbance on one end, and then of course is highly
susceptible to disturbance on the other end of things. So
do you know, mainly being all the ways that human
civilization has impacted it and disturbed the way that it operates.

Speaker 3 (18:18):
Yeah, So, like the kinds of human development that have
gone on in the prairie since you know, United States
settlement by like US farmers and stuff like that, that
has been incredibly disturbing to the natural balance of the prairie.
But at the same time, the prairie depends on all
these more natural form, more natural and ecocompatible forms of attack,

(18:40):
attack by fire, attack by these big animals, all these
attacks actually sustain the prairie itself.

Speaker 2 (18:47):
Yeah, yeah, that's so amazing.

Speaker 3 (18:59):
So one way that the prairie historically was actually defined
by disturbance was in how its plant and animal diversity
were maintained by the bison, particularly by the creation of
bison wallows, and so sometimes bison in the literature today
are called ecosystem engineers. You can almost imagine them through

(19:23):
their wallowing behavior, through you know, horning, stomping on the ground,
tearing up these patches of earth, making these little bowls,
exposing the mud and the dust, rolling around in it,
peeing in it, rolling in it some more. All this stuff.
They are creating tiny nature preserves and little wetland gardens
that spread all across the prairie. I've read some estimates that,

(19:48):
you know, we don't see them as much anymore, obviously,
because the bison have been so terribly reduced from how
many there once work and you know, at their height,
maybe thirty to sixty million bison roaming the Prayer or
roaming the continent of North America in general. But there
were tons of wallows back of the time when the
bison were at their peak. I've seen estimates that there

(20:11):
may have been multiple wallows per acre, you know, maybe
up to five per acre. So just imagine that spread
out across the Great Plains, So tons and tons of
these little nature preserves and wetland gardens that allow different
types of plant and animal diversity to survive on these
islands within the prairie. And of course these islands would

(20:33):
help maintain the plant and animal diversity of the landscape
as a whole.

Speaker 2 (20:38):
They were like bison gas stations and rest stops with
their own little economic system going on, right.

Speaker 3 (20:47):
Yeah, totally, little havens, little havens, little things can happen.
So this study by Horn at all, the goal of
it was, they say, quote, to characterize spatial and physical
characteristics of bison wallows at the Konza Prairie Biological Station,
a tallgrass prairie preserve in northeastern Kansas. So the Konza

(21:10):
Prairie Biological Station is like an eighty six hundred acre
native tallgrass prairie preserve. This is in the Flint Hills
of northeastern Kansas. It's been used for ecological research and
conservation since nineteen seventy one. Bison were reintroduced to it
sometime shortly after its creation, I think in the early eighties.
I believe sometime in the eighties, bison were reintroduced, and

(21:32):
now there are a bunch of bison there and they
are used for ecological research, but also just they're allowed
to live there. So it's a place where they are
trying to recreate some of the more original conditions of
the tallgrass prairie and preserve them. So in this study,
the authors relied on aerial photography from two different years

(21:52):
from twenty eleven and twenty nineteen, and they looked at
questions like how many wallows were there, where were they located,
what are the characteristics of the sites, and how the
wall They tried to see how the wallows related to
things like fire, elevation, and slope. They also randomly selected
certain wallows and analyzed their characteristics up close in the

(22:15):
year twenty twenty and the author's main findings were that
wallows were more abundant in places with combinations of quote,
more frequent burning, higher elevations, and little or no slope,
So for wallows, the bison like well burned areas, places
that are higher and flatness. They also say that wallows

(22:37):
tended to be smaller in places that experienced more frequent
fires and tended to be shallower in depth that higher elevations,
especially in the middle of heavily grazed areas. The authors
also sampled plant life growing in the wallows and robin
the outline just above this section I'm looking at. There's
a picture photograph from the paper that shows what some

(23:00):
of these fairly fresh buffalo wallows look like. These are
not like the ancient ones. These are the ones that
the bison are creating within the concept Prairie Biological Station
at in the past few years. The authors found that
within these wallows quote some quantity of aquatic plants in

(23:21):
approximately seven point one percent of the sampled wallows. The
probability of finding aquatic vegetation in wallows was higher on
grazing lawns and in areas burned less frequently, particularly every
twenty years. Now for some reflection by the first author,
I was looking at a Kansas State University article called

(23:41):
Biologists Are Protecting and Preserving Bison in the Prairie Home
by Taylor Provine. This article is generally focused on research
taking place at the Conzapt Prairie Biological Station focusing on bison,
and about this wallows research. They point out that one
thing that might not be very surprised is that these
conditions where you find the most wallows, you know, areas

(24:05):
with a very gentle slope, basically flat surfaces, higher elevations,
hot places with higher rates of fire. These are also
just the places where bison tend to spend most of
their time. Now, that might be kind of surprising, like
why would bison spend most of their time in areas
that have higher rates of fire, But actually this is

(24:26):
a well documented phenomenon because fire tends to clear out old,
maybe dried out, older, tougher grasses and allows new, fresh
green shoots of grasses to come back up from the roots,
and that is the most delicious type of grass for
the bison. And so traditionally fire was used as a

(24:48):
landscape management technique biplanes Native American tribes to try to
make the areas more attractive to bison that we're eventually
going to be used for hunting. You know, you might
burn area and then have these fresh green grasses come
in that are just like it's setting out the buffet
for the bisons, like the.

Speaker 2 (25:07):
Fresh steamer tray coming out, Like the bison take note.

Speaker 3 (25:10):
Totally, Yes, it's like they got new crab. That's not yeah,
so again, maybe not very surprising, but the places where
they found the most of these wallows tend to be
the places where bison just liked to hang out the most.
But then there was another part that I thought was
interesting about these wallows, as little little nature preserves little
ecological zones of their own. And so this article quotes

(25:34):
the first author of that paper, Eva Horne, saying, quote,
there are at least three species of frogs that breed
in the wallows, and numerous different insects and arthropods can
be found in them. It changes the diversity of the
plants around the wallows, even when they're dry, because sometimes
annual species of plants that don't have any other place

(25:55):
to live can grow in these wallows. So that's interesting
thing about the plant species. But also I didn't know
this about the frogs. You know, obviously I was no
expert on on the prairies, certainly not before we started
the series. I mean, I'm expert now, but you know,
I knew even less before we started, but I certainly

(26:16):
didn't associate the prairies with frogs very much with amphibians generally.

Speaker 2 (26:22):
Yeah, yeah, this, this, this reminds me of some of
our past discussions with Martin Mandinka of the Amphibian Foundation
about certain amphibians that you know that depend on very
particular water environment, the water environments like this, you know,
and outside of the prairie. I think we we've talked
about Georgia related species in the past, but you know,

(26:46):
they'll be very specific, you know, micro habitats that they'll
depend on, and those micro habitats are in many cases
very susceptible to disruption. And and this is another case
of the case of that for sure. Yeah, this is fast.

Speaker 3 (27:00):
Was it the case when we spoke to Mark Mandica
the last time he was talking about the frosted frosted
salamanders that, unless I'm remembering this wrong, their way of
life to some degree depended on fire. I think fires
that are now naturally that are now suppressed. But in

(27:20):
whatever ecosystem they were in, I think it maybe like
southern pine forests or something like that, they for some
reason depended on fires. And now that like we're preventing
some of those fires from happening, it's made the landscape
harder for the salamanders to live in.

Speaker 2 (27:36):
Yeah, disruption creates opportunity, I mean, that's that's that's a
fact of life in general, and we see it. We
see it everywhere. We see it in economics, we see
it in politics. It's it's a fact of life, and
we see it boiled down in these particular cases.

Speaker 3 (27:50):
Here to follow up on the idea of frogs and
amphibians using these wallowing sites as habitats within the prairie,
I was trying to find and if there was a
paper that addressed this directly, and I did come across one.
So this is an earlier paper from two thousand and
three by Nicole Gerlank and Glennis Kaufman called use of

(28:11):
Bison wallows by Anurines on Konza Prairie, the same place
in Kansas. This was published in the American Midland Naturalist
again the year two thousand and three, and the authors
write that quote bison may have been important in the
life histories of prairie and urines by creating pools in
the form of wallows that could be used as breeding sites.

(28:33):
Now they say that more is going to have to
be learned about this because it's not fully understood how
amphibians and especially frogs and toads use these sites. But
the paper does mention several anurine species that have been
observed in this study and in others breeding and living
in bison created wetlands. These wallows turned into wetlands that

(28:56):
serve as islands of wetness in the prairie. And so
the species that have been observed include the western chorus frog,
the northern cricket frog, woodhouses toad, the Great Plains narrowmouth toad, copes,
gray tree frogs, and planes spade foot toads. And I've

(29:16):
seen a couple other sources mention that sometimes these wallow
ponds can be great for amphibian reproduction because they lack
the main natural predators of amphibian eggs and tadpoles, particularly fish,
which are very efficient predators of young amphibians and young frogs.

Speaker 2 (29:37):
That's a great point as well.

Speaker 3 (29:38):
Yeah, So in general, I thought this was fascinating, like
I'd never thought about this before, that the idea that
large herbivores like bison would be out there creating little
wetland islands of biodiversity within the broader prairie ecosystem. They're
out there like making these little almost like crea eating

(30:00):
little terraria where different plant and animal life can can
take hold and can spread out across the prairie in
this way kind of from island to island.

Speaker 2 (30:09):
Also, Yeah, and it all began because a bison had
an itchy flank and just had to roll around in
the dust and where was the dust? I had to
make dust, had to make a spot. And then that
creates opportunity for all these other life forms to move
in and take advantage of the scenario. Yeah, amazing, very cool. Yeah,

(30:37):
all right, Well, for the rest of this episode, I
want to talk about another creature that that had that
that has historic origins in the prairie environment and in
some adjacent environments. And now this is also a story
that is going to involve a lot of disruption and opportunity,
and it is going to concern coyotes because so in

(30:59):
the first episode, you know, we discussed how the grizzly
bear was once a creature of the prairie but was
pushed out by Western colonists and their widespread eradication efforts.
We also have, of course, discussed the ratit the widespread
eradication of the American bison, one of the grizzlies historic
prey animals. And I think we also mentioned the wolf
as well as being another one of the creatures that

(31:22):
was vilified and seen as a threat to livestock and
to humans Westerners that were moving out and taking advantage
of the landscape. But yeah, today I want to talk
in this episode by talking about another creature that was
historically at home on the prairie and the human eradication

(31:42):
efforts that catastrophically failed due in large part to the
particular resilience all of the species in question. This is
again the coyote kiness latrans, also known as the prairie wolf,
the brush wolf, and the American jackal. This last one
sounds like something I see a bumper sticker from out
driving about, But no. It was also sometimes called the

(32:06):
American jackal, and this I think some of these names
stem from the fact that when Europeans and Americans from
the East began to encounter the coyote for the first time,
they didn't really know what they were looking at the
like is it a jackal? Is it a wolf? Is
it a fox? What are we dealing with here? Yeah?

Speaker 3 (32:25):
American jackal sounds like the name of a movie. Really
an American jackal?

Speaker 2 (32:29):
Now, I want to mention before I get into the
rest of this that My sources for this included a
number of different like code conservation and research organizations. This
includes Project Coyote dot org, Urban Coyote Research dot com,
and Vermont Coyote dot org. These are all very informative websites.
So today the vast majority of our North American listeners

(32:53):
are going to be familiar with the coyote. You have.
If you're blood lucky, maybe you've seen them. They are
see and they especially in urban environments, they tend to
be more nocturnal. They're there, they're they're they're major survivors.
More likely you've maybe heard them at times, maybe out camping,

(33:13):
and you've heard their their their varied and strange vocalizations.
They have a lot more variety in their sounds compared
to domesticated dogs. And you know, at times they can
sound like cackling children or goblins. It can be very unsettling.

Speaker 3 (33:27):
They there's a musicality and a conversational quality to coyote vocalizations.
You can almost feel like you're following a grammar when
when you hear them making noise, If that makes any sense.

Speaker 2 (33:39):
Yeah, yeah, absolutely. There are now some nineteen subspecies of
the coyote, currently ranging across North and Central America, from
California to Newfoundland, from Alaska to Panama. They thrive in
a vast array of environments, now including urban landscapes, where
they have often been left to claim the mantle of

(34:00):
apex predator in the absence of wolves, especially the red
wolf in the east, and bears and so forth. And
yet historically the coyote was a creature of the flatlands.
Prior to the seventeen hundreds, coyotes in North America were
restricted to the prairies and desert areas of Mexico and

(34:22):
central North America. So most of these, for a number
of you, you live in places that now have coyotes,
and just a few centuries ago this was not the case.
They were just not there at all, and in some
cases much more recently. I'll get into some examples of
this as we go. So there, the cotes evolutionary journey

(34:45):
had landed them in a niche that was somewhat below
the bears and the cougars, below the dire wolves that
existed there prior to ten thousand years ago, And when
the dire wolf went extinct, the gray wolf moved up,
so the coyote was relegated to the role of a
subordinate meso predator, which itself directly suppressed top down by

(35:08):
wolves and cougars. It lived very much in the shadow
of these greater killers, just as it had lived in
the shadow of greater ice age species before them. So
they were predators that fed a lot on rodents and rabbits.
They also ate carrion. You know, they were fairly opportune, opportunistic,
and they suppressed smaller predators themselves, but again top down

(35:31):
pressure from the bigger guys ahead of them.

Speaker 3 (35:34):
Now, does that mean that the wolves and cougars would
just tend to out compete coyotes for better sources of
prey or would they actually prey directly on coyotes as well.

Speaker 2 (35:45):
From my reading here, I think most of it is
just like the pressure is going to be competing for
the same resources, driving them off from those resources, and
in some cases a kill might take place. Yeah, but
you know, basically just a situation where they had a
lot of enemies, you know, but they and they had
to be really cagey and scrappy to get by. They

(36:09):
had to be clever. They're competing with and living an
active fear of these apex predators above them, and they
had to stick together. They had to be highly social animals,
which they were and they remained to be. They had
to be highly versatile. And it is interesting that indigenous
people's found many parallels, many positive but also some cautionary

(36:31):
regarding the coyote. And so the mythical coyote as a
as a trickster, you know, a deity factors or here
and or hero factors into many of these traditions. You know,
where the coyote is to be admired because the you know, coyote,
like a lot of trickster characters, you know, gets by
and finds clever ways to survive, much like human beings do.

(36:54):
But also their tales about you know, a coyote, you know,
took the easy way way out here, and maybe you
shouldn't do that. Coyote was slothful, coyote was gluttonous, and
so forth again. Western colonists didn't quite know what to
make of the coyote at first. Was it a fox?
Was it a wolf? Was it a jackal? In fact,
Lewis and Clark, in their journals, initially labeled it a

(37:16):
prairie wolf in eighteen oh four. I looked up the
exact first reference in their journals and it's Monday seventeenth,
the seventeenth of September eighteen oh four. Quote killed a
prairie wolf. These wolves are larger than a fox. And
this is about as interesting as it gets with Lewis
and Clark's coyote interactions. They kill a few more, they

(37:39):
have a few more, just brief comments about them, but
nothing on the scale of their discussions of grizzly bears
and so forth. But still Western colonists, they knew they
did not like coyotes, and there are numerous examples of
this found in literature. Probably one of the most it's

(38:00):
really meanest you find from eighteen seventy two in Mark
Twain's roughing It. So Twain just lays into the coyote
for multiple paragraphs here. It also has to be clear
horrible dehumanizing things to say about native people's as well.
But I'm just going to read just a little of
the coyote specific material here. Twain wrote, the coyote is

(38:23):
a long, slim, sick and sorry looking skeleton with a
gray wolf skin stretched over it. A tolerably bushy tail
that forever SAgs down, with a despairing expression of forsakenness
and misery, a furtive and evil eye, and a long,
sharp face with slightly lifted lip and exposed teeth. He
has a general slinking expression all over. The coyote is

(38:47):
a living, breathing allegory of want. He is always hungry.

Speaker 3 (38:52):
That's interesting because it's like, I don't like this kind
of sentiment as nature writing, but also I think that's
somewhat beautifully expressed.

Speaker 2 (39:03):
Yeah, yeah, there's a little more. He says he is
always poor, out of luck and friendless. The meanest creatures
despise him, and even Fleas would desert him for a velocipede.
Joe will remind us what a velocipede is.

Speaker 3 (39:17):
It's like that it's that old timey big bicycle with
a big front wheel.

Speaker 2 (39:20):
Okay, So Fleas would rather be on that than on
the coyote, I guess so. Okay. He is so spiritless
and cowardly that, even while his exposed teeth are pretending
a threat, the rest of his face is apologizing for it.
He is so homely, so scrawny and ribby and coarse
haired and pitiful. Wow, So I agree with you, Like

(39:43):
all of this is obviously editorializing too much and presenting
the coyote is just a just a you know, a pitiful,
hatable villain, But I mean it is stemming from an understanding.
I guess that the coyote exists in a place where, yeah,
he has no friends. He's positioned and certainly was positioned

(40:05):
historically between the pressures of the apex predators that, according
to Twain, you know, hate him, and and then the
creatures that he preys upon. And yeah, he is probably
always hungry, like a lot of animals are. It's always
about that next meal. And the coyote is a survivor,
scraping by, you know, engaging this opportunistic lifestyle and you know,

(40:27):
getting what it can get when it can get it.

Speaker 3 (40:30):
And even the fleas are like, no, thank you.

Speaker 2 (40:33):
That I highly doubt I think the fleas were happy
to have a coyote. Yeah, So, you know, I think
it also is worth reading these lines because it does
sum up how the code he was viewed and in
many places is still viewed, not as a subordinate mezzo
predator with an important role in the ecosystem, because that
is that is essential to note here. Just as apex

(40:55):
predators have have a very important role, so do predators
all the way down the lawn. Like you know, they're
all part of the web and they do us a
service in that role. But this is not how they
were seen. They were seen as vermin that we were
just better off without a loathsome creature that lived in
loathsome places. And then on top of that, like higher

(41:19):
ranked predators, it was seen as a threat to livestock
and even to human beings. Now they are livestock predators
when they can get it. I mean, you can't bumblame
any livestock predator. You know, they're chickens around, and you
eat chickens, and they're a bunch of them and they're
in a little pen. You might go in and kill
one or all of them because they are good to eat.

(41:41):
That's understandable. That's how predators view things as for it,
and you know, it's going to depend on what the
livestock happened to be. But yeah, they're not immune from
those kind of temptations When it comes to humans. However,
coyotes are generally not a threat to adult humans. The
exceptions to this are tragic and and also you know,
highly circulated. I think, but statistically, your chances of being

(42:04):
hurt by a coyote are close to zero. And again,
I think that this attitude is still a part of
how we view coyotes, like some kind of like loathsome
ghost that lives in the shadows. You know, I've never
you know, I was not engaged in livestock growing up,
so I never had that influencing my way of thinking
about them. But I would hear them very occasionally, see one,

(42:27):
and there was this kind of idea that like, that's
I'm supposed to feel negatively about this creature, and certainly
just hearing their vocalizations while camping. You know, I've been
slightly unnerved by that, Like I don't like that. I
don't like these guys making all this racket and being
so close to my camp.

Speaker 3 (42:44):
Yeah, you know, there's a there's a special kind of
disrespect I think, reserved for what you might call the
maso predator that we can, like an apex predator, we
could be scared of, but that fear is accompanied more
often by a kind of awe and respect, whereas a

(43:07):
second something that you think might still be a little
bit dangerous to you. But it's not like in the
top tier of predators. I think people are more likely
to just treat that animal with disgust and contempt.

Speaker 2 (43:20):
Yeah, it's always almost like I think there's like a
crime comparison to being made here, like a serial murder
like those those guys are on T shirts for some reason,
you know, like people people like hate and love them
at the same time. And likewise, you know, these major
apex predators like those are those those have become icons

(43:40):
that we like associate with, you know, regardless of actual contact,
like historic contact with those species within an environment of
a given culture. Like the lion. How like how how
many different cultures have taken up the lion as a
symbol even if they did not have lions within their
historic environment. You know, it's just a potent symbol. The coote. Again,

(44:00):
the coyote has been taken up by people who lived
long term with them in their natural environment, but has
maybe traveled less well outside of that context. Now, I

(44:22):
want to come back to what I said earlier though
about the historic range of the coyote. This is what
I found really interesting here. So they were once creatures
of the plain in Desert Mexico and central North America
already a huge swath of the land, to be clear,
So it's not like they had a tiny range. But
today their range is even faster, having expanded significantly since

(44:42):
the seventeen hundreds, and they've expanded farther south in Central
America and farther north into most of Canada and into Alaska.
They've expanded slightly west to reach the Pacific coast, and
they've expanded all the way to the Atlantic Coast in
the east. You know, they have conquered the conquered North America,

(45:04):
to be clear. So again, we both grew up in
Coyote lands, you and I, but the coyote didn't expand
into the American southeast until the nineteen thirties and nineteen forties.
They didn't reach Florida until the nineteen sixties and nineteen seventies,
and eventually like covered the entire south by the nineteen nineties.

(45:28):
So that's how recent we're talking about them getting like
a firm foothold in these areas, or maybe I should
say pad instead of foot, but you can get what
I'm saying.

Speaker 3 (45:36):
Yes, yeah, it's interesting that we see the coyote as
this type of you know, this not the only species
like this, but as this type of species that benefits
where many other species are harmed. You know, from circumstances
that circumstances and disruptions of natural ecological balances that on

(45:57):
the whole are harmful to natural plants and animals. There
are some species that see an opportunity there, like you
were saying earlier, and they can fill the gap, they
can spread out.

Speaker 2 (46:08):
Yeah. Yeah, they're already opportunistic. They're great at scraping by,
and suddenly there is a widespread opening for an apex
predator and they are there to accept the mantle. They
are ready to headline. Baby, They've been ready all this time.
They're ready when the dire wolf got promoted. They were
ready when the gray wolf got promoted. And now there's

(46:28):
nobody else ahead of them. It is now their time
and we are living in their time.

Speaker 3 (46:33):
Interesting.

Speaker 2 (46:34):
Yeah. During the nineteen nineties, this is I think when
we really begin to see the coyote move into the
sprawling urban areas, both like metropolis areas and suburb environments.
Even places like New York City and la have become
the domain of the coyote, including I should mention the bronx,
which we previously were talking about in Weird House Cinema,

(46:55):
you will find the coyote and the bronx. Certainly I
find them in or there out here in the Atlanta area.
I I don't think I've ever seen one in Atlanta,
but I hear stories of people, you know, seeing them
or catching one on a cam that sort of thing.

Speaker 3 (47:08):
Totally yeah, uh.

Speaker 2 (47:10):
They are firmly established throughout North America. Outside of the
High Arctic and certain island environments. You know, there are
certain areas that that they have been cut off from claiming,
but again they've pretty much spread everywhere else. So the
reasons for this explosion of coyotes are pretty fascinating. And
I do want to stress that, like we have some

(47:30):
key you know, building blocks to our understanding, some key
things to put into the equation, but there is still
a fair amount of back and forth among researchers about
actually how this comes together. So I do want to
know say that none of this is completely settled. But
there are two of the major factors that are discussed

(47:50):
the most are as follows. First of all is that
absence of historic apex predators like the wolf or the cougar,
and and and In this absence, the code becomes the
de facto apex predator in many areas, still an important
role that something needs to play, and the coyote, again
long overlook for promotion, just slides right into that spot.

(48:13):
They're adaptable predators and can even take down large prey
like moose and elk if conditions are just right. However,
at the same time, they cannot exert the same top
down pressure that former apex predators did, so for instance,
you don't see them actively impacting adult white tailed deer populations,

(48:33):
though they'll highly They're like, they're the number one predator
for white tailed deer fawns, so you know the young,
the weak, the injured. You know, they are absolutely there
to eat those guys up, but they don't really have
the pressure to impact the adults in the way that
a true apex predator would have. Also important that in

(48:57):
becoming the new apex predator, they are also just not
touched by any top down pressure from higher level predators.
So it's part of it is them moving up, but
the other part is just like there's nothing keeping them
down anymore. The other fascinating reason for their expansion is actually,
and again some researchers go back and forth on this,

(49:18):
but it seems to be that one of the major
factors here, and this is that their population surge and
expansion is also tied directly to concentrated human eradication programs.
So humans eradicated and expatriated the grizzly bear from the
planes they did. They did the same with the wolf

(49:38):
and to a very large extent, the bison. But when
they tried the same with the coyote, the coyotes simply
conquered the whole continent instead. So poisoning, shooting, trapping, and
really the efforts that the US governmental agencies and state
agencies as well put into trying to eradicate the coyote

(50:01):
we could do a whole podcast on these. You know,
different technologies were developed, all sorts of means were tried.
It wasn't just okay, go out and shoot a bunch
of coyotes, though that was still absolutely it, you know,
bounty programs and the like. So how did anti code
crusades fail so absolutely again, not only failing to achieve

(50:22):
the stated goal, but actually actually resulting in the opposite,
you know, actually spreading the coyote the rest of the
way across the continent. So for starters, let me stress
that eradication efforts here aimed at predators that included the
coyote were not merely the product of say the nineteenth
century or earlier. They continued in a major government sanctioned

(50:44):
capacity well into the mid twentieth century, you know, preaching
total eradication of the coyote, seeing that as an achievable goal,
and then they continue to this day via various federal
animal damage control programs, like half a million coyotes are
still eradicated each year in the US alone. Wow. And

(51:06):
here's the thing. Under normal conditions, a population of coyotes
is thought to be somewhat self sustaining. So only a
dominant in a given coyote pack, only a dominant pair
in that pack are going to reproduce. Reproduction by others
in the pack is going to be repressed, and litercizes
are going to be kept small. Lethal intervention. Intervention will

(51:29):
temporarily reduce numbers because of you know, death, you know,
if you're literally reducing the head count of the coyotes.
But one argument here is that what happens in this
case is when a coyote pack is disrupted, the survivors
are going to like splinter off, and when they splinter off,
they're going to spread to new territories, so transient loaner coyotes.

(51:53):
I've read a couple of different figures here. One figure
was that they'll travel fifty miles or more when they
splinter off and try to find a new place to
establish their presence. I've also seen five hundred kilometers or
three hundred and ten miles as a possibility. So at
any rate, there is a you know, however far they're traveling.
The idea is if you if you shatter the pack,

(52:14):
the pack is going to like spread out. There's like
like a hydra.

Speaker 3 (52:18):
Yeah yeah, yeah. So so one pack has natural limits
on how much each individual in the pack can reproduce,
but disrupting the pack causes more members of the pack
to become reproductively active.

Speaker 2 (52:33):
Right right, Okay, that's the idea here. The other way
of looking at it is also that on top of
this or again, researchers go back and forth on some
of the particulars here. But the other idea is that
since they're no longer bound by pack limits on reproduction.
Reproduction is just going to increase after the fracture, So

(52:53):
this is going to result in a rebound of reproductive compensation. Also,
localized kills are going to open up territory for Roman
coyotes to settle into. So you know, you encountered this
with other like like feral cat populations and so forth
as well. Like you if you were doing like lethal eradication,

(53:14):
you kill all the coyotes in an area, Well, now
you have an area that can clearly sustain coyotes that
has no coyotes. And if these coals are taking place
elsewhere within say you know, fifty miles one hundred miles
one hundred and fifty miles, then you have a high
possibility that new coyotes are just going to move into
occupy that gap. And as all of this is happening,

(53:36):
and what was happening, the spread into urban areas and
surrounding areas is occurring. And in this case, the coyote
is encountering what is referred to as edge heavy areas,
so places edge areas being like places where two different
cover types converge, two different ecosystems kind of converge. You
have a lot of that occurring artificially in an urban environment,

(53:57):
and these are environments that they already thrived in. And
then and on top of that, they're going to suddenly
find things like augmented food sources in the form of
urban rodent populations that all time favorite human garbage pets,
as well as a certain amount of crops and small livestock,
as well as various lower food chain urban adapters like

(54:18):
raccoons that were already a part of their diet. H Okay, Yeah,
So coyote's, after all the opportunistic gomnivores with a heavy
lean toward carnivore. But they can scrape, buy, and they
will eat vegetation.

Speaker 3 (54:33):
So coyote probably wouldn't turn down a piece of pizza.

Speaker 2 (54:36):
What do you think, Yeah, my understanding is that if
it was a meat lover's pizza, they would definitely be in,
But if conditions were right, they would still go for
plant lovers.

Speaker 3 (54:43):
What do you think about a tub of yogurt? Do
you think coyote is getting in there with the tongue?

Speaker 2 (54:48):
I don't know, I don't know. I think I just
don't know. I have a maybe the raccoon.

Speaker 3 (54:54):
No expertise here, but my gut feeling is yes, I
think they're getting the head and the yogurt tub.

Speaker 2 (55:00):
Okay, all right, I'm gonna again, though add a little
nuance here. So the coyote explosion is not in question,
nor is the coyote's resilience to culling methods. But there
is at least some disagreement out there about the different
factors and how it all comes together. So, for instance,
some experts argue or counter argue that lethal enforcement actually

(55:24):
does work. So this is kind of like the back
and forth. Some people are like, lethal enforcement does not work.
We shouldn't do it. We should look at other ways
to manage them. Others are saying lethal enforcement does work,
but we see these initial rebounds due to how it
alters food availability for animals in the aftermath. So this
idea being it's like, okay, this is another factor to consider.

(55:47):
It's like, you kill all the coyotes in an area,
and then the food sources for the coyote in that
area may rebound, and this just enables more of a
coyote rebound.

Speaker 3 (55:56):
I see.

Speaker 2 (55:57):
Some also counter that the packs don't all seem to
shatter in the way we just described. When they lose
a breeding pair, sometimes a new alpha may rise up
and the pack more or less remain stable, and we
don't have this explosion factor. And others argue that lethal
enforcement in general and at least mathematically works, but the

(56:17):
problem is that the kill threshold for effectiveness with coyotes
is just impossible to hit. So, for instance, and I'm
not sure this is indeed the target number, but say
you're looking at and I think this is more or
less what is discussed, but say you need to hit
a theoretical sixty to seventy percent kill rate to outpace

(56:39):
reproduction among coyotes, that would just be astronomically high. For instance,
already mentioned like how many coyotes are cold a year,
and I think the current actual rate is closer to
like twenty percent. So I mean, I don't know what
good that really does you know, to to point that
out that you know that killing does work, but we

(57:00):
just on a level that we're just incapable of achieving.
But that is one of the arguments that I was
running into. And then I found this interesting. A twenty
twenty five study by Gaya at All published in Ecosphere
argue that coyote populations can decline under sustained intensive control efforts,

(57:21):
but the problem is once you cease those efforts, a
rapid rebound is just going to ensue. So you know,
you so there's this counter argument that, Okay, yes you can,
you can really try and suppress them, you know, through
lethal suppression, but are you going to keep that up forever?
And if not, well they're just going to bounce back,
like and again, they're just too well established in the

(57:43):
areas that they've ventured into at this point. And so
they they argue, I think they're most mostly talking about
white tailed deer here for example, but they say lethal
control efforts for coyotes are prohibitively expensive at a large
scale and are unlikely to be a viable long term
management strategy. So they argue that, like, whatever your concern

(58:04):
is regarding the coyote, like for instance, kills on white
tail deer fawnds something like that, well we should maybe
move past looking at the coyote as being the factor
that we should adjust. So if we're worried about whitetail deer,
then maybe we need to talk about like how many
you know, what the what the kill limit for hunters

(58:25):
is or some other environmental or ecological factor, because the
coyotes can just only be controlled so much at this point. Yeah.
So anyway, just I found that really fascinating, especially after
talking about some of these other cases where human disruption
has just completely eradicated and or expatriated animals from the

(58:46):
prairie environment, Like here's an example where we just ended
up spreading them everywhere. And to be clear, they are
still very much in the prairie environments as well. It's
not like they left there either. They're still they're you
know that they're the apex predators in those ens in
many cases as well.

Speaker 3 (59:01):
Yeah, so the coyote cannot be stopped.

Speaker 2 (59:04):
Yeah, pretty much. It cannot be stopped.

Speaker 3 (59:07):
Like an incredible hulk.

Speaker 2 (59:09):
Yeah yeah, really, it really is. But and that's an
interesting comparison because the Hulk is very much an idea
of the human apex predator, you know, like human like large, strong, powerful,
you know, not worried with stealth at all. And that
is the type of predator that human civilization decided should

(59:29):
not be allowed to exist in close proximity with humans.
For the vast you know, the vast majority of North America.
But the Coyote is, you know, it's like a you know,
it's more of a mid level hero, a mid level villain,
and has therefore never gone away and will likely never
go away, has only gotten stronger. So I guess, if

(59:51):
you were con compare it to the Hulk, the coyote
is like Hawkeye or something, you know, just saying, you know,
Hawkeyes can I guess always be around even if the
Hulk gets killed off.

Speaker 3 (01:00:01):
I don't know, I forget which one Hawk I is.

Speaker 2 (01:00:04):
I don't know exactly.

Speaker 3 (01:00:06):
Yeah, yeah, I guess that means I don't see him coming. Yeah, well,
I have great respect for the coyote, especially after this.

Speaker 2 (01:00:16):
Yeah yeah, I as well feel like I have a
lot more respect for them. So the next time I
hear hear one, I'll just be like, Okay, fair enough,
fair enough, Coyotes, you got it, fair and square.

Speaker 3 (01:00:26):
That's some great wicked cackling you got going on out there.
Yeah that's off to you.

Speaker 2 (01:00:32):
All right, We're gonna go and close out this episode, though. Yeah,
we'd love to hear from any of you, so feel
free to write in in the meantime. Just want to
remind you, though, that stuff to Blow Your Mind is
primarily a science and culture podcast, with core episodes on
Tuesdays and Thursdays, short form episodes on Wednesdays and on Fridays.
We set aside most serious concerns, so just talk about
a weird movie on Weird House Cinema.

Speaker 3 (01:00:51):
Huge thanks as always to our excellent audio producer JJ Posway.
If you would like to get in touch with us
with feedback on this episode or any other, to suggest
a topic for the future, or just to say hello,
you can email us at contact at stuff to Blow
your Mind dot com.

Speaker 1 (01:01:13):
Stuff to Blow Your Mind is production of iHeartRadio. For
more podcasts from my Heart Radio, visit the iHeartRadio app,
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