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What, Exactly, Are Southern California’s Coyotes Eating?

Author: Jessica Leigh Hester / Source: Atlas Obscura

A coyote crosses a street in the densely populated Westlake neighborhood, just west of downtown Los Angeles.

Again and again and again, the volunteers went looking for poop. They tromped through cemeteries and parks, hugged the fence line, and wandered paved and dirt roads in search of links about the size of their thumbs, with tapered ends.

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They avoided smaller nuggets—no thanks, opossums—and ones with rounded tips, which suggested they’d been dropped by a bobcat. These poop scouts were scouring Los Angeles and the Conejo Valley in search of hints about coyotes’ palates.

For several years, biologists have kept track of the canids moving around Southern California’s cities and suburbs. Researchers have tracked them with GPS collars and camera traps, and confirmed that they’ve been chowing down—but they haven’t gotten a full picture of all the meals coyotes are consuming.

“You hear a lot of different things, like, ‘Oh, they’re living off of rats, my neighbor’s feeding them, they’re only living off of cats in the neighborhood,” says Justin Brown, an ecologist at the National Park Service’s Santa Monica Mountains National Recreation Area. “People had a wide variety of thoughts.” To get a better picture of how the coyotes were flourishing in these urban and suburban enclaves, “you need to know what resources they’re using,” Brown says. Food is fuel, and the proof’s in the poop.

For the past two years, Brown has led a project to collect coyote scat around the Conejo Valley, including Thousand Oaks, and compare it to samples collected in denser, busier Los Angeles. “Our goal was to look at urban to suburban gradient, and see how that affects their diet,” Brown says.