Feral Cities (14 page)

But when it comes to wildlife complaints in L.A., the coyote tops the list. In response, the wildlife program has amassed a large collection of oddball deterrents that clutter its small two-desk office. Gregory shows me a plastic tub filled with what looks like the contents of a child's toy box. “This is the wildlife scare kit I take to community meetings to show people what they can use to deter wildlife,” he explains.

He plunges his hand into the tub, pulls out an air horn, and presses the button, letting out a deafening blast of noise. Next, he grabs a rainbow-colored umbrella and opens it up. “You know how animals pump themselves up to make themselves look bigger? Well, you get this and all of a sudden you've just become gigantic to that animal, and if you do this,” he says, quickly opening and closing the umbrella, “that really scares them.”

The inspiration for the umbrella was, oddly enough, a golden eagle. “I was watching this golden eagle and a coyote. Golden eagles are huge. They can take out an adult coyote. So this coyote comes up to try and take the eagle's prey. The eagle flaps his wings and the coyote is gone. I have never had a coyote stand its ground with this.”

He puts down the umbrella and starts rummaging through the container, yanking out cooking pans, a megaphone, and a can wrapped in aluminum foil that is filled with coins. Eventually, he finds what he is looking for. “This one is my favorite,” says Hoang
as Gregory hauls it out. “This is something I bought at Wal-Mart,” says Gregory. “It's a girl's ribbon gymnastics toy, a little spongy thing with Mylar strips. I went to Griffith Park in an area where people were feeding coyotes, sat down, and waited for about eight coyotes to gather around me and then did this.” He twirls the ribbons fast above his head, causing the plastic strips to make a loud whooshing sound. “The coyotes took off,” he says.

Other bizarre animal deterrents are spread over the office. On one filing cabinet is a Haunted Hedge. “It's a Halloween item. It was designed to scare trick or treaters, but it works for wildlife too,” says Gregory as the hedge lets out a spooky laugh.

Over in a corner is a deterrent Gregory hacked together from different objects—a large kite designed to look like a giant owl. “I'm always trying to make extra things and adapt two items together to make another scare source. So I have this owl. Normally, it's just a kite you hang in a tree that flutters. For animals that are afraid of owls, like raccoons and skunks, it is very effective on its own. But what I did is I took part of another device to make it hoot and light up and added a motion sensor so it reacts more realistically.” He switches it on. The owl's eyes light up and noisy hoots echo around the office.

“The idea is to create a generation of wildlife that is more afraid of humans again because the trend has been in the other direction. From seeing us all the time and from being around us, they are getting into closer proximity and begging food.”

Another example of Gregory's handiwork is a motion camera encased in foam and painted to look like pale brown rock. But this isn't for the wildlife; it's to help Gregory catch people who are feeding coyotes. He has spent the weekend perfecting the camera's camouflage and today he is going to put it to the test.

After Hoang, who has been working the night shift, heads home, Gregory and I head off to plant the camera. As we drive, Gregory tells me that most of the problems coyotes cause start with people feeding them. The Barstow couple who provide meals on wheels
for San Pedro's wildlife are, he says, not unique. “There was this two-story house in the Hollywood Hills, and the neighbor complained because the guy was feeding coyotes in a very unusual fashion. He said to me ‘You're going to have to come out and see it to believe it.'”

Curiosity aroused, Gregory headed over to the house early one morning. “The neighbor says, ‘Just wait in my yard.' So it's six in the morning and I'm there down in the bushes, and I could have reached out and petted the coyotes from where I was sitting. Then, I see this platform lowering from the second story with plates of food. Next to that I notice a motion sensor that rings a doorbell in the house to let the man know the coyotes are there so that he can lower the food.”

Feeding coyotes is a crime in Los Angeles, and so Gregory headed to the front door to have words with the homeowner. “As I come round to the front door, I see him put peanuts into one of the planters outside and go back into the house. So I knock on the door and as I'm waiting for him to come to the door, I feel this tug and there's a squirrel sitting on my shoe, as fat as can be, holding onto my pant leg. This big, fat squirrel that's been eating all the peanuts.

“The first thing he says to me after he sees my uniform is ‘How did you know?' I said, ‘How did I know? Look at the squirrel. C'mon!' I asked why he was feeding the coyotes and he says, ‘Well, so they won't kill my cats.' He thought if he feeds the coyotes and the other animals the cats will be fine.

“So I write him a notice to comply with the law and, as I'm doing this, a lady walking her dogs comes up and goes, ‘Oh, you're not going to give that man a ticket. He's so nice. He feeds all the wildlife in the neighborhood.' It's like, ‘You're not helping him, ma'am.'”

Far from making coyotes less dangerous, those who feed them are making them less afraid of people and instilling the expectation that people will give them food on demand, and back in 2008 the actions of one coyote feeder in Griffith Park had serious
consequences. “This woman was in this green area near where people had been leaving plates of food for the coyotes,” says Gregory. “She was stretching and exercising, and there was a coyote sitting there near her. People in Griffith Park are used to seeing coyotes, so she just continued exercising.

“Anyway, she was texting on her phone, and the coyote came up and bit her on the shin and then went back and sat down. This is what we call notification. It is not an aggressive act. It's the coyote telling her, ‘Where's my food?' Coyotes do that to each other, but they don't break the skin because their skin is very pliable and has fur. But in a human that's a very thin area of skin, so it didn't take much to puncture her skin.”

The wildlife program has a saying that “a fed coyote is a dead coyote” and that was certainly the case in that incident. After the woman was bitten, three coyotes that had become used to food being provided had to be killed to ensure they didn't bite anyone else.

Not that that stopped the feeder. A year later Gregory got another call. “A guy was lying in Griffith Park with his shoes off and felt a bite on his foot. The coyote had bitten him and gone back and sat down. Another guy chased it off with a stick, and the guy reported it to the Department of Health and Safety, who told us. Then, three weeks later, I get a call from a guy saying, ‘I was in Griffith Park and was bitten on my foot by a coyote.' I said, ‘Oh yeah. You were bitten three weeks ago.' He says, ‘No, I was bitten yesterday.' I was like, ‘What the hell is going on? We've got a coyote with a foot fetish.'”

Following the incidents, the Department of Agriculture came in and killed nine coyotes that had been begging for food. The coyote feeder whom Gregory is after today has been dishing out food where Griffith Park meets the upmarket houses of the Hollywood Hills.

As we drive up the twisty roads we get an early sign of the results of the feeder's activities. In the bushes overlooking the road
is a coyote, staring down, presumably waiting for its food. It looks at us for a moment and then moves on. We're obviously not the delivery he's been waiting for.

Gregory's theory is that it's not a lone feeder they are after but a coyote feeding conspiracy organized by a woman who is hiring people to go feed the coyotes on her behalf. Conspiracy sounds like an overstatement, but as Gregory points out it really is a conspiracy if the woman is paying people to commit crime on her behalf.

But to secure a conviction, the city needs evidence, and that's where the camera comes in. The first attempt to get the feeder on film came unstuck when a tree branch fell in front of the lens. “So I've got to try and do this again,” he says as we stop close to the feeding site. He is hopeful the disguised camera will do the trick. “I spent a big proportion of my weekend making this foam rock to conceal the camera and making sure it matches the rocks in the area.”

The guy has already had a ticket from a park ranger, but if he comes back, Gregory hopes the motion camera will catch him. “If he keeps coming back in spite of getting the ticket, he is going to get a felony whether he likes it or not.”

We head up a dirt path to a secluded ridge. Gregory scrambles up the side and plants the camera, which he covers in dust and dirt for good measure. “It's a crap shoot, this,” he says. “Hopefully we will get lucky.”

Trying to stop wildlife feeders is a never-ending battle, Gregory says as we return to his truck. He tells me about one woman who has been feeding raccoons. She has been ticketed, but instead of stopping she has put a tarp over her garage door so the raccoons can come in and feed out of sight.

“It is not legal for me to look into her garage beyond where I can see normally, but you see the raccoons going in,” he says. “Because she's already had a warning it's going to end up as a $1,000 fine. We try to start with a written notice because it's hard to be hit with that amount of money. A good amount of people will stop
but some are stubborn. It's getting to the point where park rangers are now writing tickets right off the bat when they catch someone feeding the animals because people are argumentative and you really have to hit them in the pocketbook to get them to wake up. It's sad that it has to be that way.”

The next job on the list is to head over to Mount Sinai Memorial Park. It has been a regular stop for Gregory ever since a pack of coyotes took down a deer on the grounds of the Jewish cemetery. One of the problems at the park is that people bring food when they visit. “They leave food residue behind, like they leave food for the deceased. I'm sure the cemetery doesn't want to change their policy. I'm sure they want people to be able to come here and do that, but as long as that happens coyotes are going to take advantage of what is left behind.”

With the policy unlikely to change, Gregory has begun making regular visits to chase away coyotes that stay during the daytime. As we drive through the grounds, Gregory says you have to look carefully to spot them. “They blend in really well. You'll see something that looks like a rock and it'll be one of the coyotes.”

We do a circuit and then, just to be sure, we go around a second time. “Is that rock, flowers, or coyote?” asks Gregory. We drive closer. It's flowers.

But a little further on we see them. Two coyotes snoozing under a tree, almost unnoticeable as they lie flat in the shade. Gregory stops the truck and asks me to wait while he heads off to deal with them. He wanders down the path and then, suddenly, starts running across the grass straight toward the coyotes, waving his arms as he goes.

The head of one of the coyotes shoots up. It looks at the uniformed animal services' officer tearing toward them for a moment and then starts running. The second coyote immediately jumps up and starts running too.

The coyotes race through the graveyard, every so often looking over their shoulders to check if Gregory is still charging after them.
Eventually, they dive into the hedge that hides the Ventura Freeway from view and head out of the memorial park.

Gregory returns, panting. “This is the other thing the cemetery doesn't like,” he says, looking at a gravestone where a coyote poop sits next to the words “Devoted wife and mother.”

Chasing will only do so much, he says, wishing he had his paint-ball gun on hand to reinforce the message. “Running at them isn't that much of a deterrent, although it is keeping the fear of humans, which is really important. But it really needs to be done in a much more assertive manner. In an hour they will be back. In the same spot probably.”

When it comes to the threat to pets, Gregory thinks coyotes often get blamed for crimes they did not commit. “You ever seen those movies where the guy finds the victim and the knife, and then three other people come round the corner and see him with it and say ‘That's the guy who did it'? Same thing happens with wildlife. Yes, they do kill cats, but a lot of times wild animals like coyotes and raccoons are nature's vacuums, picking up the dead,” he says.

“We had a deer hit by a car by the observatory, and ten coyotes were on that thing right away. Everyone who saw it after was saying the deer was brought down by the coyotes, which wasn't the case. Another time a coyote was seen running down the street with a cat in its mouth. Guy saw a car hit a cat—a coyote came and picked up the cat almost instantly and ran around the corner. A person round the corner saw the coyote with the cat and called it in.”

While coyotes may be wrongly accused in some cases, pets left out in yards are vulnerable to them. “The coyotes aren't looking for pets per se, but during the course of their natural hunt for food they are going to come across pets in yards. If a pet is out in the yard while a person is at work, it can't really go anywhere. It's like self-contained food for a coyote.

“So while they are not the target animal, pets in the five- to ten-pound range end up being part of it. People hear about this and,
because coyotes are the most vilified animals in North America, it doesn't take much to get people going.”

This deep-rooted fear is something unscrupulous trappers take advantage of, telling tales of coyotes killing seventy-pound dogs and leaping over six-foot-high fences. “I had a lady who called me. She had a 120-pound Great Dane and actually believed that the coyote could pick up the dog,” recalls Gregory. “We're talking about a dog that's four or five times the size of a coyote. That would be like Supercoyote, a coyote with a great big
S
on his chest. I said, ‘Ma'am, the day that happens I'm leaving this job.'”