Wolves got wiped out of the Lower 48. Coyotes got the same treatment — bounties, poison, a federal agency that killed millions of them for the better part of a century — and instead of dying off they spread into all 49 mainland states and onto the sidewalks of Chicago and New York. Flores is a historian, and his explanation is that the killing is what did it. Hit a coyote population hard and the survivors throw bigger litters and scatter into open ground. He runs the animal back through Native trickster stories, where coyote is already the one who can’t be killed, then Mark Twain sneering at it in Roughing It, then Wile E. Coyote, then the poison campaigns, and finally into the city parks where they live now.
Coyote America