Coyote America Chapter Summary

Many years ago, laying out on the trampoline late at night, I remember hearing the coyotes howl and yip in the field bordering my friend’s house. The sound so frightened us that we promptly rushed inside. To children that grew up never truly in the country, only on the edge of town, coyotes seemed so wild. However, as Dan Flores illuminates in his book, Coyote America: A Natural and Supernatural History, that encounter was not an unusual experience at all. In the past century coyotes have spread across all reaches of the United States. The ambitious creatures have broadened their horizons far beyond their original southwest homes, becoming as common in Los Angeles as they are in hayfields in Indiana. This ubiquity, according to Flores, is due to their incredible adaptability and intelligence as a species. It was these characteristics that have helped the species survive extermination campaigns and decades of hate, and now more recently, helped to win over the hearts of animal rights activists, naturalists, and more. They are an often overlooked source of …show more content…
“Coyote America,” is a term Flores invents to label the coyote’s “story” (Flores 2016: xxv). The story of the coyotes is rich, and intricately connected with ours in a way that Flores says is hard to compare to any other species. Hundreds of years ago, they were highly respected by many groups of Native Americans. The canid was featured in Native American mythology as a god (Flores 2016: 28). “Old Man Coyote” (or just “Coyote”) was a trickster sort of figure. He was not shy of the humans he was fabled to have assisted in creating, and would teach them lessons about human nature and behavior through his tricks and stories. This view of America’s small wolves is far more respectful and thoughtful than that of the European settlers that settled the