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Coyotes are being seen on the empty streets of San Francisco

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211–220 of 318 posts

Re: Coyotes are being seen on the empty streets of San Francisco

#211
Perhaps appropriate: The famous poem by Sara Teasdale, about a different context, which also lent its name to a short story by Ray Bradbury:

There will come soft rains

--------------------------

There will come soft rains and the smell of the ground,

And swallows calling with their shimmering sound;

And frogs in the pools singing at night,

And wild plum-trees in tremulous white;

Robins will wear their feathery fire

Whistling their whims on a low fence-wire;

And not one will know of the war, not one

Will care at last when it is done.

Not one would mind, neither bird nor tree

If mankind perished utterly;

And Spring herself, when she woke at dawn,

Would scarcely know that we were gone.

Re: Coyotes are being seen on the empty streets of San Francisco

#213
post #135

What we think of wild nature is nothing compared to what used to exist. Schools of fish so dense they would bring boats to a halt in the middle of the Atlantic. North America had more large wildlife than Africa. Whales as far as the eye could see all day long. Walruses in the Thames in London. I did a couple video essays on what I learned from a wonderful book The Once and Future World : My video essays: https://yout…

What amazed me was after reading Unbroken (WWII novel set in the pacific) was the incredible amount of sharks in hawaii and the surrounding islands. A family member who was in the pacific theatre backed this up. Shark schools so dense that sailors would be attacked after they fell in. This was barely 70 years ago so alot has changed in terms of animal population.

There's a Hardcore History episode about the event:

https://dchhaddendum.libsyn.com/ep5-nightmares-of-indianapol...

Re: Coyotes are being seen on the empty streets of San Francisco

#214
post #195

Chicago has lots of urban coyotes. https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.wbez.org/shows/wbez-news/ch...

Yep, the Chicago subreddit has a photo of one wandering around this week. We also occasionally get deer that make it into the city; usually walking down some of the long bike trails from Skokie.

Re: Coyotes are being seen on the empty streets of San Francisco

#215

The city of Chicago employees coyotes for rat control. They’re seen all over the metro area and have become familiar faces.

They use coyotes? I thought it was just cats. Huh ... I guess some of those photos of them on the street this week may not have been of wild coyotes like I thought.

Re: Coyotes are being seen on the empty streets of San Francisco

#216

Earlier quoted context omitted.

haha-- i've heard this in reference to raccoons many times, and i've always wondered: what kinds of things to raccoons get up to that earn them such a universal designation (condemnation?)? like, surely even though a coyote technically doesn't impose (much of) a physical threat, it is more threatening than a raccoon... i do know that they are terribly fond of pulling lids off trash cans, etc., so i assume the annoyan…

they're super cute, but will claw and bite you viciously if threatened. there used to be a couple in my neighborhood in LA and i'd hear them fighting sometimes (when not raiding trash cans). they're also a rabies vector. but generally, they'll leave you alone if you leave them alone.

Do you mean LA as in Los Angeles or as in Louisiana?

If it is Los Angeles, then rabies from raccoons is not really a worry. The raccoon rabies reservoir in the United States is just in populations in the southeastern, mid-Atlantic, and northeastern states.

Raccoons can be downright creepy, though, in the right circumstances: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lW-6MxobUeU

Re: Coyotes are being seen on the empty streets of San Francisco

#217

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Reminds me of a quote from Charles Eisenstein. He cites The Once and Future World and then channels Steve Nicholls in Paradise Found : "Atlantic salmon runs so abundant no one is able to sleep for their noise. Islands “as full of birds as a meadow is full of grass.” Whales so numerous they were a hazard to shipping, their spouts filling the entire sea with foam. Oysters more than a foot wide. An island covered by so…

I'm not sure exactly what those quotes are referring to, but many reports of European settlers to the New World, while technically true, were greatly misleading. Prior to arrival of the Europeans, the continent was full of Native Americans who lived in an ecological balance with wildlife. When the Europeans arrived, the diseases they brought wiped out 90+% of the indigenous population, according to some estimates. By…

> the continent was full of Native Americans who lived in an ecological balance with wildlife

Native Americans weren't a monolithic group, and the balance with wildlife is just a part of the noble savage myth, for most of the groups. Maya, Toltec, and Aztec societies deforested Central America quite significantly before collapsing (and before Columbus).

Re: Coyotes are being seen on the empty streets of San Francisco

#218
I live roughly in the middle of the Seattle metropolitan area, and coyotes, deer, eagles, wabbits, etc., are a common sight. Last year a mom coyote and her 5 pups were often playing and hanging out in my front yard. (I didn't bother her and she didn't bother me, aside from stealing my Acme Rocket Sled.)

Re: Coyotes are being seen on the empty streets of San Francisco

#220

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What amazed me was after reading Unbroken (WWII novel set in the pacific) was the incredible amount of sharks in hawaii and the surrounding islands. A family member who was in the pacific theatre backed this up. Shark schools so dense that sailors would be attacked after they fell in. This was barely 70 years ago so alot has changed in terms of animal population.

https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/the-worst-shark-attac...

Quint, the old shark hunter from the movie Jaws was said to have survived the USS Indianapolis (the character not the actor)
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