Dan Flores

Coyotes are not just their own animals who experience existence differently one from the other and love their own unique aliveness.

As science at the Predator Research Facility in Utah has shown, they are truly remarkably singular.

To understand the coyotes we're coexisting with in a way that's good both for you and for the four-legged animal looking back at you, sometimes make an effort to identify a specific individual coyote.

To be sure, coyotes tend to look the same to us, and no doubt initially they return that non-discriminating favor.

But there are often distinctive markers you can pick out.

I can tell you from my experience with the female with the white-tipped tail who dens in the canyon below my house in New Mexico, once I identified her as a particular animal, she quickly did the same with me.

Our mutual curiosity has led to an interesting, even intriguing relationship.

We sometimes don't see one another for weeks.

Then hiking in the canyon, I'll spot her, often with other coyotes, and before she moves off, she will sometimes direct me with her nose and ears to something of interest to both of us.

I'll return from an absence and she'll be sitting in the front yard like a dog I've absentmindedly forgotten to take along, moving off calmly and reluctantly as I park my Jeep.

From a respectable distance, she's inspected our new Malamute, Kiska, and she is clearly willing to bring her family, her new pups, past the windows.

I don't know why she does these things.

and I'm not about to claim I do.

She knows she's not in danger, of course, but I certainly don't feed her or otherwise encourage her.

But this much I do know.

I like it that every so often a wild coyote apparently thinks of me.

So I'll suggest something radical.

Try meeting a coyote halfway and see how it goes.

Yeah.

As I, as I said in the, uh, in the episode, um,