Dan Flores

America's scorched-earth campaigns against the country's wildlife a century ago drove numerous species to extinction or the edge of it.

That was not the coyote's fate, who thrived as other creatures, big and small, disappeared on all sides.

Targets of wholesale extermination in the 20th century, coyotes have responded to that by spreading across America, making it to Delaware, their 49th conquest in 2011.

Only Hawaii lacks them.

No other mammal except humans has ever exhibited such cosmopolitan talents for that kind of successful expansion.

To do the coyote justice, you have to engage not just with the animal itself and every field from evolution, biology, ecology, to anthropology, history, and folklore, even literature, art, and film has done so, but also with a rich range of us bipedal animals involved.

Obviously, Ernest Thompson Seton is there.

And so is everyone from Mark Twain to the biological survey coyote killers to Richard Nixon.

And to be honest, the psychologist Carl Jung, the poet Gary Snyder, the painter Harry Fonseca,

And if you can imagine such a person, the genius Paleolithic American who created the first coyote avatar story, so far back in time, we can't fathom either the depths of coyote stories or their future.

Of course, our resident super genius, Wiley Coyote, is in the mix.

And I can report with some delight about Wiley that his New Yorker-inspired product liability lawsuit against the Acme Corporation is about to have its day in court with the film Coyote v. Acme coming to movie theaters in late 2026.

What I've also learned following coyotes through history is that their story is far from over.

As one remarkable example of that, right now coyotes are on the cusp of becoming the first North American species in 3 million years to cross from this continent into another one, in this case, into South America.

Expansion across a continent is one thing, but into another?

While the locus of their evolutionary origin seems to have been in the southwest of the present United States, coyotes do seem to have been occasionally on the scene south of Mexico, in Guatemala, Honduras, San Salvador, and Nicaragua, even before Spanish colonization there.

Fond of open country and most certainly attracted to the sheep and goats Spanish colonizers introduced, coyotes apparently veered away from the cat-filled jungles to the south.

But as humans steadily cleared the Central American forest, dispersing coyotes began colonizing Costa Rica during the 1970s and 1980s.

Since then, they have steadily pushed into Panama and the Grand Isthmus between the continents.

They crossed the Panama Canal in 2010 and are colonizing South at a rate of about 40 miles a year, which means that by 2018, they began to approach Darien National Park athwart the Isthmus, beyond which lies Colombia and all of South America.