Dan Flores

Did the generosity of writing me back and saying, yes, you have probably seen coyotes because coyotes are beginning to colonize in Louisiana.

So I think that's what people in Columbia and the first, the most northerly of the South American countries are going to experience.

It's something like I did in Louisiana.

Here is this animal that, what in the hell?

And that's kind of the reaction.

And, you know, maybe it's really magnified when you're 13, 14 years old and are seeing it.

But that's what is about to happen in South America, coyotes.

And, you know, as the biologists who are studying this have pointed out, man, once they get through Darien National Park and cross into Columbia, into more open and cleared country, all of South America is in front of them.

They're probably going to colonize the entire country, continent, I mean.

Yeah, it is a massive intervention, and it happens in part in order to keep a bureau alive.

C. Hart Merriam, who's the first director of Biological Survey,

is finding a difficulty to get funding from Congress in like 1904, 1905.

And he comes up with the idea.

They don't want to fund us because we're doing pure science.

Let's become the resolution for the predator problem.

And of course, he's right.

Once he lays out the Bureau as that kind of agency, then the funding does follow.

And so I think to your point, Randall, about...

This is a government agency that needs to have something solid to rest its feet on going into the future in the 20th century in America.

They come out of, so many of them come out of this background where they're not ecologists.