American Bolshevik begins in the wealthy waterfront enclave of Newport, Rhode Island, a city world-famous for its Gilded Age mansions, sailing, polo, and Jazz. Diana Prince, who has summered in Newport for most of her life, describes how she first noticed that coyotes had moved into her neighborhood, and mourns the loss of her beloved Jack Russell Terriers to coyote predation.
Her experience, and the increasing community concern over this new predator, drove her to fund a local research project to understand the coyote’s habits and
territories, and to determine if, and how, humans could learn to coexist with them. That project, run by biologist Numi Mitchell, became the Narraganset Bay Coyote
Study.
This story is told against the backdrop of the fraught history of the coyote’s relationship with humans after the arrival of European settlers, as told by Dan Flores, New York Times best-selling author of Coyote America. The Narraganset Bay Coyote Study findings indicate that killing coyotes is not an effective management approach. Instead, residents of the island can best coexist by adjusting their own behavior through limiting human- provided food sources, ensuring coyotes don’t become habituated to humans, and by keeping pets on leashes.
Chris Schadler, a conservation biologist living in New Hampshire, also decided to run an experiment on keeping livestock in the midst of coyotes. Using non-lethal methods, she farmed sheep for nearly twenty years, and never lost an animal to coyote predation. The lessons from these two studies can help guide us longer term on a path to coexistence with these animals.
