At last, there are coyotes in
the capital. The first confirmed sighting of a coyote in
Washington, D.C., was reported in September, and rumors of new
sightings have circulated briskly ever since. What a relief. All we
Westerners have to do is get the critters elected.
These
adventuresome D.C. coyotes, first spotted in the relative
wilderness of Rock Creek Park, don’t have a whole lot left to
prove. In their native home, coyotes long ago established their
reputation as crafty survivors. They show up regularly in Native
American tales — usually as mischief-makers — and their
persistence is memorialized in the names of countless canyons,
mesas, gulches and sports teams.
When white Western
settlers launched coyote-slaughtering campaigns in previous
centuries, coyotes just sped up their breeding. They refilled their
ranks as fast as they were depleted, and biologists believe that
coyotes are now more numerous than they have ever been.
Coyote-human relations have improved a bit in recent years. At
first, urban sprawl around Seattle and Los Angeles and Phoenix
looked like it would do the job bullets and poison couldn’t.
But as it turned out, the wily animals were well equipped for the
‘burbs of Western cities. They feasted on garbage and
housecats, and even expanded their range farther east. They started
showing up in Texas, the Midwest and the urbanized Northeast. Now,
they’ve taken the capital.
As someone who feels
under-represented in Washington, D.C., these days, I find this news
encouraging. Also encouraging are reports that coyotes are growing
fatter as they move east, since Westerners need a few more
heavyweights on Capitol Hill. It’s time to leap over the
species barrier and recruit these tough characters for national
office.
Westerners of all political stripes could find
something to like about these new representatives. For instance, we
could count on them for tenacity. Like Arizona Sen. John McCain,
coyotes have survived the worst and come back fighting. And coyotes
are preeminently adaptable, having found ways to get by in the
strangest of new environments. They wouldn’t be fazed by an
abrupt shift of power in the Senate or the House, or by a change in
administrations.
Coyotes, famously, can fend for
themselves. Our representatives wouldn’t be bought by
corporate lobbyists or cowed by vicious snarls from the other side
of the aisle. Plus, as the original tricksters, coyotes are
well-known for their street smarts — and they are saturated
with political savvy. They wouldn’t be taken in by
meaningless rhetoric or scuffles over symbolic issues of a moral
sort.
Perhaps most reassuring, we could depend on the
coyotes to make themselves heard. Their voices, as most Westerners
can attest, carry for miles. True, coyotes might have a few
weaknesses. They’d probably be distracted by political pork,
though they’d get over that once they found out what it
really was. They might also bear Westerners a wee bit of resentment
for those nasty poisoning campaigns.
But let’s hope
bygones could be bygones. Coyotes, after all, are among the few
members of the animal world that have benefited from civilization.
And the land and people of the West could really use their help on
Capitol Hill.
There aren’t many in Congress these
days who can claim such a deep familiarity with the West. Coyotes
are natives of the place, and have explored nearly every inch of
it. They know our mountains and canyons and other wildernesses, of
course, but they also frequent our suburbs, our freeways and the
high-rises of our inner cities. They’ve even sampled what we
throw away.
So they know the score. They know the wild
places of the West are getting scarcer. They’ve seen how
recent droughts, fires, and insect attacks have hammered forests,
wildlife, and rural communities. Because coyotes move so easily
between the natural and human worlds, they might also know that
there really is no boundary between the two. The damage done out
there, to the open spaces of the West, will, sooner or later,
affect our lives and the lives of our neighbors.
Some of
our representatives in Congress seem to have forgotten their animal
nature. To them, the environment is a political punching bag,
something to sneer at. But coyotes don’t have the luxury of
forgetting their roots. They know that we all need clean air, clean
water and maybe a housecat or two to get by. No matter their party
loyalties, we could count on them to vote for what really matters.
Michelle Nijhuis is a contributor to Writers on
the Range, a service of High Country News
(hcn.org) in Paonia, Colorado, where she lives and
writes.
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