“We need to stop looking at these animals as static entities. They're evolving." —Roland Kays, a mammalogist at the North Carolina Museum of Natural Sciences in Raleigh, reminds us that the coyotes that have been exploding in population across the Northeastern United States of late, spreading as deeply into urban areas as Central Park, are not your great-great-grandmother's coyotes. These are a coyote-wolf hybrid, 50 percent larger than the coyotes of yore, highly adaptable and well able to hunt and take down animals as large as deer. They're getting bigger and faster and stronger and smarter. And they are coming for you. Joni Mitchell never lies.

 At around 3:30 this morning a coyote was spotted on the loose in far west Chelsea, presumably after it was turned away from the driving ranges at Chelsea Piers. This coyote is the third to be spotted on the streets of Manhattan in the past month. Does this mean that New York is getting "edgy" again, or is it just a sign that all those abandoned developments are being colonized by non-human squatters? [Via]

It was good to learn in today's Science Times that coyotes, which are basically taking over our country, eat lots of Canadian goose eggs. So maybe that will cut down on airplane crashes. But the best part of the article was bit about how coyotes and badgers hunt ground squirrels together out west. Here's a video that explains it some, too. (Don't make fun of that park ranger's performance, either. It's notoriously difficult to act with animals, even when they're stuffed, or just green-screened in next to your face. And she's probably a very good person.)

So it looks like the coyotes are here to stay. This video was filmed three weeks ago at "The Pond" in the southeast corner of Central Park. When the car lights pass it's like that scene from Collateral, right? After this week's exciting chase through Chelsea, Paul D. Curtis, Cornell University associate professor of Natural Resources talked to Discovery's Jennifer Viegas about it. "Coyotes have been in Central Park in the past, and will continue to appear in such urban parks and green spaces throughout most of New York State," Curtis said. "People will need to find ways to coexist with urban wildlife to minimize potential [...]