The Coyotes of Crenshaw

Three years ago, Nina Moore moved from Beverly Hills to Leimert Park. She was swapping one idyllic place for another that offered the unique advantage of being connected to the Black community. Leimert, a neighborhood defined partly by busy Crenshaw Boulevard as a western border, has long been an oasis of tranquility in the middle of Los Angeles. For many Black Angelenos, Leimert offers a perfect balance: solidly middle class but street level, rooted in community while providing respite from its rougher elements. 

These days, Leimert is making headlines for a different distinction: its visible coyote population. 

Sightings have become routine and now threaten to upend the neighborhood’s prized tranquility. Walking the dog and taking an evening stroll have become fraught with the prospect of coyotes approaching pedestrians and their pets. The approaching is often seen as menacing: in June, local news networks showed security camera footage of a panicked Leimert Park woman screaming for help as she and her dog fled from a coyote in pursuit. 

Moore spied her first coyote after six months in her new home. She has since counted four more encounters with lone coyotes and one encounter with a pack. She walks her own smallish dog with a ‘coyote-proof’ vest that has rows of medieval-looking spikes, an increasingly common accessory for canines. “My walks used to be meditative,” she says. “I never took my phone, disengaged and enjoyed. Walking is now the most stressful part of my day.”

Coyotes are everywhere in California. But in recent years, the highly adaptable predators have migrated from the dunes of El Segundo and the foothills of San Gabriel, and begun appearing in greater numbers in places like Mar Vista, Culver City and now Leimert Park. There are many theories as to why: increased drought, food scarcity, the spring-into-summer mating and birth season and, of course, habitat displacement driven by humans. There’s also the fact that in the age of Covid, with more people at home, and the ubiquity of home security cameras and apps like NextDoor, we are able to witness coyotes where we hadn’t recorded their visitations before. But coyotes have been in urban spaces a long time. The L.A. Urban Coyote Project, operated by the National Park Service in the Santa Monica mountains, has been studying the population since 2017.

But if Leimert Park’s coyote cohort is not unique, it has a particular resonance. Unlike other areas that live with coyotes, such as Malibu or nearby Baldwin Hills, Leimert Park is not affluent. And at 1.19 square miles, it is small; wildlife that seem normal in the expanse of hills or beaches can look like a downright incursion there. “It’s just overpopulated for this area,” says Moore, who says that 20 coyote pups were born in a six-mile radius of the community this year. Flyers of dogs and cats gone missing are posted everywhere. Humans are feeling threatened, too, though none have been attacked. Like the woman in the camera footage, Moore once retreated to a neighbor’s car for safety after being tailed by a coyote. “They’re aggressive, especially the males,” she says. “They will track you.” 

Rebecca Dmytryk, CEO of Humane Wildlife Control, says that’s mostly a mischaracterization. Dmytryk has spoken to Leimert Park neighbors and worked with Phaedra Harris, the neighbor who took in the fleeing woman, to safely evict a coyote family that had been living under Harris’s house. Dmytryk says there’s much the public doesn’t know about the species. Coyotes mate for life, and in any given area, such as Leimert, there are only two coyotes, a sort of king and queen, that reproduce. Pups eventually leave the area, so the population is self-controlled. Dmytryk says claims of invasion are greatly exaggerated:  A resident sees the same coyote more than once and thinks they’ve seen a pack, a phenomenon Dmytryk calls the “cloud coyote.” She marvels at how coyotes have managed to adapt at all to a space like Leimert.  

Some unnerved residents view the coyotes as criminals. Indeed, Moore calls them “gangsta-oytes” — an animal version of street gangs that Leimert Park has historically lived next to, but not with, bringing the fear of crime to a place that prided itself on having none. Leimert’s greatest luxury has never been multimillion-dollar mansions but peace and quiet, a sense of small-town uneventfulness. Coyotes sully that luxury. More than that, in the minds of residents, they sully what’s left of the good life in Leimert. With gentrification shifting demographics in the past decade, animals moving in uninvited are a last straw — an encroachment atop an encroachment. 

The most frustrating thing for Moore and other residents is their powerlessness. Hunting coyotes is legal in California, but discharging firearms or using other weapons in urban settings is often not. Los Angeles county prohibits the public from trapping and removal of wildlife, including coyotes. Residents in Leimert and elsewhere are instead encouraged to learn how to cohabitate with them. The California Departments of Fish and Wildlife and other experts advise homeowners to take measures such as securing trash, refraining from putting out food, keeping shrubbery trimmed and pets indoors. Tim Daly of Fish and Wildlife advises people approached by coyotes to “get big” — wave arms, shout, throw things, deploy pepper spray or air horns, “throw rocks if you have to.”  

Moore, however, finds these tactics to be ineffective. “They seem to be immune, not intimidated,” she says. A resident who has lived in Leimert Park near King Boulevard for 24 years had never seen the animals until three years ago. Since then she has seen a pack lounging on her lawn in the middle of the night, and dealt with one that moved into her backyard. For the neighbor, who didn’t want to give her name, the appearance of coyotes is simply a reality. But it’s also confirmation that the L.A. she grew up in is disappearing. “We used to be able to go outside whenever we wanted, even sleep outside,” she says. “You can’t do that anymore.”  

It may be that Leimert’s coyotes are emboldened because they’re in the final stages of the human desensitization process. The statewide Integrative Pest Management program says that coyotes normally avoid humans, but can become less cautious over time as they figure out peoples’ routines and get used to deterrents. The Leimert Park woman caught on camera was fleeing at night; the last step in coyote desensitization is approaching adults during the day. Small wonder Moore and others are on edge. Dmytryk stresses that, desensitization notwithstanding, “coyotes don’t see humans as prey.” If they approach humans, they’re simply protecting their pups. 

The good news may be that Leimert, which has been fractured by gentrification, has found a common cause. Moore says the neighborhood as a whole has become vigilant, developing coordinated responses to coyote encounters that could happen to anyone at any time. “When I’m outside, I know when a car speeds up it’s coming to tell me there’s a coyote around,” she says. People are walking with some combination of what Moore calls an “arsenal” — sticks, sprays, horns. Meanwhile, she worries that the coyote presence will depress home prices. That hasn’t happened in more affluent, less urban neighborhoods where coyotes are simply part of the landscape.

Ultimately, this isn’t about luxury. It’s about living with creatures who have already figured out how to live with us. That’s a cause that bonds not just Leimert Park neighbors, Black and otherwise, but everyone in a state that was coyote country long before we arrived.