Following Coyotes
The presence of coyotes in New York City may seem contradictory, as wild animals living in such a densely populated city might be hard to believe. However, numerous packs of coyotes have been able to thrive across the city’s pockets of green space.
In this episode, “Following Coyotes,” Jay Simpson (artist-researcher and National Geographic Explorer) tells a story about coyotes, soundscape ecology, and how to listen to a landscape. Drawing from his research and sensory ethnography practice, Simpson leads us along coyote paths that run throughout Pugsley Creek Park, along Westchester Creek, and throughout Ferry Point Park in the Bronx. We’re able to hear the extent of noise pollution within these environments, and the ways coyotes and humans can co-create city spaces. What can we learn about New York City, about our notions of a “wild” nature, and about environmental change as we walk along the pathways of coyotes?
All proceeds from this episode will be donated to the Gotham Coyote Project, a collective of researchers, educators, and students working together to study the ecology of the northeastern coyote in New York City and the region.
Further Resources
Everything Sings: Maps for a Narrative Atlast, Denis Wood
"Queer Ecology" by Catriona Sandilands from Keywords for Environmental Studies (Eds. Joni Adamson, William A. Gleason, and David N. Pellow)
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[The voices of all the storytellers from Season One of The Sonocene begin to overlap and blend together in a single, collective gesture.]
Listen.
Listen to my voice.
To spoken words and ambient sounds.
[Leaves “crunch” under the weight of footsteps. An engine revs as a truck accelerates. A pack of coyotes “yelp, yelp, yelp!” Water laps against a shoreline.]
Together they tell the story about people and place; about plants and animals; about the ecological relationships within New York City during a time of rapid change. And the way they all resonate as an interwoven network of vibrations.
[Voices and sounds crescendo, and then hard cut to silence. All the storytellers from Season One exclaim in unison:]
Welcome to The Sonocene—
[The voice of “Following Coyotes” episode storyteller, Jay Simpson, replies.]
ecological stories told through sound.
[A microphone signal crackles. Auditory haptics skew your listening experience. You hear bits and pieces of a voice and a place, until a clear auditory signal reaches your ears. The storyteller is speaking to you from a fieldsite, clearly holding a microphone and explaining the surrounding environment.]
[00:39] And when sharing it with an audience being able to... translate. Being able to translate these moments into something that helps them understand what was I actually picking up when I was in that environment? So currently, I just plugged in my two stereo microphones and these allow me to choose what location do I want to place, what what are the things that I really want to focus in on without having this kind of wide-open ear to all of the landscape, I can really focus in on sounds. So I'm going to walk back to the shoreline, which was a very frequent place for me to be able to record. Because this was where mud is, this is where you can find tracks of the animals. You can see who’s coming and going very easily on the shoreline.
[1:48] Today's storyteller is...
Jay Simpson. I'm a National Geographic explorer and interdisciplinary artist and researcher.
[Coyotes begin to “yelp”]
[2:30] I study coyotes in New York City, which in itself sounds like a contradiction because New York City is the epitome of the concrete jungle, its epitome of man's control over nature.
[An airplane rumbles slowly overhead. A truck engine rumbles as another truck “beeps” in reverse.]
[2:41] The truth is, we don't have that grip over nature that we thought we did. Walk along the sidewalk and the concrete is cracked and there's weeds pushing up from the edges. Tree trunks still bend around fence posts. And nature is eroding and recreating and co-creating the city with us.
[A truck passes with quick acceleration. Bike gears “click” as tires turn. A car honks a horn.]
[3:26] Coyotes are a fascinating research collaborator because they really challenge our boundaries of where we expect wild things to live and where they want to live. We can detour into the history of that, where the colonization of America was made both in expelling Native Americans from the land, but also in expelling wildlife, specifically wolves and coyotes. And where we were successful in eradicating wolves, coyotes evaded us because they were never the big guy on the block. From the pressure of wolves hunting them, they were always much more suspect and watchful and curious and tricky. So they carry all these ecological traits from this history of growing up next to wolves that made them harder for us to eradicate. And when we removed wolves from the landscape through poisoning entire mountainsides and hunting and trapping and removing their prey species, coyotes flourished. The first coyotes to come to New York City were found in the Bronx in 1994 and in Manhattan in 1999. And now coyotes are found in every borough. Now that coyotes have found their home in these U.S. cities, they challenge us to reconceive of what urban space is and what it can be home to.
[The sounds of biking along a busy street are sped-up to an insanely quick speed! After the timelapse, the sounds of water lapping against land enter your foreground. Storyteller, Jay Simpson, speaks while standing near Westerchester Creek.]
[5:23] So we just biked from the western side of Westchester Creek and coming over to the eastern side, like looking back. We just went through this huge pocket of noise, huge like wave of traffic. And I can look across the creek and where we are is basically the same. Both sides, just these tiny pockets of weeds and trash debris smashed up against concrete boulders. And between us is a river. But just on the other side of these pockets of weeds are cement blocks piled up as walls. There's really no space on the edge of its creek. It's lost most of its actual kind of habitat along the shoreline. And as we're biking across it, I'm thinking of how miserable this connection route is. I realized, like, we're here now in a park and we just left another park. And how that mirrors coyotes that came to this area, they can't just live within the park. That's not enough space. It's not enough resources for them. And in between these islands, we have these like, seas of noise and traffic and disturbance that makes it really dangerous for them to be able to move between makes it really dangerous to be able to live and not get hit by a car. Also attracting attention to themselves, the coyote running down the street in that part of the Bronx is likely to garner attention from the police. And we just mirrored what these coyotes did of just leaping from one park, kind of following the water's edge as closely as possible to get to another park. Kind of then rest and see what's around, see if you can find any food, if you're a coyote, and then you're going to keep moving. And just constantly looking for these edges of the water where the tiniest scraps of quote unquote, nature still appear, that you may be able to find something to eat and then move on.
[Water continues to sound against the bank. Airplanes continue to take-off and land nearby. Birds chirp all around.]
[7:34] Listening to this, you're able to get a sense of that energetic presence. So that sonic print isn't just a discrete survey of what types of vehicles are there, what kind of environment of concrete. You can hear the reverberations of these things. But really the emotional state matters like animal stress level, human stress level. It's the same. If we live in these environments and they're constantly spending time in that it puts undue stress in our bodies and it can really impact how we regulate ourselves. So finding the little pockets where we can hide away from the sounds of traffic or the sounds of planes. It's the same on both sides of the equation. Birds are famous for being able to have different bird calls to match the frequencies that are unoccupied within the landscape. And if you're constantly shouting over the noise, you can't actually survive there. You can't communicate. So you seek out the spaces where you can find that silence to be able to speak above everything else going on.
[An airplane passes loudly overhead and then crossfades to the “crackling” of leaves underfoot. Someone walks through a forested landscape.]
[8:57] In the summer of 2020, when I started this research, I took some of the most general Coyote maps of New York City where they had known to have breeding pairs for known coyote locations in Central Park near the Ramble, Queens at Railway Park, in Astoria near Rikers Island, and in the Bronx in Soundview and Ferry Point Park. And when I went to these parks, I could see that, yes, coyotes clearly can make a living here, but these landscapes were fractured and fragmented, especially small little parks like railway park. It's way too small to imagine, actually, a coyote sustaining itself off of that tiny little parcel of land. So I quickly came to realize that coyotes need so much more than just within the boundaries of the park. While I can learn a lot from walking around these areas and seeing for myself what the landscape and kind of waterways look like, I needed to get a new form of data to really see how far do these coyotes have to go to sustain themselves. Where are they eating? Where they hunting? Where they denning? How can they really draw upon a dispersed network of places to be able to make a territory? Luckily, I received GPS data from the nonprofit Gotham Coyote Project to be able to try to understand where coyotes were living in the Bronx and what some of their home territory looked like. Once they had the GPS data of coyotes, I would travel during the winter to these field sites to go look for current coyotes and their prints in the snow.
[The sounds of walking in the forest crossfade to the quiet hum of distant traffic. The dull quiet of an early morning soundscape enters your foregound. Snow “crunches” under heavy boots. A predator bird sounds close by. And storyteller, Jay Simpson, speaks softly into a stereo microphone: “The tracks I see. But this top layer that's been kicked is still really soft.”]
[11:23] And what was fascinating was taking a practice of wildlife tracking and blending it with ethnography. And as soon as I started to do that, I really needed to understand how sensory ethnography plays into that. When you're tracking animals, it's not just looking for, you know, the writing in the snow of where an animal was.
[The sound of crunching snow crossfades so the sound of crunching leaves. The season changes in Ferry Point Park.]
[11:47] You have to attune yourself to the entire environment around you to notice subtle differences of where a hill slope might guide a ridge line, or where water might kind of draw along the edge of a field.
[The sounds of waves and wind slowly enter your foreground. Wind “pops” against a microphone. Storyteller, Jay Simpson, speaks softly into a stereo microphone.]
[12:08] So now, take my little microphones, and let's see where we can place these to help bring you to this place and get more than just wind sounds. So I put one of these to the base of a piece of grass hoping that the water level stays high enough or low enough that this stays there. And another onto a place that's higher.
[Waves crash closely. Wind pops gently.]
[13:16] Walking is a very special research practice.
[13:19] I’m going to place these microphones on my pant leg.
[Friction—fabric against microphone. “Squealing,” “crunching,” and “popping” of walking along a coastal landscape.]
[14:11] As a researcher, I also didn't want to harass these animals to be able to make them a subject of my study. I considered myself much more along the lines of walking with these animals and trying to collaborate with them in a way to be able to walk alongside, to understand their territory.
[Gusts of wind blow against a microphone as storyteller, Jay Simpson, speaks into a stereo microphone.]
[14:32] So trying to kind of recenter perspectives into a space that's more collaborative and recognizes these other voices. Like, how can we pay attention to these things that otherwise... If I walk and I'm six feet tall and my head is always up above where my ears are, our attention gets gravitationally pulled towards these things. And it's harder to pay attention to how ground surface impacts our relationship to place with our understandings of what am I trying to learn? How am I relating to this environment? As I walk through the snow and I'm relying on footprints in the snow to be able to navigate behind these animals or following in the mud, I'm very attentive to what type of mud is this? How deep is it? How permanent is this? Are these tracks 5 minutes old? 5 hours old? All of these subtleties start to become apparent and actually really transform your literacy of making sense of this place.
[The wind subsides and crossfades to the noise of a distant airplane. Feet “crunch” leaves and sticks. Subtly, the high-pitched sounds of twigs “snapping” is replaced by other noise of footfalls against plastic, glass, and other debris and trash.]
[16:01] Our cities are built on years and decades of ruin, of toxins, of construction, waste just buried underground. And in following coyotes, I came to start to see all these places where heavy metals and dangerous gases exist within our landscapes that we think as greenery and parks. And they really speak to a legacy of the Anthropocene, of what it means to live in a toxic environment where humans have really altered the world around us to a place that is both complicated and dangerous, but also a place for renewal.
[16:44] What excites me most about coyotes returning to New York City? It's been their choice. No one brought coyotes here to try to reintroduce them. Coyotes came into New York City themselves. They're showing us how they thrive, how they make a living out of the rubble and forgotten corners of our city. And them, along with the weeds and other animals, are showing us a way we can survive in the Anthropocene.
[Coyotes “yelp” as someone walks across a littered landscape. Those sounds then fade to silence.]
[A simple electronic melody, alongside a resonant percussive groove elicits a feeling of earnest contemplation. This is the outro music, composed by UCC Harlo.]
[17:40] I do not recommend that people go and seek out coyotes in New York. Please don't. If you do see a coyote, you can visit the Gotham Coyote Project website and report a coyote sighting. These are still wild animals. And especially during winter and early spring they're denning, and you should leave them alone and give them a wide berth.
[18:01] The Sonocene is supported by Humanities New York, the NYU Center for the Humanities, and the NYU Graduate School of Arts and Science Music Department. Our production team is a collective of environmental humanities scholars and artists, including Elizabeth Fickey, Bailey Hilgren, Konstantine Vlasis. Original Music by Annie Garlid, a.k.a. UCC Harlo. Sound Design and Mixing by Yi-Wen Lai-Tremewan. And voiceover by me, Elizabeth Geist. All proceeds from today's episode will be donated to Gotham Coyote Project. If you'd like to support this podcast, have an ecological story you'd like to share, or would like to learn more about the topics of today's episode, please visit our website at www.thesonoscene.com or check out our social media pages @thesonocene. Thanks for listening.
