Let’s Hear It for the Coyote Hiding in the Produce Aisle

I don’t live in Chicago or follow the news there, but it didn’t take long for social media to deliver a video of Chicago police officers pulling a live coyote out of a refrigerated display in the produce section of an Aldi supermarket there. Instagram clearly knows that I live for videos of wild animals turning up in unlikely places.

A black bear relaxing in a Gatlinburg hot tub? Yes, please! A mountain lion strolling through downtown in the California city of Vacaville? Of course! A groundhog gobbling pizza on a Philadelphia sidewalk, or a barred owl perched atop a family-room Christmas tree in Arlington, Va.? Send me those first!

But it’s the coyote videos that have my truest heart. Coyotes — like red-tailed hawks, opossums, raccoons, skunks, foxes, deer and a host of other wild creatures — have learned to thrive among us, even when we live in densely populated areas. Attempts to eradicate the coyote have been failing spectacularly for hundreds of years. People who have lost pets to coyote predation often demand revenge from animal control departments, but even if a particular coyote is killed, it won’t change the underlying reality; other coyotes will simply move into the newly open territory. Coyotes live among us, and they will always live among us.

In 2019, a coyote trotted past security at Nashville’s convention center and made its way into an exhibit hall before guards managed to trap it in a bathroom. In the police photo, which went viral, the gorgeous animal, its fur thick with winter, is sitting calmly on the counter just past the last sink in the row.

In the video shot this month in the Aldi market, the coyote is hiding in the back of a refrigerated shelf, behind the food. After a police officer finally manages to pull the animal out by its tail, it leaps right back onto the shelf and disappears, once again in plain view but completely out of sight.

This is the way wild animals mostly live among us. They are right there, crouched under a bush, curled up beneath a toolshed, tucked next to the trunk of an evergreen. An ancient, one-eyed box turtle once turned up in my yard decades after I thought he’d died. I spend a lot of time in my small yard — I’ve written a whole book about my small yard — and yet I had no idea that turtle was still there.