AKRON, Ohio — Shane Good, the senior director of animal care at the Akron Zoo, said even though the zoo is in an urban setting, employees have noticed wild coyotes on the property outside the perimeter fences.
“We wanted to learn more about the coyote,” Good explained. “They were being seen by staff, walking across parking lots, walking into the wooded area behind the zoo.”
Good reached out to Mike Johnson, the chief of conservation with Summit Metro Parks, and his team about partnering on a project to learn more about how coyotes are using zoo property and to research behaviors of the coyotes living in the area.
“It might be surprising, but coyotes don’t recognize our park boundaries,” Johnson laughed. “They are part of a landscape. Our parks are part of a landscape, so they move through our parks and interact with people.”
In early spring of this year, two coyotes, one male and one female, were humanely collared for research purposes and then released back into their habitat.
“It’s a GPS collar,” Johnson explained. “This has all of the GPS technology in it. It’s communicating with satellites. It also has a cell phone chip. So periodically, the collar sends us the data via a text message.”
Johnson said these collars cost about $2,000 each and the Metro Parks have four collars in total.
“This is a detachment component, so once these collars are on and when we are done monitoring them, we can program this unit to detach, so the collar can then fall off of the animal,” Johnson said. “It also has a radio beacon on it that helps us find it.”
Data from these tracking collars shows that the coyotes' range extends through much of downtown Akron and the two coyotes are believed to be a part of the same family unit.
The female coyote appears to be nursing a litter of puppies in a den.
“We’ve learned that the zoo is at the periphery of their range. They do spend time here, but their core habitat is downtown,” Johnson explained. “They are utilizing various corridors to move around the city.”
Good said he hopes that this research will help minimize conflict between urban animals and humans.
“We wanted to be able to utilize the coyote that were already using zoo property to gauge how we could tell that tale of coexistence,” Good said. “So that when we are talking about more endangered species like red wolves, we can also tell the story about how to coexist with any kind of urban wildlife.”
The plan is to continue this program and collar more coyotes early next year.
“It is really kind of a community resource that we all share now,” Good explained. “It will be a fun thing for us to be able to tell that story to all of Akron.”