City Council to Vote on Coyote Study

The City Council meeting scheduled for May 13, 2019 will take on Action item A-1 as the approval of the proposed LMU coyote study. This will commit the city to a three year agreement with Loyola Marymount University for a price tag of $210,000, to create a three tiered approach to the urban coyotes.

While the program is still controversial to some community members, Dr. Eric Strauss, the project head, spoke at several community meetings in recent months to present his ideas and his team, which he offered has “several decades of experience assessing and mitigating coyote/human management issues in New England and cities in the Los Angeles area. Most recently, [the] team has been working in Long Beach where we are completing a three-year study and developing a management plan for their coyote population.”

While the huge loss of over 60 cats last year left the community reeling, the increase in awareness has mitigated the problem slightly.

From Dr. Strauss,  “The proposed three to five-year study will focus in the first year on a review and assessment of existing data relating to coyote distribution and activity that has already been recovered by city wildlife management professionals. This assessment will be augmented through additional data recovery using game camera analysis and the assessment of coyote dietary components through scat analysis. Preliminary site selection and pre-baiting for potential coyote capture and fitting of radio-telemetry collars and/or remote sensing technologies installation will also be conducted during the first year of the study.”

Coyotes are here to stay; how we choose to approach the issue is still a matter of discussion.

Judith Martin-Straw

The Actors' Gang

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