The Beau Geste Effect
Me vs. the coyotes, part three
It’s been awhile since I’ve updated you on the coyotes.
To recap: we live in a strip of suburbia situated at the edge of a bluff, right next to the foothills of Pike’s Peak. Smack in the middle of the human-animal interface.
A few months ago coyotes began howling, not from our backyard, but just beyond it. I don’t know how many, it might have been just two, a male and a female, though they sounded like a lot more. This, I learned online, is called the “Beau Geste effect,” named after French troops propping up dead soldiers to make the army appear larger (this happened in a novel, I think, not real life). Coyotes, by using a series of different sounds, create the illusion of having a much larger pack than they actually have. They do it to create a wall of animal sounds that effectively defines the pack’s territory.
The howling was late at night, and generally caused a chain reaction that got all the dogs in the neighborhood howling too. My neighbor on one side has small dogs she was fearful of putting in harm’s way, a neighbor a couple doors down has four large dogs that went annoyingly berserk at the sound of coyotes.
One Saturday I awoke to find the male coyote laying listlessly in our backyard. Signs of mange pocked his fur. I actually thought he was dead, until a sound from a neighboring yard caused him to leap up and run away. His female pack-mate, who had been hiding in the brush behind the fence, leapt out and followed him.
A week later I was on a Zoom call with my writing critique group when, not ten feet from my head and separated by a pane of glass, the male coyote attacked a squirrel, and I mean, attacked! The speed and violence of the attack was stunning. He ripped the squirrel apart in under a minute. Now, I don’t begrudge the coyote a good meal, and my neighbor with the big annoying dogs described the fenceline running along all the houses as “a superhighway for squirrels” that made for a quick and easy coyote meal.
But. Clearly, they were beginning to see our backyard as home base. I did not want to hurt them, or kill them, but the squirrel incident was more than a little disturbing.
I needed to mark my territory.
The internet led me to some basic mitigation techniques. I bought some LED lights that were supposed to mimic glowing animal eyes. I peed along the fence. I made noisemakers out of beer cans and pennies, and this is what I think worked. The first time I heard the coyotes howling after I made them, I ran to the deck, shook the noisemaker, the coyotes stopped abruptly and immediately. I did this maybe five times.
I think of this as my own personal “Beau Geste effect.”
I haven’t heard them since. I haven’t seen them since. I’m happy I didn’t have to go out and buy some wolf urine, which I’ve read is an extremely odiferous last resort to coyote mitigation.
I doubt they went very far away, which is fine with me. I assume they went a couple houses down, and now use that yard as a corridor to enter and exit the neighborhood.
I’ve been slowly taming our back yard this spring and summer. Lots of weeds and wild grass grown out from a couple years of neglect. I cut them back with a push mower, a weed-wacker and a hedge-trimmer. I see occasional vestiges of the coyotes toward the back of the yard, matted down grass, tufts of hair, scat. I remove those parts of it that are easiest to get to, and let the rest remain.
I’m not bending this narrative toward some comfy truth about cohabitating with nature (I try in these Oort Cloud essays to say one thing simply, clearly, and honestly). I don’t know if there is any larger truth to be found. As I cut back the grass and weeds and brush, I am reminded that my relationship with the coyotes is one of negotiation and compromise, each of us redefining our territory for the sake of the other.
Peace.
Thank you to all the kind responses to Goodneigbor.com last week. I’m proud of that story.
The links. As always, if you like my writing, buy a story.
July’s story: Goodneighbor.com
June’s story: Feral
May’s story: Nine Lives
April’s story: Prince Albert in a Can
March’s story: Fuck, Marry, Kill
February’s story: Veronica Scissors
My first novel, Life Under Water
My erotic flash fiction series, Serious Moonlight (as J G Cain)