In this scene from the movie Collateral (2004), Jamie Foxx is a taxi driver in Los Angeles, and he gets a passenger, Tom Cruise, for a long ride with several stops. As the movie unfolds, Jamie's character realizes Tom's character is an assassin, who he's driving around to murder people. Late at night, in this quiet scene, when they're driving near downtown L.A., they see a coyote cross the quiet street in front of them. This turns out to be the crux of the movie, the moment when Jamie's character decides to fight back in the way he can. Pretty cool movie. And yes, there are plenty of urban coyotes in Los Angeles county, Orange County and other urban and suburban cities.
As a taxi driver when I saw the movie Collateral, I loved that coyote scene. Spending several years driving around Orange County at night, I had seen coyotes while driving my taxi, and I saw them a couple of more times afterwards. You generally see them wandering around at night, roaming around, most likely looking for food. One time a coyote crossed the road in front of my taxi, while I was driving up Goldenwest in Huntington Beach, I had a passenger in my cab, and it was this quiet moment, almost like the scene above.
Altogether, I've seen coyotes in Southern California probably 25-30 times. Usually I've seen a single one, but I've seen a pair in the San Fernando Valley, four at once on the Bolsa Chica Mesa on the north end of Huntington Beach, and six once in a field, from the window of a bus, in Yorba Linda. Generally, they look much like small wolves, with thick hair, making their 25-30 pound bodies look bigger than they really are. I saw this one below this morning, feeding on some chicken pieces if pulled from a trash can, in Studio City/North Hollywood area.
One of the most adaptable predators, when it comes to cities and human dominated environments, coyotes thrive in cites, as strange as that seems to most people. We tend to think of packs of wolves way out in the wilderness, and many people see coyotes as little wolves. Coyotes may dig through trash and scavenge for food, but they also eat a lot of rodents, like mice, rats, gophers, and ground squirrels. Generally speaking, they are afraid of humans, and want to keep their distance. If you see one, and get freaked out, clap your hands, make some noise, and it will probably run off fairly quickly.
If you want to learn more about coyotes in urban environments, this video below, from Toronto, is a good start, and it's only about 8 1/2 minutes long.
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