 Hello out there everyone and welcome. Thank you all for being here today for Coexisting with Coyotes in the Presidio. I'm your host Marcy. I am a teen services librarian with the San Francisco Public Library and a huge fan of the Coyote. Let me first take a moment before we start to acknowledge that the San Francisco Peninsula is the ancestral home of the Remaitush Ohlone peoples. The Remaitush Ohlone continue to live, work and play here today. They have not ceded lost or forgotten their responsibilities as caretakers of this place. We recognize that we benefit from living and working on their traditional homeland. And it is with the deepest respect that we acknowledge their ongoing stewardship of this land. And now Summer Stride. Summer Stride is the library's annual summer learning program. And this year we are so excited to bring you a variety of programs online for the whole family to enjoy. Check out the chat for more information about your summer learning program. Library program would not be possible without the friends of the San Francisco Public Library. They make possible today's program and programs all year round with their unwavering support. Today we have the second episode of the Nature Boost series for Summer Stride. Nature Boost is a collaboration between parks and library. We're honored to work with the National Park Service, the Golden Gate National Parks Conservancy and the Presidio Trust to make Nature Boost happen in the summer and all year round. We encourage you to get out and explore a park near you. Today's presenters work with the Presidio Trust and today's star is the coyote. You'll have a chance to ask your coyote questions. If you're on YouTube, just put them in the chat and we'll make sure to share them with our presenters. Speaking of our presenters, I'm delighted to introduce Mike Sun. Mike is an immigrant from Taiwan who grew up in the outer sunset of San Francisco. In summer 2000, Mike started his Presidio National Park journey and his love for parks, nature and people. After completing undergraduate and graduate degrees in biology at Humboldt State, Mike and his partner moved back to the Bay. Now as a staff member representing the Presidio Mike is known as coyote Mike, who in collaboration with the Presidio Wildlife Team being John and David, you'll hear about. He helps to facilitate the Coyote Awareness Education Program with the preschools located inside the park. Mike loves sushi, video games and taking his kids to visit different parks in the Bay area and beyond. Today we also have John Young. He'll be with us today in place of David Harrelson. Jonathan Young was born and raised in the foothills of the Angeles National Forest on the outskirts of Los Angeles. He spent much of his youth exploring all that Southern California has to offer. After completing his bachelor's degree in biology from San Diego State, he moved to San Francisco. It was then he began his long-term relationship with the Presidio National Park. He started as a volunteer habitat steward. Jonathan worked his way through several Presidio internships while completing his master at San Francisco State, studying urban amphibian conservation and disease ecology. Upon completion of his studies, he was hired by the Presidio Trust as the first dedicated staff member with the sole focus on wildlife. Since then, he's been developing the Presidio's Wildlife Program, which includes surveying, monitoring, managing and restoring the diversity of animals found in the park. And now, without further ado, coexisting with coyotes in the Presidio, take it away, Mike and John. Good morning, everyone. Thank you so much for having us. Hi, everyone. All right, first of all, John and I will want to first give shout-outs to our colleagues at San Francisco Public Library for supporting us and giving us this platform to share more about the Presidio. So thank you to Lili May, Lisa, Maricela, Christie and the entire IT team, including my buddy, George Tran. And of course, thank you, Marcy, for helping us to facilitate this program. Our last shout-out goes out to Dave Harrelson, who couldn't join us today, but has been a huge and critical part of our coyote research. Before we start going in depth about coexisting with coyotes, let's first run ourselves briefly on some history, the people and context, like what Marcy has shared in the land acknowledgement. San Francisco has long been the traditional and ancestral land for the rabbitutia loni. It is also important to note that we still have a robust indigenous communities in the Bay Area and beyond today. We encourage you to learn more about their stories from the past, today and into the future. Prior to European contact, here are a few of the wildlife that you could expect to see here in the Presidio at the time, including jack rabbits, bobcats, grizzly bears, or animals like elk, which is not shown here. Starting the post-European contact period, the Presidio San Francisco has experienced under three different regimes, including in 1776, that's when the Spanish colonists settled in San Francisco and the Presidio. 200 years ago exactly, we would have been a part of Mexico. And in 1850, this land became California and Presidio had turned into military post for the next 150 years. That brings us to today after the US Army left the Presidio. For the past 25 years, we have since transformed this land into an urban national park where we aim to create an inclusive space, not only for the public, yes you, but also as a refuge for the many wild animals and plants that belong here, we've been restoring this land back to many natural habitats. And people like John and David, along with many others, including staff and volunteers, have been a huge part of our wildlife restoration efforts. And that brings us to Coyotes in Coexistence, our topic for today. And here's John to tell us more about Coyotes. Thanks, Mike. As was painted with what Mike just said, the landscape has obviously undergone some drastic changes since pre-European up until today. If you look at this shot right here, obviously we're looking north and you can see the Marin Headlands, which are relatively untouched, versus the contrast of San Francisco that we all know and live in and love, the density of buildings. Imagine this place before those buildings. We've seen pictures, what it used to look like, full of dunes, full of lakes and streams and creeks and ponds and all kinds of different habitats. And of course, as the city began to be built and built out and urban development happened, we lost a lot of those landscapes. And with that, we lost a lot of the wildlife associated with that landscape, some of which Mike already pointed out, the rabbits, the bears and the cats, the big cats. And Coyotes were also here as well. We know that from records in our museums, from written records and from indigenous folk lords that go back for millennia in this area. But along with a lot of lost wildlife, so too did the Coyote, it blinked out as well around the 19, late 1920s. So almost a hundred years ago, the Coyotes in San Francisco were vanished, they were gone. They were driven out by the people that were developing the city in those days. And they were gone for many, many, many, many decades until they came back in the early 2000s. And since they've come back in the Presidio as well as San Francisco throughout the city, we've been working together with the city government as well as the Presidio Trust and National Park Service to really understand what does that mean to live amongst these animals in our urban area? How do we get along with them? And how do we reduce issues that can happen between humans, our pets and these animals, these wild animals? So that's what we're gonna talk about today. And this idea is really boiled down into one term which is known as coexistence. Mike's gonna talk a little bit about coexistence. Yeah, so what does coexist even mean? Everything we're talking about today applies to all wildlife in not just in San Francisco, but across the whole world. And can also help us successfully coexist with wildlife such as Coyotes. So to break down this really cool word into two parts, the first part is co, which means together and exist means to live. To coexist means to live together. Coyotes are animals called wildlife and they have vastly different needs from the animals that we know as pets. Wildlife such as coyotes, they eat, drink and sleep in the wild, meaning outside. And John, what can you tell us more about the role of coyotes in nature? Yeah, it's really important when you think about our urban areas and animals, some of the most common things we think of that we interact with probably daily in our house are what we would consider pests like rats or gophers or mice or things like that. These little tiny critters that you can see here, that's a gopher that we would consider pests and some people don't want those in their houses in their front yards because they can cause problems. And in fact, coyotes and other predators like raptors such as owls and hawks are incredibly important in helping us control or balance out or reduce the numbers of these pest species in our urban areas through their predation or consumption, eating these small little critters like gophers and rats and coyotes really like those and it really benefits humans, what we would call an ecosystem service because it's a tangible benefit to humans by the reduction of rats and things like that. Cool, thanks, John. And next, we also have animals that we call pets such as dogs and cats. And they also have very different needs from animals like wildlife. For the most part, pets. For the most part, pets drink, eat and sleep with people in the house, meaning inside. To truly protect your cats and dogs, it is best to keep cats indoors and dogs unleashed when outside. Keeping cats inside can not only keep them safe from cars, from raccoons, other cats or coyotes. It can also help saving our native birds, lizards and other small animals. Coyote food, gophers and other rodents are among coyotes' favorite food in the Presidio. Coyotes help to balance the health of our ecosystem by keeping rodents like rats, mice and gophers in check. Even at five months old, like the coyote that you're seeing in front of you, they can already hunt for raccoons, which is their biggest local prey. And just a really kind of honing in on this idea of coyotes and raccoons. I'm sure a lot of you have probably experienced raccoons in San Francisco or anywhere in California for that matter. If you have attics or basements or garages or backyards or in the park or these raccoons are living in every little crawl space that they can find. And when they are not kept in balance, a natural balance, their numbers just will shoot up and they will be everywhere. There will be raccoons everywhere. And that causes a lot of problems, one of which can be the spreading of diseases. When raccoons get together, the more and more raccoons getting together and interacting, the more likelihood that diseases will be spread around. And sometimes those diseases can jump from a raccoon to humans. And so again, another example of what we call ecosystem services, the coyotes help us keep a more natural, healthy balance in the ecosystem, to keep the environment healthy and to keep the people like us that live in the environment healthy. Back to you, Mike. Thanks, John. And coyotes are the happiest and healthiest when you let coyotes find coyote food. John, can you tell us what this coyote that we're seeing is doing here? Yeah, so this is a classic coyote hunting example. And coyotes think about their really big ears. They're like little radars. They can hear some of the most subtle, quiet sounds, including gophers under brown. And this is a field in the Presidio that's wide open and it's full of gophers. And you'll see coyotes out there hunting. And what they're doing is they're sitting there, perfect silence, focusing in and finding those gopher holes and just waiting in silence. And when they hear that gopher right at the edge of their little hole, they will jump straight up into the air and snout first straight down into the hole. And the gopher won't even see it coming because they can't hear it. The gopher is totally oblivious and the coyote will just jump right down and grab it. And in one gulp, oh, gopher's gone. Wow. Next slide. Thanks, John. So thank you everyone for putting those human trash away. So that our smart coyote friends cannot get to them. Human trash is not only bad for coyotes' health and human food is also not good for wildlife in general as well. And it's not only bad for the health of the coyotes in wildlife because they were never meant to eat human food. Human food is for us. They need to eat natural food to stay healthy. And so not only is human food bad for their health but it's also bad for human safety because when a coyote becomes fed, it can start to associate humans with food being fed tasty food. And that's when they're more likely to start approaching people expecting to be fed by people. And that can lead to really serious public safety issues. So that's a really big important in terms of human behavior, our behavior and how does our behavior cause or potentially reduce the likelihood for issues or problems or conflict between us and coyotes. So there's really two types of problems that can happen in urban areas with coyotes and people. One of those is people feeding coyotes, whether that's indirectly through their trash or directly trying to feed them right there in the park. Really bad for their health and it can cause problems with human safety, as I just said. And the other potential can be with our pets like dogs. And so we're gonna talk a little bit more about how do we as humans in urban areas living with or coexisting with coyotes, how can we reduce the likelihood for problems or issues or what we would call conflict? How can we reduce that? And how can we promote coexistence? We're gonna talk about that. And so a couple of the things that we promote here and we talk about in programs like this are things again that we can do as humans that can either cause problems or can reduce problems. So you can see some of these right here. Feeding coyotes or any wildlife for that matter can cause problems. As I said, the coyote is gonna be more likely to approach you which means it might be more likely to bite you and we don't want that to happen. So feeding coyotes or any wildlife is not a good idea. Feeding your pet foods outdoors is okay but you have to remember to clean up afterwards because that can attract rats and those rats can attract coyotes. So that's gonna attract the animals you don't want around leaving the food out. As Mike said earlier, cats outside is not only bad for the health of your cat, the safety of your cat not just because of coyotes but cars and raccoons and other cats. There's a lot of things in this world that can hurt our cats but also cats outside can impact our native birds and native lizards and things that we want to cherish and have around in our backyards. Keeping your dog on a leash we're gonna talk a lot more about that and how that's really important but having your dog under control so that it doesn't see a coyote and wanna go play with a coyote, chase the coyote around with something like that you can keep it from doing that or you can keep it safer from running out into the street and maybe getting hit by a car. Really important to leash your dog in most areas and then again, your trash, really important not just for coyotes but all animals, rats, raccoons they wanna get into your trash and they wanna make a mess and again that's not healthy for them but it can also attract more problems like more rats and more coyotes and just a mess in your neighborhood so you need to be really thoughtful about how do you secure your trash can in the Presidio we have these things like bungee cords so that if a raccoon knocks over the trash can it's less likely to spill open into the street attracting more pests like rats and raccoons so trash management is really important. And the most important time of the year that we're gonna talk about next is right now and that's the puffing season and that's the time of the year when Mama Coyote and Dad Coyote have had their pups right now their pups are about a month and a half old and that's the most important time of the year for dog owners out there. So for all you dog owners out there, listen up because this is the information to keep your dog safe and to keep the coyote family safe. And so we're gonna talk about that right now and we're gonna show you some of our footage that we do to monitor some of our coyote then. So next slide, please. So this is we use automated motion activated cameras to monitor the coyote dens and monitoring the coyote dens allows us to track the litter size and the health of the animals and behavior of the animals. So this is from a couple of years ago. These are two pups of a litter that was headed for about six pups and I don't know how smooth that's playing it's kind of choppy on one. You get the idea of these little pups. So we wanna know where the den is. Next slide. And knowing where the den is is gonna allow us to create this, reduce the likelihood for dogs to come close and we're gonna talk about that in just a minute but you can see here this was from last year this is mama feeding her three pups and of course she's a mama and she wants to protect her family and she can see other dogs as a potential threat to her family and other coyotes that might not be part of the family she'll also see that as a potential threat. So I'm gonna let Mike take the next slide. So from April to October every year it's the time of the year that we call the pups season meaning that mama coyotes are extra protective of their babies because dogs no matter how friendly they are to humans to coyotes they smell just like wolves and other natural predators that may hurt their babies. So if you always want to keep your dogs so you always want to keep your dogs on leash and if you happen to run into a coyote during this time with your dog whether you see the pups or not the best thing to do is to leave the area quickly that mama coyote may be escorting you and mostly your dog away from their pups and also may follow your dog for a certain distance until the dog is far away enough that's when the mama coyote will simply return to her babies and kind of just disappear all of a sudden. And yes, and by the way if you don't even if you don't even have a dog with you there will be no conflicts at all. And so in the Presidio as I said we use cameras and other technology to find where the active densite and the pups are every year we only have a one pair in the Presidio so one mom and one dad and they have one litter in one den per year. So what we wanna do to reduce the likelihood that dogs and coyotes are gonna have problems we identify where the densite is every year. And when we identify that we will put an area around that where dogs aren't allowed. So people can go in there they don't know where the den is the den's very well hidden but dogs getting too close to the den as Mike said can cause problems where the coyote wants to chase the dog out of the area. So when you keep dogs away from the den or the pups you're gonna have less, less, less, less problems between dogs and coyotes. So in the Presidio we put signs out like the one you see on the right and keep the dogs, we direct them to other areas away from the densite so they can have fun outside and play and run around away from where the pups in the coyote family plays. Yeah, the signs are there to help you and if you cannot remember when the pups season might be we are here to help. So look out for those coyote awareness signs and follow our recommendations such as number one, be aware of your surroundings at all times. Number two, keep pets on leash and under control. Number three, keep your distance away from wildlife and number four, never feed coyotes. So you may also notice that some of our Presidio coyotes wear those earrings, colorful earrings and those collars while these are important accessories allow our coyote scientists like John and David to study and also to help us differentiate each animals apart. If you are interested to learn more at the end of the slideshow we're gonna show you our website where we consistently update with the newest information on coyote research and also asking the chat because we will answer your questions during the Q and A towards the end. So let's talk about safety. Say if we were going on a hike in the Presidio what should we do? Remember to always stay on the trail and also remember to stay in a group especially for kids you should always listen to the directions given by the grownups that you are with and remember the four things that can help humans coexist with coyotes stay on the trail, stay in a group keep human food away from coyotes as to avoid both direct feeding and indirect feeding securing your trash cans picking up after yourself after the lunch picnic and always be a responsible pet owner keep your cats indoor and dogs on leash when out and about. So let's keep both you, your pets and coyotes safe that is how we can coexist. John, do you have anything to add? Yeah, and I'll just say that over the years as I mentioned coyotes were gone for almost a hundred years in San Francisco and then they came back about 16 years ago it's been a while since they've been back and we've been learning a lot about how to coexist with these animals and reduce problems between our pets and ourselves and the coyotes. And over these those years all the research and the learning that we've been doing and all the teaching to the public and all of this community engagement that we've been doing has really been working we've really come a long way we still have a long way to go but each one of us has a part to play in promoting coexistence and promoting a healthy ecosystem environment. We wanna have a healthy environment and coyotes are a part of that healthy environment but we wanna be safe and all of these things we talked about is are the ways to be safe and coexist. And just finally on one final note I just wanted to mention, next slide please. If you're ever out and about and you see something that you are unsure of or something happens that you feel needs to be reported to somebody it's really important that people like myself and other people in San Francisco specific people need to know about that even if you're unsure of what happened needs to be reported or not. So if you're in the Presidio you wanna report anything or send questions to coyote at presidiotrust.gov or you can call 415-656-14148 up there. And as Mike said, visit our website for more information we update it regularly. And if you forget any of this but you're in the Presidio all of that information is on our Coyote Awareness sign and those are all over the Presidio so you'll see them out there. If you're anywhere in San Francisco that is not the Presidio San Francisco Animal Parent Control is the place you need to report things. And again, whether you're sure or not sure if it needs to be reported feel free to report it and all that information is right down there on that screen. So we need to know about this stuff because if somebody's feeding coyotes and coyotes are getting acting a little weird about that that we wanna know so we can stop that before things happen. So that's the information right there. And Mike. And thank you so much for helping us to us humans and our pets to coexist with coyotes in the Presidio and beyond. So the coyote says thank you. So now we are at our Q and A time. Take it away Marcy. Okay. And I say you are welcome to coyote. We've got a bunch of questions here. And just recently again, John you brought up that coyote came back around 2000 after being gone for decades. One of our first questions here was why did coyote come back? Yeah. So it's a pretty complicated answer but it's a really interesting answer. And what happened originally in the early days as Mike said, around the 1850s when the city of San Francisco really started to become a city and start to develop people in those days did not tolerate coyotes. And so they were more likely to shoot them to trap them in those days. And they actually got paid for it. They would make money off of that by selling their pelts, the fur. And over the years as the city became more of what we know today, no longer is that socially acceptable nor is it legal to hunt wildlife in San Francisco. And so over the years, that pressure on the coyotes so people killing them in this area basically disappeared. And because that pressure disappeared the coyotes around the greater Bay Area to think about Santa Cruz and think about Point Reyes and all the far away places there are coyotes out there this whole time. They started to move in and move in and move in and now they're here. And again, it's been almost 20 years since they came back. So they're here now and we need to learn how to live with them. Okay. Another question here is, what are they by nature? Coyotes that is, are they shy? So what's their personality? Yeah, so for anybody who has dogs or has interacted with dogs, we all know that each dog is different just like each person is different and that can change as well. Some people are shy when they're little and then they grow up to be really bold and engaging and talking to a lot of people. So just like people and dogs, coyotes can be a variety of things and that can change through time. So generally coyotes are wary or shy of people but they can change. So again, if somebody's feeding a coyote, they might become less shy and more likely to approach those people as we talked about in the presentation. So that's another reason why feeding them changes their behavior and in this case can change it for the bad and we don't wanna do that. And so again, each coyote is an individual, they're different, they're all different. And that's why in the Presidio, as Mike said, we wanna know who those individuals are and that's why in the Presidio you might see some coyotes with putex. So we know the one with the yellow tags, we know who she is, the one with the purple tags, we know who he is and we can monitor their behavior and how their personalities develop and change through time. So... Yeah, and one thing that we didn't talk about today is hazing because we do want coyotes to be shy to maintain their shy nature so that they will keep distance away from humans and dogs and other pets. So I don't know if you feel comfortable because at first I was not. I didn't feel comfortable hazing coyotes because I feel like I want to protect these beautiful wild animals. I don't wanna like be mean to them but actually like pretending to throw rocks at them, to keep encouraging them to know that humans are kind of dangerous to them so that they have to develop this natural fear of humans is actually a good thing for all the coyotes and also will help humans and coyotes to coexist in the same space. And I'll just add to that the idea of that hazing. It's a tool that can be used but it doesn't need to be used in most cases. In most cases, the coyote is ignoring you and it's just hunting in a field. So in cases like that, just keep your distance, don't feed it and just enjoy it and appreciate it. You don't need to chase it away or anything like that but as Mike said, in some cases, say for example, a coyote is resting on your front lawn and you wanna play with your dog on your front lawn so you want the coyote just to move along. It's very easy to get a coyote to move along through hazing, so squirting it with a hose or something like that to scare it but not to harm it. You don't wanna harm them. It's not that difficult to do that but you don't really need to do that most of the time. And if you need to do that, always be aware of what's going on because the last thing you wanna do is scare a coyote into the road where it can cause a car accident or get hurt running into the road. So just be aware of your surroundings and most of the times you can just sit and watch and appreciate the coyote. And if you don't feel comfortable putting matters in your own hand and there's a coyote on your front lawn, if you're in San Francisco, which is outside of the Presidio, call San Francisco Animal Fair and Control. If you're in the Presidio, email us, call us. Let me ask you this, Mike. We have a question from Kate. Where do coyotes go when they grow up? So I guess the first question would be, how does that work? Like when do they, do they go away? How old do they go? And where, where do they go from here? Yeah, so even before, prior to our most recent return of these coyotes to the Presidio, they've always been around in Simitel County on the East Bay, Marine Islands and North wherever there are more wild habitats and more urban areas that could sustain them, they are, they have always been there. So it's the moments that they realize, oh, San Francisco, it's illegal to kill coyotes anymore, that people stop hurting them and then they slowly migrate back to not just San Francisco, but also to the northern tip, to the Presidio because they are enough habitats, at least enough to sustain one family. That's how many families we have in the Presidio. And I'll just add to that, when they have their families and their pups grow up, they usually leave home or leave their parents territory around the fall of that year. So maybe around nine months of age, they start to leave the territory. In some cases, their parents actually chase them out. Hey, there's not enough food here anymore. You need to go, go on your own. And that's what we call dispersal. That's when a young coyote heads out on its own to try to find its own territory and its own mate to have their own family. And we found that through our tracking program, those coyotes will tend to go south. And one coyote went as far south as San Jose. But unfortunately, most coyotes are young and they don't know to look both ways when they cross the road. Just like kids, we need to learn to look both ways when we cross the road because they're cars. Coyotes need to learn that as well. And in some cases, the young coyotes, they never learn that sadly. So in urban areas, most young coyotes get hit by cars at a very young age. Let's say, do coyotes just occurred to me? Do they recognize you, the ones that are in San Francisco? Do they know you too? Do you feel like, can they do that, recognize a human? Coyotes are incredibly intelligent animals. They can smell us as individuals. They can see us as individuals and they learn and they know if somebody's coming around feeding them, they know that person's gonna feed them and they're gonna start to approach that person. If somebody's coming around and hazing them, they know that person is hazing them and they're gonna avoid that person. So they are, you cannot underestimate how intelligent these creatures are. And that's why you hear the cliche, the wily coyote, because they're so smart and they know how to maneuver and they know how to succeed in these complicated cities like San Francisco, but incredibly intelligent animals. Let's see if we've got any other questions I missed here. We do have one raccoon question, if I may. Go to the raccoon for just a moment, John, you were mentioning raccoons. Can you just talk a little bit about what, just the high, well, what should we know about raccoons? You know, our sort of urban and suburban landscape. Yeah, raccoons are by far the most common creature of that size in San Francisco. They're more common than coyotes and they're about actually the same weight as most coyotes. So when you think about a coyote, most people think that coyotes are actually really big and raccoons, maybe people think medium-sized, but in fact, a raccoon, a full-grown raccoon can actually be almost the same weight as a full-grown coyote. But raccoons are just like coyotes. They can learn their incredibly intelligent and really, really, really adaptable and really cunning and they can learn as well. So if you start to feed raccoons, you're gonna have a lot of problems as well which can lead to the public safety issues which has happened because people feed raccoons. And so one of the important things is again, just like coyotes in all wildlife, raccoons included, don't feed any wildlife. Do not do, there's plenty of natural food for our raccoons around here. And if you ever have problems with raccoons, same thing, if you're in San Francisco, call animal parent control if you're in the Presidio. Go to the coyote at presidiotrust.gov that goes right to me, Mike, so we can respond to that. But in general, raccoons can really, really reproduce a lot and get really numerous, which is what happened before coyotes came back. And now that coyotes are back, raccoons are still very common, but they're not as abundant as they otherwise would be because of the coyote. Again, a healthy balance in our environment. Yeah, hey, John, do you know what's the biggest coyote on record in the Presidio? The biggest coyote in terms of pounds was 32, 33 pounds. And I wanna say the biggest raccoon that we've weighed was 29, 30 pounds. So again, coyotes are much smaller than people think and raccoons are much bigger than people think. And raccoons, I will just say, are more aggressive and they are actually things that you need to be more aware of than coyotes because they're more common and they're, again, as I said earlier, they could live in your attic, they can live under your stairs, they can live in your backyard, whereas coyotes are fairly elusive and they kind of stick to themselves in the deeper forests of our city. But raccoons, you can find them almost anywhere at any time. And so raccoons are, you would never wanna try to haze a raccoon like we talked about with coyotes, they would not respond the same. You just wanna avoid the raccoon and never feed the raccoon. Okay. We've got, if I can just slip in to these two last questions here, they come from the same person, Rebecca. We've got, what kind of ecological connections do coyotes have with birds? That's the first question. And can coyotes strike up friendship or beneficial relationships with other mammals? Mike? I think Rebecca might be referring to a video that David has shared before on a badger in a coyote. Maybe we saw that video. I am not, yeah, I'm not too sure. Yeah, there's a viral video that went around that in San Mateo County, I think, or maybe Santa Cruz County that some scientists got on with their camera traps of a badger in a coyote that were hanging out and appeared to be friends. That's very unusual. Coyotes have their friendships with other coyotes, but in general, we don't want to, even if we have a friendly dog, for example, that loves to play with other dogs, we don't want to try to make our dogs friends with coyotes because it's not something we want to do for a number of reasons that we talked about earlier. But again, coyotes are incredibly intelligent and they have emotions like humans do. So there's, obviously there's potential for something like that, but it's something that we don't want to encourage with our pets because it's probably very unsafe for our pets. And the other question, Mike, do you want to talk about the relationships of birds and coyotes? Yeah, the ecological connections between birds and coyotes is going to be more of a convoluted one because coyotes can do a really good job on controlling gophers, the number of gophers, so they are not overly abundant or overly populated and gophers are herbivores, they eat plants. And plants can also produce lots of berries and fruits for a lot of the birds that depend their livelihood on those berries and fruits. So by having coyotes around, there wouldn't be too many gophers eating all of those plants, all of those berries and fruit producing plants. So that way, coyotes indirectly can absolutely help so many, right? Not just birds, what about the pollinators, the bees, the beetles, all the bugs that help us pollinate, they depend their lives on the getting the netters. And yeah, on so many different levels, it's a very interconnected system. Thank you, Rebecca, for asking us that, such an important and profound question that on the surface may be like, oh, coyotes on the ground, birds up in the sky on the branches, how do they relate to one another? And at the end of the day, absolutely. In nature, we need this balance. We need everyone in it. We're not asking coyotes to eat all of the gophers. No, it's about having that balance. Just enough gophers, enough coyotes, birds, and all kinds of different plants. And just really quickly, they also eat rats, as we talked about, and rats love to climb up trees and raid bird nests, and they eat the babies and they eat the eggs. And if you have too many rats, the birds start to decline because all their babies were eaten by rats. So we want our raptors. We want our coyotes. We want all of our snakes and other predators to help us keep the rats in check, just like the gophers, unlike explained. Oh my gosh, thank you so much, you two. This is so great. It really, the word coexistence, it means even more after this. Understanding how many animals, including ourselves, are involved in this. And it takes care to keep that balance. So thank you so much for what you do, both of you. Oh my gosh, I could go on forever about coyote. But we have to kind of close down now. Any parting words, anything else, either of the two of you want to say to everybody before we go? I'll just say thanks again for joining and just remember we, as a community, benefit from these animals and we can promote coexistence through our behavior. So good behavior, responsible behavior, helps the coyotes and it helps us. Yeah, we can absolutely do it. We can all be here and we can all thrive collectively. Thank you all for watching. And remember the Presidio, it's a national park that belongs to all of us. It's a free park and please come by. Please hike on the trails. Please look out for those coyote signs. And if you're lucky, you might get a glimpse of our wild coyotes along with so many other wildlife in the Presidio. And lastly, thank you, Marcy. Thank you so much to our friends at the San Francisco Public Library for allowing us, inviting us and providing this platform so that we can spread our love and joy to everyone. All right, join us next week. Third episode, it is Protect and Serve, the military and the Bay Area's LGBTQ community. That is next week, our Pride Nature Boost. So that's all for now, folks. Take care. We look forward to seeing you soon either online or at one of our open library locations. Bye for now.