(Caption: Ottawa’s bylaw department has received a record number of coyote related calls in 2017. Source: Christopher Bruno [CC BY-SA 3.0])
The number of reported coyote sightings in Ottawa has already hit a record high this year, according to an analysis of 311 call data.
203 sightings were reported to the city’s bylaw department in the first eight months of 2017. That’s a 45 per cent increase over last year’s total and more than any year going back to 2013, the last year of available data.
River Ward, a suburban ward that straddles the Ottawa River just south of downtown, made up nearly a quarter of the calls made so far in 2017.
The ward’s councillor Riley Brockington said he understands why some residents may be wary, but he doesn’t think it’s a cause for concern.
“This is coyote habitat, it’s Eastern Ontario,” he said. “Some people are surprised to see them in an urban setting, but it’s not out of the ordinary.”
The only risk is to pets and livestock, Brockington said. A fatal attack on a small dog in the McCarthy Woods, an area of green space in the southern part of the ward maintained by the National Capital Commission, was reported last October.
Brockington called for warnings signs to be placed at entrances to the park, but the results of a review by the NCC found there was not, “a natural, compelling need,” spokesperson Jean Wolff told Ottawa Community News.
The number of coyotes in the Ottawa area and across eastern Ontario has remained stable or declined slightly over the past several years, according to Brent Patterson, a research scientist with the Ministry of Natural Resources.
It then makes it hard to explain why Ottawa is seeing the jump in sightings, Patterson said.
With higher than average snowfall in late winter this year, coyotes living close to the city that hunt smaller animals like squirrels and rabbits might have found it hard to find food.
“Snow and deep snow certainly interferes with their hunting behaviour,” Patterson said.
Coyotes have a diverse diet, eating anything from deer to berries to compost, so they might have moved towards human-related food sources to make up for a lack of prey.
Another theory Patterson offered was that as coyote populations decline, they tend to move closer to urban areas. “We don’t have the hard data for Ottawa,” Patterson said, “but we have some evidence of that sort of thing happening around the burrows in [Toronto].”
What is more likely is that multiple people are reporting the same coyote, he said. The city groups sightings by ward, but other cities like Toronto have taken to recording specific locations to help clarify the number of calls.
Other reports have suggested the presence of so-called “coywolves”, a hybrid between wolf and coyote, around Ottawa are to blame for spikes in sightings, such as those recorded in 2015 . Patterson dismissed the idea, saying nearly every coyote in eastern Ontario carries some wolf DNA.
“Genetically, the coyote you see in a rural area outside Ottawa in 2017 is the same coyote that used to live there in 1950,” he said.
Until there is a clear explanation for the rise in sightings, Brockington said it’s up to councillors to “take the temperature” of residents and make sure the community is well-informed.
Brockington will hold a coyote information meeting with his constituents on January 8.
“Coyotes have every right to live in this environment than humans do,” he said. “So, it’s about having a better understanding of how to coexist in the same community, in the same environment.”