Coyote America: A Natural and Supernatural History

Finalist for the PEN/E.O. Wilson Literary Science Writing Award “A masterly synthesis of scientific research and personal observation.”-Wall Street Journal Legends don’t come close to capturing the incredible survival story of the coyote. In the face of centuries of annihilation campaigns employing poisons, gases, helicopters, and bioweapons, coyotes didn’t just survive, they thrived, expanding across North America from Alaska to Florida and New York, and now, as this new edition explores, to South America as well. In the war between humans and coyotes, coyotes have won hands-down. Coyote America traces both the five-million-year-long biological story of coyotes, as well as their cultural evolution from preeminence in Native American religions to haplessness before the Road Runner. A deeply American tale, the story of the coyote in the American West and then across the entire country is a sort of Manifest Destiny in reverse, with a pioneering hero whose career holds up an uncanny mirror to the successes and failures of American expansionism. An illuminating biography of an extraordinary animal, Coyote America is one of the great epics of our time.