The "engaging" (New Yorker), New York Times best-selling story of how coyotes took over North America--and are now taking over South America as well
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.
Review Quotes:
"[An] absorbing book.... The coyote stories in this book are among the best, and Flores is a master storyteller."-- Natural History
"Fascinating... essential literature in university courses on environmental studies, wildlife management, and general ecology and public policy. This book will appeal to ecologists as well as to a general audience seeking to better understand how modern humans have treated coyotes and build a new paradigm for a reformed and more holistic vision of how to manage coyotes with respect and compassion... A copy of Coyote America should be given to all legislators to help in making informed and more cost-efficient and humane wildlife policies."-- Ecology
"A must-read book if you are interested in knowing more about this persecuted critter, revered by Native Americans long before the settlers arrived."-- Virginian Pilot
"[A] fascinating scientific and cultural history.... Deft prose and wide-ranging research do their part to carry Flores through the grimmer chapters of his narrative.... Whatever the coyote may still be wanting, that list no longer includes a book to do it justice."-- New Mexico Magazine
"It is often impossible to separate how animals behave 'wild' from how they behave around humans. Coyotes are a startling example.... Historian Dan Flores has fun describing how coyotes make a mockery of our attempts to put nature in order: 'It turns out, the coyote really is The Dude, and The Dude absolutely abides.'"-- New Scientist
"Wide-ranging, engaging, informative... Flores is both a fine scholar and a most engaging writer. He argues most persuasively that we need to learn to live with coyote and the other beings with which we share this earth."-- National Parks Traveler
"The coyote should have been TIME Magazine's Person of the Year. This deeply engrossing study is part scientific, part mythological, and part personal observation. It is fully fascinating."-- Lit Hub
"Flores's mix of edification and entertainment is a welcome antidote to a creature so often viewed with fear."-- Publishers Weekly
"As I was reading Coyote America by Dan Flores, a coyote walked through our backyard. Magic occurs in these pages."-- Terry Tempest Williams, author of The Hour of Land
Dan Flores is the A. B. Hammond Professor Emeritus of Western History at the University of Montana and the author of eleven books on aspects of American history. Flores lives just outside Santa Fe, New Mexico.