Coyote at the Kitchen Door: Living with Wildlife in Suburbia (review)

In Coyote at the Kitchen Door, research professor Stephen DeStefano draws on his extensive experience with wildlife management to describe an increasingly common phenomenon—wildlife and humans living in close quarters in suburban neighborhoods. This is an accessible book meant for a broad audience, a personal account of growing up in a suburb of Boston, going on to conduct research in remote wilderness areas from the Arctic to the Andes, and then coming full circle to live once more in Massachusetts and study suburban wildlife. Each chapter is divided into distinct sections, creating a collage of personal essay, memoir and even fiction that juxtaposes the author’s wilderness experiences with the experience of wildlife in suburbia. In one anecdote, DeStefano watches a curious and probably hungry polar bear track his scent through the snow. In another, a line of curious on-lookers forms as his research team tries to get a radio-collared suburban moose back on its feet. DeStefano connects these segments with the recurrent narrative of an imaginary coyote, navigating life at the edges of human habitation.

The last chapter of the book is titled “A Suburban Land Ethic,” a clear reference to Aldo Leopold’s famous “land ethic” and an indication of the influence Leopold’s work has had on the practice of wildlife management as a whole. Leopold may be best known in restoration circles for A Sand County Almanac, his posthumous collection of essays, but his other famous work was the textbook Game Management, the founding work in the field of wildlife management. Leopold was the first professor of wildlife management at the University of Wisconsin, and his work in the field included training the nation’s earliest cohort of wildlife managers. Much of his written work aimed to convince small farmers that restoring habitat on their property was a good way to increase game populations. At one time, in other words, ecological restoration and game management went hand in hand.

Fast forward 70 years, and the 2 disciplines are still working at the intersection of the human and nonhuman worlds, creating and managing habitat for wildlife. What do they share in a contemporary sense? How can knowledge of urban wildlife management contribute to the practice of ecological restoration? To get a sense of the common ground between the 2 disciplines, I asked author Stephen DeStefano to respond via email to a series of questions on the structure of his book, the influence of Aldo Leopold, and the confluence of restoration and wildlife management.

1) How did Leopold’s work influence your own book?

Aldo Leopold as conservationist and writer has had more influence on me than anyone. I was first introduced to his work and writing when I was a freshman at the University of Massachusetts. That influence was reinforced when I started graduate school at the University of Wisconsin and had a chance to visit his farm in central Wisconsin. Leopold was a pioneer of conservation and has been called the father of modern wildlife management. He was an excellent scientist and teacher, and very influential in the field of policy. But it is Leopold’s ground-breaking philosophy with regard to a land ethic that I think transcends conservation through the decades and is still so relevant today. I think many of the answers that we seek can be found in the writings of Aldo Leopold.

2) Urban wildlife management really took off as an area of research in the 1990s. Why did this shift in thinking come about?

One of the biggest reasons for the rapid development of urban wildlife management as an area of ecological research in the 1990s was the fact that so much of the world had become urban. Cities were growing at enormous rates, and the surrounding suburbs were reaching well into previously undeveloped areas. In the United States, about 5% of all residents were urban dwellers in the late...