Aliens in the Backyard: Plant and Animal Imports into America

Misplaced Americans: As Rootless as the Humans Who Invited Them In

170 Misplaced Americans As Rootless as the Humans Who Invited Them In Humans are not the only species to have immigrated on their own into the United States. A number of our more visible fauna come from elsewhere, many under their own steam. Some are indigenous to the United States and have greatly expanded their native ranges, becoming pests in their new homes and raising interesting questions as to just what is native. Although some of my greataunts , glorying in their colonial roots, looked down their noses at fellow citizens whose roots lay more shallow, Native Americans must consider such twohundred -year differences picayune. Nevertheless, my Johnny-come-lately family , it turns out, has been here longer than the iconic coyote has occupied its current range, and many whose family passed through Ellis Island are more American than that scourge of the South, the boll weevil. Texans might claim the armadillo as a native, but it’s been there less time than have the Anglos who stole the place from the Mexicans, and, ignoring Horace Greeley’s advice, the Colorado potato bug, which at least is aptly named, being indigenous to that state, bucked national tendencies and migrated east—but not until the nineteenth century. About the coyote, no one is neutral: varmit or victim, North America’s native dog has been inspiring fierce debates ever since humans first encountered it. Folklorists classify Native American stories of coyotes as “trickster” tales, frequently salacious stories of dubious morality, often involving deceit and duplicity . In short the coyote was wily long before Warner Brothers. Credited with providing humanity with fire, the coyote also introduced death. Although Spanish chroniclers knew and described the coyote in the sixteenth century, most Americans first heard of it thanks to Lewis and Clark, who were fascinated with what they termed a “prairie wolf” and spent several weeks trying to kill one—testimony enough to the coyote’s wiliness. In May 1805, Clark wrote of “the small wolf or burrowing-dog of the prairies which is found in almost all the open plains. It is of an intermediate size between the fox and dog, Misplaced Americans 171 very delicately formed, fleet and active. . . . These wolves generally associate in bands of ten or twelve, and are rarely if ever seen alone, not being able singly to attack a deer or antelope. They live and rear their young in burrows, which they fix near some pass or spot much frequented by game, and sally out in a body against any animal which they think they can overpower; but on the slightest alarm retreat to their burrows, making a noise exactly like that of a small dog.”2 During Major Stephen Long’s 1819–20 expedition to the Rocky Mountains, trained scientists for the first time encountered the marvels that Lewis and Clark had described in their journals. It was expedition biologist Thomas Say who gave the prairie wolf its scientific name, Canis latrans, or barking dog, because “their bark is much more distinctly like that of the domestic dog, than of any other animal; in fact the first two or three notes could not be distinguished from the bark of a small terrier, but these notes are succeeded by a lengthened scream.” The only canine other than the domestic dog that habitually barks, the prairie wolf was a novelty to American explorers of the Louisiana Purchase but was well known to the Spanish farther south, who transformed the Nahuatl name, coyotl, into coyote. As with so much in the American West, the Spanish term coyote vanquished the English prairie wolf, although Americans still can’t decide whether it has two or three syllables, competing dictionaries preferring conflicting pronunciations.3 Today coyotes range from Alaska to Costa Rica, from California to Newfoundland and Florida—thanks almost entirely to European colonization. In 1500 the animal was limited basically to Mexico and the Great Plains. But the extermination of the grizzly bear, mountain lion, and wolf removed the coyote ’s primary natural competitors and predators, while cattle and sheep proved easier game than larger elk and bison. The coyote expanded its range, reaching into Canada by the 1850s, where it continued northward to Alaska and then turned east. By the 1920s it was in New York, and it had populated all of New England by 1970. Crossing the Mississippi, it spread throughout the Southeast as well, turned north, and joined forces in Virginia with its northern compatriots . By the end of...