*ACDC’s Back In Black starts playing*

Aargh. This kind of thing drives me nuts, because it gets posted, it gets made into a simple image with text, it gets spread all over the fucking internet (twitter, facebook, you name it), and it’s just one more piece of misinformation out there.

Coyotes are not “invasive” to the Yellowstone National Park region. They are native.

The issue is that wolves were exterminated from the region, until they were reintroduced in 1995. With the wolves gone from the ecosystem, the coyotes there over-populated. (But did not completely fill the wolf niche; coyotes were not a major predator of elk/wapiti, or any kind of predator of bison.) Wolves being reintroduced caused a steep drop in coyote population immediately after the reintroduction (wolves will often regard coyotes as competition, and go after them). But in the end, they really just brought the coyote population down to what it should have been.

How does misinformation spread? By people being too clever.

The title here comes from a reddit thread 2 years ago. Some person found the image and slapped a “clever” title on it.

Within the thread (but not by the OP), the source of the photo was posted as AmWestPhoto.wordpress.com – a Wordpress page unfortunately now deleted. But from the Wayback Machine, you can still see the article (from 2018):

“A Thousand Words: The Wolves of Yellowstone”

Guess what? The original article, by the photographer (whose credit the poster cropped out of the image), never calls the coyotes invasive. (Because they aren’t.) The photo is from 2005 – not “coyotes first encountering reintroduced wolves in Yellowstone”, because they were reintroduced 10 years before that.

And, despite what the photo may imply story-wise, in fact these two coyotes (and 4 more of their friends) drove this black wolf and a pregnant female off of an elk kill the wolves had made. (Even for the biggest, baddest predator, things don’t always go their way.)

(Actually, to do the reddit poster some credit – they might not have been the person to crop out the photographer credit. They might have happened across the image already cropped. They ARE the person who put the misleading title on the photo, though, which has followed it ever since, mis-educating more and more people.)

The real story is dramatic enough, and interesting enough, without embellishing it, let alone just making up something completely new and inaccurate. But even though I’ve written up a correction post here, and maybe others have back through the reblogs of this, that won’t really help correct the thousands of shared and reblogged instances of the wrong info that are floating around out there. My corrections are unlikely to make it as far as the original. Most people will just see it and share it; if you aren’t especially interested in wolves and coyotes, and in the Yellowstone wolf reintroduction, then you won’t know off the bat that this title is wrong.

Anyway, the photographer is Brent Paull, and his website is now here. He has tons of beautiful photos of wolves and other wildlife. I can’t tell whether the write-ups he did on that old Wordpress were ever archived elsewhere. His site has a section for archived newsletters, but that begins in 2019, and the article linked above is from 2018. A pity to lose all those good write-ups he undoubtedly had on the Wordpress page.

rip debbie parker, you were a great tree