Urban coyotes are deadly hunters, tracking rodents, rabbits and other small prey.
Sometimes, feral cats are on the menu.
But a new study of the two species shows that feral cats have figured out how to avoid coyotes and thrive.
The Ohio State University study, which focused on Chicago, found that this coexistence creates a side benefit for birds and other small animals that feral cats kill.
Over time, feral cats there learned to stay away from parks and nature preserves where the coyotes dwell, said Stan Gehrt, an urban wildlife ecologist at Ohio State’s School of Environment and Natural Resources and a coyote expert.
That, in turn, means cats no longer hunt for birds and other prey in those areas. Gehrt said that despite that loss of potential food, the cats he followed in the study did surprisingly well, living near buildings and houses.
“We expected these animals to be in fairly poor condition or carrying a lot of diseases and parasites,” he said. “Their survival rate was pretty darn high.”
Gehrt has spent years studying how coyotes have increasingly adapted to city environments. In some areas of Chicago, there are as many as six coyotes for every 250 acres, he said. As many as 60 feral cats can occupy the same spaces.
The study examined feral cats that roamed near six Chicago parks and preserves known to harbor coyotes. Gehrt said he initially thought that the increasing number of coyotes, city traffic and disease would kill as many as 70 percent of the cats.
But using radio tags to help track cat movements and check on their health, Gehrt found that 20 percent died during the two-year study period.
The findings offer some good news in an ongoing debate over feral cats and how they are handled. Many groups trap and sterilize feral cats and maintain them in colonies to help keep the population down.
Conservation groups, including the American Bird Conservancy, consider feral cats a threat to birds and wildlife, regardless of whether the cats are able to reproduce.
One recent study estimated that domestic and feral cats kill as many as 3.7 billion birds and 20.7 billion small mammals each year in the United States.
Gehrt said his new findings, published in the journal PLOS ONE, show that coyotes have reduced the cats’ ability to kill birds and other small animals in parks and nature preserves.
No one knows how many coyotes live in and around central Ohio. But Gehrt said he expects the population to continue climbing. And if Chicago serves as a model for Columbus, there should be fewer feral cats hanging around central Ohio parks.
The idea that feral cats have figured out how to survive among coyotes came as no surprise to Jay Mathew, a Columbus retiree who routinely traps the cats to be spayed and neutered.
“Cats are smart enough to adapt to almost anything humans can throw at them, as well as Mother Nature,” Mathew said.
Donald Burton, a veterinarian and CEO of the Ohio Wildlife Center, said he’s not sure how much of an effect coyotes would have on overall bird and small-mammal populations. Cats are responsible for 12 to 15 percent of the injured wild animals treated at the center, he said.
“Coyotes kill some wildlife, too,” Burton added.
Gehrt said he plans to more closely examine what feral cats hunt outside parks and preserves in an upcoming study.
“If they are moving out of the green spaces, they are potentially having impacts in those urban areas,” Gehrt said.