Coyotes and Bobcats and Bears, Oh My in RI!

Illustration by Emily Rietzel/Coyote photography courtesy of The Conservation Agency/Narragansett Bay Coyote Study. Bobcat release photo courtesy of Amy Mayer.

He had one — no, two.

Or maybe just a pair of racoons. They tend to travel in groups.

Christopher Hickling headed for the two traps set off a winding backroad in Charlestown. Sub-freezing temperatures had held the New Year’s Day snowfall to the ground, and the wind chill pushed the thermometer down further, but a pink streak on the horizon promised a sunny day. Hickling, a natural resources science graduate student at the University of Rhode Island, had been driving around since 7:30 a.m. with an antenna slapped on the roof of “Pothole,” the university’s Toyota Tacoma, its wire threaded through the driver’s side window into the radio, listening for the beeps signaling that a curious animal had tripped a cage door shut.

Hickling and Kathleen Carroll, a URI assistant professor of applied quantitative ecology, had been trapping and collaring bobcats since December as part of a research project with the Rhode Island Department of Environmental Management, the Wildlife Clinic of Rhode Island and local land trusts to understand the return of a native predator. By the end of January, they had a study sample of five males and four females.

“Bobcats were extirpated from the state through persecution, trapping, poisoning, things like that,” says Carroll. “But they’ve come back on their own. And having carnivores is critical for ecosystem health. They control rodent population and disease. It’s important for vegetation communities. They’re part of this giant food web, so it’s important to have some predators on the landscape.”

Which predators on which landscape is always in flux as habitat changes by man or nature’s hand, and, in turn, the opportunities for food, shelter and reproduction change. The Rhode Island Bobcat Project is one of the latest efforts to assess this balance. Other scientists have been examining the rise of the coyote population, the trickle of black bears into the state and the decline of fishers and foxes. These tallies are conducted for scientific interest, but they can also inform public policy and human behavior.

Biologist Numi Mitchell is president of The Conservation Agency, a Jamestown-based scientific not-for-profit. She had been working on habitat restoration in Turks and Caicos for the endangered rock iguana when life circumstances recentered her research in Rhode Island on one of the state’s most abundant species: coyotes. Over the last century, the adaptable and socially organized Canis latrans has spread from the Midwestern prairies to the entire continental United States. They arrived here in the mid-1960s and have flourished.

“We wanted to look at exactly how the species is using the components of their ecosystem — the biological community and the physical components.” Like all predators, coyotes’ population size is linked to food resources and competition, Mitchell says. “If we could identify what resources were making them abundant, we could potentially control coyote numbers passively.” 

Photography courtesy of The Conservation Agency/Narragansett Bay Coyote Study.

In 2005, the Narragansett Bay Coyote Study began trapping coyotes on Aquidneck and Conanicut islands and outfitting them with technologically advanced GPS collars that provided real-time tracking to see where they sheltered, traveled, mated and foraged. After a year, the maps of daytime, nighttime and twilight pathways looked like the “cocoon of a silkworm, something that was very tightly woven,” Mitchell says, with lines marking the boundaries of a pack’s territory and intersections at food resources.   

It turned out that a human is a coyote’s best friend: highway motorists who struck and killed deer, farmers who disposed of dead livestock in unprotected piles, kind souls who fed feral cat colonies, composters. Coyotes are versatile predators whose natural diet of small mammals, geese and fawns was being subsidized by thousands of pounds of human-supplied food each year.

Mitchell used this information to test the effect of removing scavenging opportunities — collecting roadkill and corralling livestock remains — on the coyote population. She found that when food sources are removed, coyotes will increase territory size without changing pack size, creating lower density. Fewer coyotes spread over greater distances would result in fewer negative interactions between coyotes and humans, she theorized. This data became the basis of a science-based coyote management plan that included assistance to farmers and the DEM with animal remains disposal, a no-feeding ordinance and a police protocol. Mitchell hopes to persuade the General Assembly to pass legislation that would put the plan into action statewide.

“The coyote research started because coyotes and people were in conflict with each other. And it really showed that we needed to change our behavior to be safer around these new and returned animals to our environment,” says David Gregg,

executive director of the Rhode Island Natural History Survey. “We need to learn to adapt to coyotes, because the joke is that coyotes are bears with training wheels. If we can’t learn how to live safely with coyotes, we’re in for a world of trouble when we get bears back in Rhode Island in large numbers.”

The DEM estimates that the number of potential resident black bears in the state is no more than ten, with some transients passing through. Other New England states have seen their populations rebound along with the forests that were cleared for agriculture in the 1850s, in tandem with the elimination of bounties and hunting laws restricting their harvest.

Ben Kilham, of the Kilham Bear Center in Lyme, New Hampshire, says that humans and bears can coexist peacefully — if humans adjust. He has been studying bear behavior and rehabilitating injured, abandoned and orphaned cubs since 1993.

“All the issues with bears come from humans and food attractants, like unsecured trash and bird feeders. I’ve spent my life trying to educate people not to be afraid of bears,” he says. “But there is a level of fear, and it’s unfounded because bears have no interest in people, only in food we leave around.”

DEM Furbearer Biologist Laken Ganoe expects this lesson is in Rhode Island’s future and hopes to initiate a bear tracking study to better understand if and how bears are establishing a population in our state.

“We’re having bears come in from Connecticut and Massachusetts, where they have really thriving populations, and they’re starting to disperse down into our state, so we are likely to get more sightings in the next few years here,” she says.

While many humans may not be interested in a close encounter with a predator, these sightings nevertheless seem to delight us.

Photography courtesy of Chris Hickling.

The antics of a bobcat and her three kits tickled Carla Davis, a small business owner and alpaca farmer in South Kingstown, just before Christmas. From her back deck overlooking an old cranberry
bog, she spied the family silhouetted against the dun-colored brambles, sauntering over the ice.

“We’ve seen bobcats on the property over the years, many times. But I’ve never seen three babies frolicking around, acting like kittens and having a wonderful time. When the mother came out, one of them fell through the ice. She stood there and made sure it could get out before she herded them all over to the side.”

In its first two months, the Bobcat Project was flooded with more than 830 citizen science reports from all over Rhode Island. Elise Torello’s YouTube channel of woodland creatures passing through her untamed backyard has attracted thousands of views. She started in late 2015 with one inexpensive camera that morphed into six, all recording wildlife within about a quarter mile of her South Kingstown house, fortuitously situated near two freshwater ponds separated by a narrow strip of land. The videos have featured great horned owls, coyotes, red foxes, fishers, river otters, bobcats and a bear once in June 2024.

“If we want to have these amazing creatures around us, we have to have the open space, the healthy habitat, the clean water and the clean air for them to continue to survive around us, because I think their resilience is really inspirational when people are feeling kind of overwhelmed,” she says.

The Bobcat Project’s goal is to trap and collar thirty animals this winter and next, collecting tracking data through 2028. Carroll hopes the information will help conservation groups and land trusts better understand how to preserve the bobcat’s habitat, contribute to the DEM’s overall wildlife management plan, and educate landowners to reduce possible conflicts.

Hickling peered into the first cage, hoping against racoons, which chew the metal cage wires and generally make a mess.

“Bobcat!” he texted Carroll.

He checked the second cage a short distance away.

“OMG. We got another cat!”

The team quickly assembled its gear and headed to Charlestown, where it would anesthetize, weigh and swab the animals for diseases, take blood samples, and fit them with GPS collars to track their movements for fourteen months before the collars fall off. The bobcats are monitored for body temperature, heart and respiration rates as the scientists establish their baseline biological profiles, to ensure that the animals are tolerating the anesthesia well. Then they administer a reversal drug, and the cat is transferred to a large dog carrier to recover.

By 10 a.m. the female was upright, and the draped cage began to thump with impatience. Bobcats six and seven — a female they nicknamed Plover and a small male dubbed Eider — were perhaps a mating couple. In time, the collars would tell. Caroll and Hickling would have liked to keep her a little longer to ensure that the cat was fully alert, but they didn’t want to confine the male in the second cage much longer.

Hickling lifted the tarp and opened the carrier door. The cat bound out in a flash of brown and dashed this way and that, behind a scrim of spindly pines, as though she wasn’t sure what to do with her freedom. Caroll and Hickling stood tall and waved their arms overhead to shepherd her away from the road.

Plover finally turned tail.

“Good girl!” Carroll cried.

Then she disappeared into the woods.

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Ellen Liberman is an award-winning journalist and columnist who has commented on politics and reported on government affairs for more than four decades.