They can also volunteer for the analysis team to help examine scat contents, a 1-3 day commitment per month. No experience is required, but these citizen scientists must attend a training on Saturday, June 4, to learn proper scat collection procedures, and will perform walking surveys on a monthly basis starting in June. The more the merrier." And yes, he really said that.įrom the NPS news release on the Coyote Scat Team: "And we're basically looking to collect as many samples as we can get.
It's a commitment of a few days a month, for up to two years. "We are looking for around 20 volunteers to help collect poop," Brown said, "and then we're looking for another 10 to 20 volunteers to help us analyze what's in the poop." "Is it fruit from people's trees, rats, possums, skunks, raccoons, people's cats?" Brown asked. NPS biologist Justin Brown says "there's been a lot of work done in a lot of suburban settings," where coyotes move back and forth from natural areas into urban areas, but there really hasn't been much work done at all on coyotes that live completely within the urban matrix, in little parks and vacant lots, and places like that."īrown says researchers need to know how these urban coyotes survive, and so they need to know what the animals eat, which can be determined from the coyotes' scat.
But now, as part of their urban coyote study, they're turning to a much more habitat-fragmented swath of urban LA that runs from Boyle Heights to Beverly Hills, including East L.A., Echo Park, El Sereno, Hollywood, Lincoln Heights, Los Feliz, Mount Washington, and Westlake. and discovered they ate lots of rabbits (appropriately), mice, backyard fruit, and the rare pet cat. But if poop's not a problem for you, the National Park Service needs you.įrom 1996 to 2004, National Park Service researchers from the Santa Monica Mountains National Recreation Area studied coyotes in the suburban Conejo Valley - Agoura Hills, Thousand Oaks, Newbury Park, etc. If you're coprophobic - afraid of feces - stop reading now.
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