By March Twisdale
For eons, there were no coyotes on Vashon Island. For 10,000 years (or longer), human beings have lived in and around the Puget Sound, along with wolves and bears and cougars and many other animals native to this region. But not coyotes.
We humans are native to this land. And, like all creatures, we defend ourselves against predators that threaten our safety, our homes, our animals, and our territory. This is natural.
Native Americans did not sit idly by when top predators unwisely intruded upon human-claimed space. Nuisance animals were hunted down and killed. Their skin, fur, teeth, and bones were put to good use, as humans and their chosen animals (traditionally dogs, but later, horses) went about their much safer lives due to the lessening of a predator threat.
Over time, new Americans arrived on this continent. Their numbers were greater and they also worked to eliminate the threat of top predators. Over time, much of the continental U.S. was emptied of wolvesk and into that void came the coyotes.
This is the origin of the problem, but there’s more to the story.
Human beings change the world they inhabit, and that change is not reversible. Going back in time is for fantasy and science fiction novels.
When it comes to managing invasive species, we need to lean into reality. This begins by treasuring the ecosystem humans have created on Vashon. Today – our Island offers much greater food diversity, thanks to the many thousands of humans who have (over two centuries) introduced myriad edible plants, berries, vines, tubers, and disease-resistant trees loaded with an abundance of fruits and nuts. We even brought the European honey bee! And, of course, our Island is dripping in milk, grass-fed meat, and pasture-raised birds/eggs.
The arrival of Coyotes threatens this human-made ecosystem, and many Islanders want to see this invasive species removed entirely. But they are silent. Why?
It could be the gaslighting: “Coyotes aren’t killing pets on the Island, they just go missing for other reasons.” Or, the blaming: “You need to lock up all of your animals 24/7. If you don’t, it’s your fault they get killed.” For cats, it’s the shaming: “Don’t you know how many songbirds domesticated cats kill?”
The truth is, most domesticated cats (on Vashon) are carefully managed by loving families that invest heavily in their health and well-being. They provide incalculable value as “fur-babies and family members,” and even more value to homeowners, gardeners, and farmers by keeping the rodent population in check.
Coyote packs, on the other hand, directly harm our efforts to increase our food resiliency. Coyote packs are making “pasture-raised” a thing of the past, as they hunt at all hours of the day, making even fancy barns and night-time lock up practices insufficient to protect livestock and backyard flocks. Coyote packs are also devastating migratory wild birds, directly contradicting the goals of the Audubon Society and Vashon-Maury Island Land Trust.
And it’s only getting worse. Because, coyote packs are smart. They conserve energy. Why chase a lean, low-calorie, hard-to-catch deer for two hours, when you can slaughter penned-in domesticated livestock in three minutes flat? Vashon Island is OUR Island. The domesticated livestock are our farm animals. The pets are our fur babies. And, the small children running around on acreage and quiet trails are our children. As coyote populations rise, resource competition increases, and the packs run up against our watery boundaries, predation pressures will increase on all domesticated animals AND small humans will begin to look appetizing. This has already happened elsewhere in America.
We have a choice to make. For better or worse, Vashon Island is our resource. our human-created environment. Our chosen, developed, planned out, and well-endowed Island ecosystem. And there is no way that coyote packs are going to fit. None.
If we’d been more mature, more realistic, more honest 10 to 12 years ago, we’d have petitioned the state to immediately fund an effort to “capture and remove” or “capture and euthanize” this invasive species while its population was still small. The state knows that coyote reproduction (when they invade a new space) is a hockey stick: small, gradual increases for a few years followed by a rapid explosion in numbers.
We have reached the leading edge of that hockey stick, and our community is feeling the effects. Every week, there are Facebook posts about disappearances. Many, many more stories never land on Facebook, but if you ask 10 Islanders about coyotes, you’ll hear at least 8 stories of death to pets or livestock.
If this bothers you, good. We should be bothered. It’s our duty to protect our animals, and that doesn’t mean importing millions of dollars worth of lumber, tons of cement, and thousands of rolls of wire, all for coyote-proof barns. It doesn’t mean covering the island in hundreds of livestock guardian dogs who bark constantly, cost a fortune to feed, and tend to roam. It doesn’t mean raising penned in, grain-fed flocks that produce poor quality eggs and meat, while our wide-open pastures sit fallow.
It means, we do the hard thing, and we eliminate the coyote packs.
Editor’s Note:
See last year’s article, Vashon Has a Coyote Problem for additional information.
A series of coyote attacks on children in Bellevue were reported by Fox 13 Seattle on March 13, 2025.
Coyote nearly drags 5-year-old into forest until mom steps in, Washington officials say – from Tacoma’s The News Tribune, January 3, 2025. Contains links to two separate incidents in Colorado .
