A coyote walks into a Quiznos: What urban wildlife can teach us about ourselves

In April of 2007, a coyote walked into a Quiznos in downtown Chicago. It walked inside the front door, right into a fast food restaurant full of people. And then, it sat in a soda cooler for an hour. It was an event so rare, it made the evening news.

“It's not every day that you see a wild animal essentially say, ‘This will do; this is part of my territory too,’” said Professor Chris Schell, a researcher who focuses on urban wildlife at the University of California, Berkeley.

“That is very aberrant behavior. For those of y'all listening to this podcast, that's not normal. So to have that happen in downtown Chicago was mind boggling.”

Why did the coyote walk into the Quiznos? How was it so tolerant of people? It's not normal for a wild animal to be less than six feet away from a human without a care. These are all questions that Schell has been asking as part of his work as an urban ecologist.

“‘Cause most people thought that cities were inhospitable, that they couldn't foster any life. And what we're finding is that no, in fact, life — this is a Jeff Goldblum line — finds a way, right? Life is finding a way in cities, so much so that it is subverting the ways in which we thought about nature. It is resulting in a paradigm shift for how we understand our role in this entire process,” said Schell.