[00:00:00] Narration (Rae): This past spring when I was off on a trip doing bear work, I got a phone call from an administrator at my daughter’s elementary school explaining that she had broken down crying because she had been bullied on the playground. There’s a group of students that were playing.
She asked to play and the girls said, “No, you can’t play, it’s for white people only.” What I learned on the phone was that, through my daughter’s tears, she said, you know, “I don’t wanna go play today. I don’t have any friends and it’s because I’m Black.”
I workso hard to raise my children to be these well-rounded, you know, advocates, and yet all of that kind of goes out the window when they’re the ones, you know, experiencing racism.
So lately the question I’ve been asking myself is how do we raise resilient, adaptable kids, who will not only survive under these difficult circumstances, but more importantly, thrive?
Maybe the animal world has something to teach us.
[00:00:55] Narration (Rae): I’m Dr. Rae Wynn-Grant, and this is a different kind of Nature show: a podcast all about the human drama of saving animals. This season, I wanna share my story, but I also wanna introduce you to other amazing wildlife scientists. Some of my friends who study hyenas in Kenya, work with coyotes in California, and even track sharks. The animals we study are great, but who we are as people and how that affects our work is just as interesting.
And we’re gonna talk all about it. This is Going Wild.
Intro to Chris
[00:01:34] Narration (Rae): So after I got off the phone with my daughter’s school, it was so hard for me to shift back and focus on my work.
And I kept thinking, you know, here I am doing work to protect the bear population, but if I’m working for the betterment of the environment, you know, that includes the wellness of human beings too. And that includes me. It includes my daughter. And this emotional impact of racism, whether it’s me getting that call from my kid’s school or whether it’s watching racial violence play out on the news, you know, especially lately, I bring all of that to my job.
Even if all these incidents occurred outside of my workplace and not related to the science work that I’m doing, it still indirectly impacts my work. But for some scientists, this impact – the fear and the tension – is felt more directly in their day-to-day work.
Chris S.: Of all of the organisms that you wouldn’t necessarily expect to live in cities, there are the ones for sure that take the cake, right? You’d never expect coyotes to be as ubiquitous as they are.
Narration (Rae): Dr. Christopher Schell is an urban ecologist who studies coyotes. Some of his work is similar to mine: we both trap animals and then put GPS collars on them to track their movements. But while I’m collaring bears and lions in super remote parts of the world, Chris is trapping coyotes in cities.
Chris S.: And, as is the case with trapping urban carnivores, it’s mostly night work.
Narration (Rae): Because coyotes are nocturnal, Chris is often out and about in different parts of the city, checking on his animal traps, in the middle of the night, and for a Black man, this can be scary.
Like this one time, Chris was collaring coyotes in Denver, Colorado. He and his team had set up a camera trap – essentially a cage with a camera – near a baseball field. They’d been monitoring the trap waiting for a coyote to take the bait.
Chris S.: It was sometime around 1:30 AM that I get a call from Stewart.
Narration (Rae): Dr. Stewart Breck was Chris’s postdoctoral mentor. And he’d called to say, there’s a coyote in the trap: it’s go time.
Chris S.: My first son Cairo, he was two, three months, at that time, so already we weren’t sleeping.
And then all of a sudden, you have animals that you gotta go track and release. I then put on my field pants, which are next to the door, beause I knew I had to be ready to go just in case, grab coffee, and run to the car.
Narration (Rae): Chris drove to the site where he met Dr. Breck and four other people from the team. All of them were white except for Chris.
Chris S.: We’re then able to release the animal from the trap and then we anesthetize the animal.
[00:04:04] Narration (Rae): And they were getting ready to put the collar on the coyote.
[00:04:08] Chris S.: It was during that time where we had one of the police vehicles slowly roll towards us, and it was a little unnerving.
The cop turned on his lights in the car, shining the lights on us. And the animal had just fallen asleep. Any loud noises, bright lights, or sudden movements could instantly wake up the animal.
That’s not a good scenario because if an animal wakes up while it still is anesthetized and disoriented, it could run into the road and get hit. That’s on our watch.
So, two of us had hands on the animal, the other two on the team then go talk to said officer to let them know what we were doing.
Dr. Stewart Breck is there to kind of diffuse any potential, negative situation from arising.
So luckily it all got quelled and everything was fine. But in those few minutes of time, you’re thinking, if it was just me alone, I wouldn’t feel terribly safe in that situation.
[00:05:35] Narration (Rae): I can imagine how stressful those few minutes were. I mean, I would not wanna be alone on that field site either. I mean, imagine holding a sedated animal at three o’clock in the morning with the cops coming straight at me. Oh my gosh. But when you’re an urban ecologist, this is the kind of encounter that you actually need to be prepared for, because you’re not just gonna be dealing with wildlife, but all kinds of people from the community.
[00:06:14] Chris S.: From general bystanders, to those that are part of the unhoused community, to police and everything in between.
[00:06:25] Narration (Rae): And Chris actually loves this part of his job.
[00:06:37] Chris S.: We want folks to be curious about the wildlife around them. We want them to engage in conversation.
[00:06:44] Narration (Rae): But working in this kind of urban setting, navigating wildlife and people, wasn’t what he initially thought he’d be doing when he set out to study animals and become a wildlife ecologist.
[00:06:59] Chris S.: Before I started my graduate work I thought I was going to work on wolves in Yellowstone and African wild dogs. And right before I started my PhD I was told a story about a coyote.
News: Is it real? Oh yes. It is a wild coyote in the heart of the city. Anything could happen on the streets of Chicago!
[00:07:22] Chris S.: There was a coyote that walked into a Quiznos in downtown Chicago.
News reels
Chris S.: There were folks behind the counter making sandwiches and they all stopped what they’re doing.
News reels
[00:07:37] Chris S.: The coyote then proceeds to leisurely walk through the establishment and get into the drink cooler … stays there for 45 minutes and falls asleep
Narration (Rae): Eventually, animal control came and safely took the coyote away, but one thing stuck with Chris.
Even for animals, as bold as that one was that’s really unusual,
Chris S.: Why would coyotes walk into an especially human dominated environment? And ever since then, I was always hooked.
[00:08:07] Narration (Rae): And when it came time to decide what he wanted to study for his PhD, instead of wolves in Yellowstone, Chris decided to study coyotes in urban areas.
He wanted to figure out how the species had gotten so bold that that particular coyote would, you know, walk into a Quiznos.
What Chris learned that has informed everything about his work is that coyotes are incredibly adaptable animals.
For starters, let’s talk about how quickly coyotes were able to adapt to new environments.
In just over 100 years, coyotes were able to expand their territory from an area roughly one-third of the United States, to pretty much the whole country and beyond.
Chris S.: They have established populations already in Canada, and they likely, by the end of the century, will have established populations in South America.
Narration (Rae): It’s rare for animals to be so successful in adapting to new places in a relatively short amount of time, evolutionarily speaking. It usually takes multiple generations for a species to learn new behaviors to be able to survive in new environments.
But this wasn’t the case with coyotes.
Chris S.: Genetics as important as they are, don’t explain everything.
Narration (Rae): And so Chris set out to answer this question – How did coyotes become so bold and adaptable? And he found a possible answer in an unlikely place… his own life.
Around the same time that Chris was investigating the mysteries of coyotes, he became a parent.
Chris S.: Becoming a first time parent was a trip. Certainly, the first child I can attest, you’re more protective. Everything being a threat in the environment, every time the pacifier hit the ground, we got to sanitize it. You got to wash it, blah, blah, blah.
Narration (Rae): There were definitely times that I was a helicopter parent to my first child, Zuri, and interestingly, Chris was observing similar behavior with the coyote parents.
Chris S.: They would hover around their puppies. They would stay away from people as much as possible.
Narration (Rae): It was endearing and a little eerie seeing himself reflected in the animals he was studying. And then, Chris had his second child and things got even stranger.
Chris S.: When the second kid, when the second kid was born, when a pacifier, we hit the ground, we would just use our shirt, wipe it off and be like, keep it moving.
Narration (Rae): And once again, he was seeing the same thing happening with coyotes.
Chris S.: Come year two, we measure all of the parents with their second litters, those parents weathered the storm. They’re like, whatever these humans, they’re not going to do anything. Like y’all go ahead and eat. It showed in the puppies, they all were relatively bold.
Narration (Rae): So imagine with each litter, coyote parents are becoming more and more used to humans, and so do their pups. And over multiple generations, they get bolder and bolder.
Chris S.: The parents pick up cues from the environment and then say, here you go, offspring, this is what I’ve learned. I’m passing those lessons onto you.
Narration (Rae): This is a big deal because not all animals do this. The bears that I’ve studied don’t necessarily pass on behaviors from one generation to the next, the way coyotes are.
And this is a big reason why Chris thinks that as more and more parts of the country are getting developed, coyotes are making their way into cities and adapting into the urban landscape in a way that other animals aren’t.
Chris S.: There have been just more and more and more stories about coyotes doing extraordinary things like…
News reel
Hopping on a train in Portland,
News reel
Getting pizza from a vendor every other week in Huntington beach.
They are both exhilarating and a headache. Maybe it’s because I’m masochistic that I love these animals so much because they put us through the ringer, but I think that’s what’s so endearing about them.
Narration (Rae): You can tell how much Chris loves studying coyotes. And in just a few years, he’s learned so much about them. But the most surprising thing Chris discovered… that’s after the break.
14:22: MIDROLL
Narration (Rae): So as we’ve learned from Chris, coyotes are a fascinating species. Their boldness and adaptability make them both exhilarating and a headache.
And the kind of headache Chris is referring to are the conflicts that coyotes get into with humans. These conflicts aren’t usually attacks on people but instead more often than not, they involve pets. Chris told me about an incident in the Bay Area where he lives.
Chris S.: Someone’s cat was taken by a coyote and then few days later, a flier went up, essentially soliciting folks to kill said coyote, even though they didn’t necessarily know which individual did it and how could you? You just know that a coyote took your cat, but more or less, they put a bounty on the coyote.
Narration (Rae): Offering a bounty for dead coyotes is against state law. So they had to take down the flier, but the community sentiment is crystal clear.
And as more and more people live in neighborhoods in proximity to urban coyotes, these kinds of coyote-pet conflicts become way more common.
And the best way to avoid them is to take extra precautions, like keeping your distance from coyotes. Don’t feed them, don’t leave pet food outside, and most importantly, keep your pets indoors.
But of course, some pet owners want their pets to be able to roam free outside. And that’s when it’s the coyotes that get into trouble.
[00:14:25] Chris S.: The amount of fear that we lump on coyotes is disproportionate to the amount of harm that they actually, cause.
Oftentimes folks will think of them as almost as big as wolves, right? But they’re probably about half that size. Coyotes are no bigger than a medium sized dog.
Most folks think, oh, the coyote will bite my kid. I’m really scared of it. Or it will kill me in some instances, not true. You’re more likely to be attacked by a dog at any given point in time in your environment than you are to be attacked by a coyote but we don’t have nearly as much fear of domestic dogs as we do with coyotes and other carnivores.
So it’s sort of mythological, honestly.
Narration (Rae): And here’s where the parallels between Chris and coyotes run even deeper than parenting.
Chris S.: The way in which folks talk about coyotes, they are oftentimes vilified as threats to human livelihood; as dangerous disease ridden pests that need to be eradicated, euthanized, killed. And that’s exactly what the black experience is, right? For the majority of Black America’s history, we’ve been vilified, taken advantage of, exploited, Black bodies have been murdered.
If I’m being honest with myself, a lot of us do the research that we do because we are on a journey of self discovery. I am studying coyotes to learn more about the ways in which they persist, even though they’re being persecuted all of the time.
Narration (Rae): And what Chris learned from his research was that part of being adaptable meant coming up with new survival strategies. He’d witnessed coyotes do this, but they’re not the only ones… Humans do this, too. Chris had firsthand experience of this growing up. His parents taught him crucial skills to survive as a Black child in America.
[00:15:39] Chris S.: I was raised with the Bloods and the Crips in LA. So I had family members that were adjacent to gangbangers. My parents knew that in order for me to be able to transcend all of that, you need to follow this line.
Certainly “successful” meant having some type of job or profession that was long-term and was well-paying. Don’t try and save the planet, just try and make money. That was told to me multiple times.
[00:16:43] Narration (Rae): Following this path of work hard, get a good job, make a better life, required Chris to learn how to adapt and be flexible.
[00:16:56] Chris S.: Some of the lessons that you learn as a Black person being raised in America is how to code-switch, right? So, how do you comport yourself in different spaces that may or may not be inhospitable to your experiences or your self-expression?
[00:17:05] Narration (Rae): And of course, I also learned to code-switch when I was really young and we didn’t really call it code-switching back then, but, you know, I’d watch my mom and especially my dad who was a professor and I would see him in his academic mode, you know, speaking a certain way, dressed a certain way, kind of presenting a certain way as a Black man in academia.
And then, you know, later that day I’d see him on the basketball court with his friends, talking smack to each other on the court. And I could definitely delineate that he wasn’t bringing that part of himself to work.
[00:17:38] Chris S.: And it doesn’t just have to be spoken language. Sometimes it could be body language. Sometimes it could be the ways in which we behave in certain contexts. So then that way you can fit. So in that way, you can morph enough to not raise suspicion.
[00:17:54] Narration (Rae): And in many ways for Chris, those strategies, his parents gave him really paid off. He’s been able to have a successful career in academia where he often has to navigate white spaces.
But knowing how to code-switch, and always being mindful of how he carries himself and what he looks like in different spaces, is not only useful in climbing the ladders of academic institutions. As a Black man doing scientific field work in urban areas, knowing how to present himself in different situations is unfortunately a matter of safety. And sometimes even survival.
When Chris goes off to do field work, there are a few things he always keeps in mind.
[00:18:41] Chris S.: What we wear is important.
I wear easily identifiable clothes that are affiliated with the University of California, Berkeley.
I have my badge and ID on my hip. So then that way folks are able to see it easily and readily.
Do our white colleagues have to do all of this? Yeah, some of it. Are they as cognizant about what they wear their clothes? Maybe not.
I’m thinking about, you know, wearing clothes that look more field appropriate. I’m not thinking that I can grab a hoodie because of Trayvon Martin.
[00:19:20] Narration (Rae): This type of awareness is always at the back of his mind. Maybe not always consciously, but it factors into how he interacts with people. And sometimes the best way to interact is to let other people around him handle the situation, like that night in Denver, when Chris and his team encountered the police on the baseball field.
[00:19:58] Chris S.: This is another coyote pun: were my hackles raised? Yeah. Pretty much.
And it should be noted that even though I had my own individual anxieties, especially around the time when many Black folks were being gunned down by police at that same time. And I had a three-month-old son in my head at that moment, I knew we were relatively safe, and safe from the police in particular, because I was surrounded by five other white dudes that were 5’10” or taller.
I knew they were going to handle the situation. I was just like, thinking this animal needs to be safe and I’m not going to go talk to the police right now. That’s not my job. I’m staying with the animal.
Now, if it was an all Black team, that may have been different.
But guess what? I learned from my parents on how to code-switch. To any police officer, if they ever ask, I’m more than happy to tell them, like the work that we do and have them involved.
Being able to strike a conversation with anybody is another skill that I learned from my parents that I certainly would have been able to use that skill to be able to keep me and my team safe.
And I know I’m going to have to do that in the future because the majority of my lab are persons of color.
[00:21:12] Narration (Rae): And he has had to do that and he’s always been prepared.
[00:21:17] Chris S.: It still makes you nervous. Even though you’re armed with all of the potential tools to help you come away with a positive interaction, sometimes it’s not up to you.
[00:21:30] Narration (Rae): I had this conversation with Chris only one week after the Buffalo, New York mass shooting, where 10 Black people were killed by a gunman in their local grocery store. These people were simply grocery shopping and a young man who had so thoroughly bought into racism and believed that Black people were such a huge threat, decided to open fire.
And as parents, when we hear things like this on the news, of course we immediately think of our children, right? And as Black parents, this is especially scary.
I mean even if we’re not talking about something as extreme as a mass shooting, more casual racism is already playing out in our children’s lives.
Chris S.: Have they experienced their own forms of microaggressions and racism? Yeah. They already have, they’re 6 and 4. There’s nothing else I can say other than this is still currently the state of America and we still have a lot of work to do.
If we know that the rest of the environment outside of our doors isn’t safe for Black boys, how do we create that safety within our home and within themselves? This is hard. This is really, really hard.
Narration (Rae): As Chris knows from his own experience, part of raising resilient, adaptable kids is teaching them behaviors that’ll help them flourish in the world they’re born into.
Chris’s parents taught him how to code-switch and they encouraged him to work hard, get a good job, but times have changed.
Chris S.: When we were growing up, doing as much as you possibly can to be as successful as possible, which oftentimes was code for making a whole lot of money, doesn’t really fit in this current era, given the fact that the world is both literally and figuratively on fire.
Narration (Rae): Chris is trying to channel his inner coyote-ness and be an adaptable parent. And that means passing on new and different behaviors to his kids, than the ones his parents taught him.
Chris S.: I swear I did not force them to be interested in all things wildlife, but they are. They have their own garden. They take care of all of the ladybugs that live in our backyard. They pay attention to the crane flies that fly around. They pay attention to the different types of spiders that live in the environment. They listen for the birds. They take a look at the different plants and what grows where and why. They provide food to those plants.
Narration (Rae): In an era where everything from climate change to systemic oppression is pervasive, Chris knows that the only way for his kids, and the world to survive, is for them to learn how to care for and get along with everything in the natural world, and of course this includes coyotes.
Chris recognizes that sometimes, coyotes can be hard to love. But then, he thinks about that coyote that walked into the Quiznos and the evolutionary journey it took to get there, and he remembers how truly amazing this animal is.
Chris S.: Coyotes aren’t going anywhere. They’re figuring out different ways to make it work, even when they are being vilified, even when they provide to the environment in spades, and they’re going to continue to do so, even when folks don’t want them to.
Narration (Rae): And this is where Chris sees the most powerful parallel between coyotes and the Black experience
Chris S.: They had been thrown a bunch of things that aren’t necessarily great and turning art out of it. And that’s Black joy, right? To be able to be joyous even in an environment that wants to suppress and squash your joy.
[00:27:39]: To be able to make lemonade out of lemons… Beyonce-style. That is quintessential coyote-ness.
PICKUP 4
Narration (Rae): And so, when he’s parenting, this is what Chris strives for too. Because the only way he can raise resilient, adaptable children with the mass shootings and climate change and the awfulness in the world is to teach them ways to find joy within themselves.
And this is how I raise my kids too.
And you know, it would be nice if this is where the story ends: with this hopeful vision of Black parents raising resilient, joyful children despite a world that’s hostile to them.
But the truth is, it’s not all up to us. Because I think back to my daughter crying on the phone after she had just experienced racism in the playground. I mean, yes, I raise my Black children to be resilient, but you know what? It would be nice for my children to not have to be resilient all the time.
Chris S.: so I can raise my kid as adaptable and resilient as possible as individuals, but they’re not going to be resilient to mass shootings. Like, there’s no way to individually bootstrap ourselves out of this. It has to be community-led.
Narration (Rae): Chris and I, as Black parents, we can’t do this on our own. We need all parents to teach their children to care for and get along with everything in the natural world — this includes other people, all people, other species, and the environment. That’s the only way that we’re all going to thrive as a community.
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This episode of Going Wild was hosted by me, Dr. Rae Wynn-Grant.
Episode guest: Christopher Schell
Dr. Rae Wynn-Grant – Host and Writer
Jakob Lewis — Sr. Producer/Editor
Rachel Aronoff — Editor
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Fred Kaufman – Executive Producer, Nature
Art for this podcast was created by Arianna Bollers and Karen Brazell.
Special thanks to Blanche Robertson, Jayne Lisi and the rest of the Nature team.
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