The great coyote hunt

Part II: Pre-dawn searching in the South Loop's wildest real estate

07/08/2009 10:00 PM

By DAN KELLY
Contributing Reporter

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Dan Kelly combed through the 62 acres of vacant land at Clark and Roosevelt May 23 in search of a coyote. He didn't find one in the flesh but discovered something equally as fascinating about the nature in our midst.
Photos by JENNIFER WOLFE/Contributor

The Diarist
In last week’s Chicago Journal, we published Part I of Dan Kelly’s search for coyotes in the 62-acre vacant parcel at the southwest corner of Clark and Roosevelt, the South Loop’s wildest, most natural piece of land.

“I hear the sad howling of coyotes prowling/It sounds so mournful to me,” sang the Delmore Brothers, an early country duet act. But they were talking about a cowpoke on the run from Texas rangers across the lone prairie, not a city dude standing at the edge of a parcel of undeveloped land with binoculars, a digital camera and a Moleskine. The only law enforcement worrying me was a member of Chicago’s finest sitting in his patrol car by 16th Street. I wondered if he’d wonder what the hell I was doing out there. If he saw me though, he didn’t seem to care.

I walked into the empty 62 acres that stretch over the southwest corner of Roosevelt and Clark on May 23 at 5:30 a.m. The sun’s rays stretched out, tingeing everything with a pinkish hue. Slowly, the green asserted dominance as the sunlight poured in. It was quiet and cool. Newly awakened birdies cheeped forcefully in the boughs of the linden trees and assorted bushes popping out of the prairie grass. Beyond the birds’ kvetching, it was pretty quiet, and though the multiple crisscrossing tracks promised the eventual earth-shaking roar and keening whistle of a Metra train, none came during my visit.

In my search for an urban coyote, I was joined by photographer Jennifer Wolfe, whose surname, I hoped, was a good sign. Wolves and coyotes, I had learned, do not like one another. Wolfe suggested we might be on a wild goose chase, and I was prone to agree. Beyond the smallest of varmints and a slight breeze, nothing was stirring. I didn’t even get the impression we were being watched by beady little eyes while tongues ran along sharp little teeth.

I wouldn’t call the lot’s foliage nature proper. I’ve walked and driven through forests, across prairies, and over mountains, and to my eye this was not “the wild.” While trees, tall grass, dandelions, and thistles, and minor marshes were all present, it all lacked National Geographic oomph when skyscrapers intrude on your peripheral vision. The crunch of gravel and wood chips, and the sight of piles of railroad ties and concrete slabs show an all-too-human influence in the area. Nature may be reclaiming this parcel of land, but only ever so slightly.



But Riverside Park or what-have-you is not soft, sweet, untouched, and pastoral Nature. It’s Nature that’s more than a little ticked off.

Peevishly and passive-aggressively, Nature is trying to wrest back what was taken away back when they were driving the first nails into Fort Dearborn. I talk to the trees thrusting upwards from jagged cracks in the gravel, and they tell me, “You won’t be here forever. We’ll see you, all of you, beneath us eventually.” The railroad tracks are metal scar tissue, slowly overgrown with a lush green skin. The gravel paths, debilitated, sprout full grass and weed beards. The trees spring up from the gravel like outstretched middle fingers pointing northward at the skyline. The Sears Tower, I realize, is a future trellis for clinging vines.

I walked on through the false veldt. The river calmly burbled at the west end, the iron dinosaur skeletons of railroad bridges impassively straddling it. If you’ve ever driven down the Dan Ryan, you’ve probably caught a glimpse of the bridges. Built in 1930 after they straightened and widened the river, the B&OCT line carried Baltimore and Ohio Railroad choo-choos cross the muddy river to Grand Central Station — a 19th Century architectural jewel sitting at 201 W. Harrison — for years. In 1971, the station was demolished, the Pere Marquette and the B&O trains were rerouted, the tracks were disposed of, and the B&OCT bridge was locked into an upright position while the St. Charles Air Line bridge remained down and in service. As bascule bridges, they share a system of weights and counterweights to operate. Thus, in a Siamese twin’s dilemma, the B&OCT can’t be removed without rendering the St. Charles useless.

All very interesting. But where were the coyotes? Dawn had cracked loudly by this point, and I felt my chances of seeing a Canis latrans vanishing

My first encounter with local fauna was a common grey squirrel, zipping across my path and into the tall grass as if his posterior was on fire. He appeared used to moving quickly. The lot’s unofficial status as a wildlife conservatory became more evident as other animals popped in and out of the grass and trees as I walked by: birds, mostly robins, sparrows and black birds playing peek-a-boo in the trees and the corners of my eyes. At one point, I saw a bunny-rabbit, edgily looking at me over his shoulder, wondering if I had a taste for hasenpfeffer.

Looking closely at the ground, my long-dormant Boy Scout training clicked into action. There I saw the evidence that Mr. Rabbit and Mr. Squirrel had something to fear. Patches of dried-up mud showed the distinctive closed paw shape of Señor Coyote. Like a colored insert in a nature guidebook come to life, the coyote tracks stood beside the wide-toed evidence of visiting dogs, as well as human footprints and a jagged bicycle track from a visitor who had a near-wipeout in a mud patch.

But human spoor — the plastic, paper and paint kind — prevailed. We saw the work of uninterrupted graffiti artists, colorful hieroglyphics lacquering the underbelly of a bridge on the south end. The area has a reputation as a party place, and no doubt attracts the homeless as well. Here and there rested candy wrappers, killed rum bottles, food storage containers, railroad ties stacked like giant bonfires, shaving cream cans, huffing materials, condoms, the graves of dead campfires and the inevitable abandoned male underpants. Beneath the bridge I half-expected to find time-warped ’70s graffiti, or perhaps even a hobo convention. I was more surprised we found no one at all.

As the sun rose the mosquitoes came alive, briefly, sharpening their proboscises and thinking of yummy blood. I brushed away a few that seemed largely sluggish with morning chill. I kept thinking of Wile E. Coyote’s business cards —Wile E. Coyote: Super Genius. The coyotes were certainly too smart for me that morning. Either that or my manly scent of soap and Speed Stick tipped them off. Was it not the philosopher Jeff Goldblum who asked, and I paraphrase, “Now eventually you might have coyotes on your coyote tour, right?” No, apparently not today. But I did get something out of the trip.

It’s nice to see a thatch of untamed land in eyeshot of downtown. Even better, it’s good to know nature and civilization can shake hands once in a while. Dr. Lawrence Heaney, head of the mammals division at the Field Museum, put it to me nicely:

“We live in a natural world. We modify it tremendously, but we don’t control it entirely. And the organisms that we live with are going to adapt to the conditions that we create.”

As for Riverside Park, aka 16th Street Crossing, aka post-Apocalypseland, some folks are unimpressed with the idea of development. Standing on the staircase of the 16th Street watchtower, Roderic, a Metra employee who only gave his first name, cast his gaze across 62 acres of Chicago wild land. A craggily character with capital C’s, he told me about watching coyotes scamping and romping about, chasing rabbits many a time while working a shift. But like neighbors to the empty land, he mostly heard them as the trains whistled by, answering these manmade sounds with feral yips and yowls.

“It’s a nice forest preserve,” Roderic told me.

He doesn’t see why they need to change anything or to disturb the coyotes. “They’re not bothering anyone,” he said.

Maybe just the rabbits.


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