Coyotes

 Darwin said that when we’re talking about the survival of the fittest, we’re not talking about the strongest or most intelligent but about those that can adapt to change.

The coyote is an adaptable animal. As the human population has increased, coyotes have spread from the Southwest across the United States and Canada. Coyotes prevailed despite efforts to exterminate them.

You’d think that wolves, being bigger and stronger, would have fared better. But animals don’t just adapt to their environment. They also adapt within groups — within social structures.

Wolves have always been animals of the pack. They live within a rigid social structure. Coyotes are more flexible. They live alone, in pairs, in small groups and in packs.

I would love to better understand how that’s possible — how one species can incorporate greater flexibility in its social life.

I’d like to know whether human beings could do something similar — whether we could reorganize our social structures to do less damage to the environment, the habit we live in and depend on.

I’m reading Dan Flores’s Coyote America with pleasure. Flores loves coyotes as much as I do, although we see them from different points of view. Flores is interested in humanity’s tendency to see itself in the coyote, as I’ve just done with that crack about whether we humans could be as flexible as coyotes.

Flores’s thinking is heavy on history, anthropology and folklore. It’s fascinating, but I’m more interested in the biology — how it’s possible that one species of social animals can adapt when another cannot.

• Source and note: Dan Flores, Coyote America; New York: Basic Books, 2026. And thanks, Christopher, for the recommendation.