It’s getting ridiculous. Here we live some 15 minutes away from the center of a medium-sized city, and yet it feels like we are out in the woods, something we cherish – in principle. We love the trees, the seclusion, the birds. We tolerate the various critters, from field mice to wood rats to rabbits that share our vegetable garden.

We have gotten used to the deer that eat everything from my peas to my hostas to my roses, forgiving their rapacious appetites that even empty the bird feeders directly in front of our windows for the pleasure of seeing “real” wildlife cross our yard several times a week.

Then there are the coyotes. What used to be an occasional sighting during dawn or dusk on the road (a road jokingly known as coyote highway, since it connects several neighborhood parks and ravines,) has now become almost a daily occurrence, during all times of the day. In our yard, where all these photos were taken, as well as the street.

Not only that. Last week our substantially-sized dog, a German Shorthair pointer, ran out, barking his head off when he saw the coyote standing right next to our wheelbarrow. The coyote fled into the trees, only to re-emerge within seconds and approaching the dog, face to face, with a “play-with-me” downward dog posture, only to depart when we started screaming in order to get our dog back to safety, me with camera in hand.

Downward coyote….

Corner of the wheelbarrow lower left

Sniffing the garden bench….

It is half scary, half wondrous to see a wild animal so close. Clearly they have increasingly habituated to human locations. Part of that is our own fault. Although we keep our garbage cans closed (when there are increasing numbers of coyotes with fewer prey spread between them, they tend to go for the garbage,) we do have bird feeders. Feeder spill attracts rodents, which in turn attract coyotes. So far they have not shown signs of aggression to humans, respond with flight when we stand our ground and yell at them or wave our arms, but that might change in May when they have pups. It means always having the dog on leash, and never ever have small kids unsupervised in the yard.

We started to keep count of the daily showing, both in the garden and on our walks in the neighborhood. It is not unusual to see three or four during a single 24 hr period. Which brings me to citizen science. It is pretty amazing how much of scientific knowledge these days can be and is crowd- sourced. Here is an informative NPR podcast about what citizen science is and how ordinary people like you and I can participate in meaningful ways.

How do you do it? You can sign up on apps and websites that steer you to the right ways of observation, recording and sharing of data. Here is an example from Scientific American. You can go to CitizenScience.gov or SciStarter and see which projects tickle your curiosity. If you’re already hooked on something, why, birds come to mind, you can go to specialty programs like iNaturalist or eBird. The Audubon Society has a great Backyard Bird count every February where you can count the birds for 15 minutes to help establish which species flourish and which are on the decline. Not only will your observations help advance science but there is the additional benefit of sharing in conversation with other like minded people, no small thing in these times of isolation for many of us.

“The wisdom of the crowds” was a concept that popped up as early as 1906 when Sir Francis Galton, horrid eugenicist as well as gifted scientist, let’s face it, analyzed bets about the weight of an ox at the country fair. He realized that the average of all bets came within a hair’s width of the actual weight of the bovine. Collective wisdom was superior to any one individual guess. Aggregate answers are only superior, however, if certain conditions are present:

• The guesses have to be independent of each other – you cannot be influenced by other people’s assumptions.
• You need to have diverse guesses – people from all over the spectrum, from experts to laypeople who do not share the same biases.
• There is a need for decentralization – people need to draw on their own, private, local knowledge.
• Data need to be aggregated. You can take averages, but there are other forms as well.

The areas in which citizen scientists can make contributions are endless. A quick look at the reports unveils topics as widely disseminated as bird populations, migration patterns, bees, mushrooms, frogs, decline in ice sheets on northern lakes, northern lights, ticks, small stream flow, archeological looting and even new planets. (Ref.) Well, maybe not endless. The search for signs of extraterrestrial life by citizen scientist, an enterprise offered by UCal Berkeley’s SETI Research Center, shut down 3 years ago. SETI@home, a two-decades-old crowdsourcing effort to hunt for signs of E.T. in radio telescope data using internet-connected computers, was terminated because “we were scientifically at the “point of diminishing returns.”

I guess I stick to counting coyotes.

Music today- Joni Mitchell no regrets coyote…. about very different kinds of tricksters…