Watch These Six Wild Coyote Pups Take Over A Portland Backyard
Trail cameras installed in an overgrown Southeast Portland backyard have captured something that most city dwellers never get to see up close: a thriving coyote family of eight, including two parents and six playful pups, going about their daily lives in the middle of one of Oregon's largest cities. The video below shows the pups doing exactly what six young animals sharing a backyard tend to do: wrestling each other to the ground, exploring every corner of the property, tormenting their endlessly patient mother, and turning a large lawn surrounded by blackberry bushes and thick cover into what their backyard neighbor described simply as a hidden playground. The property in Portland's Hazelwood neighborhood has been in the same family since the 1950s, and the coyote family chose it wisely: the yard offers an abundant supply of rabbits, deep vegetation for cover, and apparently enough space for six pups to chase each other in circles for most of the day. The cameras were installed as part of a larger journalism project on Portland's coyote population.
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Coyotes have been quietly living alongside Portland residents for decades, but most people never realize how close the two populations actually are, because coyotes are experts at moving through cities mostly unseen. Researchers with the Portland Urban Coyote Project, a collaboration between Portland State University and the Bird Alliance of Oregon, have collected more than 20,000 coyote sightings across the metro area and describe them as Portland's ghost dogs, animals that watch from edges, slip through parks and yards, and raise their pups behind fences and thickets while adapting entirely to the rhythms of city life. The trail camera footage from the Hazelwood yard offers a rare and unusually intimate look at a side of that story that almost never gets captured on film: the dad trotting home with dinner, the pups stumbling over each other in the grass, and a mother doing what mothers of six everywhere understand completely, which is doing her very best and being thoroughly ignored.
