Project Coyote is delighted to feature wildlife educator Dan De Vries in this edition of our Volunteer Spotlight. Dan has represented Project Coyote at numerous public events to help spread awareness about wild carnivore coexistence. In this Q&A, Dan’s humor and creativity shine through as he describes his lifelong love of wildlife and how he came to be involved with Project Coyote’s coexistence work.
(This conversation has been condensed and edited for clarity)
Project Coyote: You have expressed an affection for coyotes. Anything in particular trigger that?
Dan De Vries: Coyotes came later. As a child, for wildlife generally.
Any species in particular?
Actually, like uncounted six-year-olds in the century past, dinosaurs.
Dinosaurs. How original!
Well, there is a story there.
We’re into stories!
I’ve told it many times but, since you asked, here goes. To start at the very beginning . . . readers my age may remember a tabloid for schoolkids called My Weekly Reader.
Never heard of that one.
It was before your time. Distributed to classrooms by grade level. I was in first grade. A copy for each urchin in the class. The thing was, MWR also had a book club, with the modestly priced books sent by mail. The very first volume was a picture book accompaniment to the Disney nature film The Living Desert.
Our friend, Coyote America author Dan Flores, mentions that one in his most recent book Wild New World. He says those Disney nature films of the 1950s had a lot to do with increasing Americans’ interest in wildlife as more than something to hunt and kill.
Right. It was so great to read that.
In the early 1950s, my parents worshipped, very sincerely, in a fiercely theologically conservative Dutch Calvinist sect. We couldn’t go to movies in theaters, but the local Calvinist college somehow got a print of Living Desert to show in the college chapel/auditorium. So, at six years old, that was the first Hollywood-produced movie I ever saw. Blew my six-year-old mind.
I streamed Living Desert again recently and, in many respects, it’s a surprisingly wonderful film. There’s an element of Disney hokeyness to some of it. Like the scorpions’ courtship ritual set to a square dance call. But the cinematography is really extraordinary! I watched David Attenborough’s Mammals series as it came on about a year ago, and really, some of the stuff in Living Desert rivals that. Mammals is as good as it gets in nature cinematography, and Living Desert is 70 years older!
No dinosaurs, though. Weren’t you going to tell a story about dinosaurs?
Right. All of that by way of long introduction. The next year, second grade if I have this right, the first My Weekly Reader book club selection was about dinosaurs.
Ah! So that got you into dinosaurs.
It did, but not in the way you might think. See, remember that Dutch Calvinist sect? “We” didn’t believe in dinosaurs, because “we” didn’t believe in evolution. Six days of creation and all that. So Mom and Dad talked to me very seriously about it and sent the book back to My Weekly Reader.
Oh. And you . . .
Went to the Bookmobile next time it came to our Christian school and took out two books about dinosaurs. They probably weren’t as cool as the book my parents sent back, but they were good enough. For learning about dinosaurs, and for establishing my reader’s rights at age seven. Even though my academic degrees are in language and literature, I’ve never stopped reading natural history.
And this story has more than that by way of happy endings. Not long afterward my mother bought me a sort of child’s one volume encyclopedia of natural history. Lots of dinosaurs in there, and also “early mammals.” You know, mastodons, saber-tooth tigers, dire wolves. And, of course, then present-day animals, birds, fish, and plants.
Through a series of events, by the time I was close to finishing third grade, we moved from our hometown in Michigan to Denver. The only Dutch Calvinist churches there were a different denomination from the one we had been in. It was a lot less stern and theologically absolutist, so my parents were able to lighten up a bit about something like evolution.
The Natural History Museum in Denver’s City Park was wonderful, with a big old brontosaurus skeleton on the entry floor. And they decided they could take me and my younger brother to the movies, since it was a bigger city and no one from church was very likely to see us go in there. The first movie I ever saw in a theater was the next of those Disney nature films Dan Flores mentions, White Wilderness. That’s the one with the dishonestly staged lemming mass suicide off a cliff but, again, the cinematography is utterly gorgeous. I’ve streamed it a couple of times in the last ten years or so.
So, in many respects, I have my parents to thank for my commitment to natural history. Both, I want to add, lived long inquiring lives. My mother in fact is still alive and active at 98 years! She’s a real pleasure to talk with when we can.
So, about coyotes . . .
Oh, right, this is for Project Coyote isn’t it? My mother even donates to Project Coyote.
I think my earliest interest in Coyote was as the mythical trickster character in indigenous storytelling. After three years out of college in my then hometown, Grand Rapids, teaching high school in that area, I got into the Masters program in English at the University of Wyoming, partly as a lark. I was really eager to get back to the Northern Rockies. It was a pretty easygoing program, and I got to teach. And coyotes were, as they remain, very much a point of contention in Wyoming. There was a bumper sticker, “Eat more lamb, thousands of coyotes can’t be wrong.” You could conceivably take that as an homage to Canis Latran. But you would be wrong.
That experience in Wyoming deepened my appreciation for the complexity of wildlife management, especially regarding predators like coyotes. I saw firsthand how local attitudes toward coyotes ranged from outright animosity to a grudging respect for their adaptability and intelligence. The tension between ranching interests and conservation efforts was palpable, and it made me realize how important wildlife education and open conversation are in shaping public perception. This early exposure laid the groundwork for my later involvement in wildlife advocacy and education.
After Wyoming, I spent some time planting trees in British Columbia. The last year I did that, I took Chris, my wife-to-be, along. The last contract we were on that season had pulled a dog, a spirited sheltie mix, out of the Prince George, BC, city pound to keep the bears out of our camp. And it worked too. We never had bears in camp and there were plenty of them around. The witless contractor we were working for planned to just bring her back to the pound after the planting was finished, and Chris would have none of that.
So we snuck her across the border with us on our way to California, where Chris is from. We named her after the BC Provincial flower, Mountain Dogwood. At some point soon afterward I picked up a copy of Hope Ryden’s book, God’s Dog, and started to notice that our Dogwood did a lot of coyote-ish things. That predatory leap they do, for instance. She had a noticeable tint of gold in her eyes, so we decided she probably was some part coyote. She definitely had a wild streak. She’s long gone by now, but she was a very cool dog.
My particular interest now is in San Francisco’s urban coyotes, who people started to notice around the early 2000s. Chris and I had moved up the peninsula to San Francisco proper in the early 1980s. Sometime around 2010 or 2011, I was playing golf and marshalling at Lincoln Park, the City-run muni, and we would all see coyotes from time to time. At one point, the area’s State Assembly Member held a sort of town hall to address neighborhood concerns about the growing population of coyotes in her district. I went, and ended up sitting next to Camilla (Project Coyote’s Founder and Executive Director). No idea then who she was, of course. She wasn’t even on the agenda, but people who were on it kept throwing their comments, and even questions her way. We chatted afterward and I mentioned that I had read God’s Dog and thought coyotes were really fascinating creatures. She told me that Hope Ryden was on Project Coyote’s Science Advisory Board, and shared a bunch of other things about the organization, and that’s how I started to get involved.
You’re a longtime volunteer with Project Coyote and identified as a Wildlife Educator on our website. Can you share some of what you’ve done in this role?
It’s certainly an honor to be included on that roster!
Basically, for me, it has specifically involved three things. Ten years ago, there was beginning to be a heightened level of public concern about a perceived increase in the number of coyotes in San Francisco neighborhoods. Project Coyote and San Francisco Animal Care and Control had a joint project to canvas neighborhoods where concerns seemed to be particularly high. I estimate that I probably approached about 1000 homes.
And what kind of response did you get?
It was pretty interesting. I was able to actually speak with people at about a quarter of those homes. The rest got the fine Project Coyote informational door hanger. The good news was that when I was able to talk to someone, I only encountered four or five individuals truly hostile to coyotes.
The rest were divided up pretty evenly into two camps. A good half of them actually said they liked having coyotes in the area. The education in those cases was reminding them to be careful, and that urban coyotes are still wild so do not approach or try to feed a coyote. The other half mainly expressed concern, but without hostility. For that cohort, Project Coyote’s informational brochures were very appropriate and I was able to have some great conversations. I don’t know how those conversations would shake out today. I see too much hostile ignorance in NextDoor posts about coyotes, but that tends to be a forum particularly hospitable to hostile ignorance, and not only about coyotes.
You said three specific things. What are the other two?
Pretty basic. I have tabled for Project Coyote at various nature festivals, and a couple of summers ago I was able to spend a couple hours at a time at a summer wildlife nature camp. That was fun. Kids at those kinds of events tend to be inquisitive and enthusiastic. A number of them seemed to already know much of what I was sharing about, which was very encouraging. I think most children are inherent natural historians. Just like I was at their age.
Come to think of it, there’s a bunch of less specific things I try to do for the wild ones. I make it a point to talk to people I know about coyotes specifically, and compassionate coexistence generally. I have an email list of friends and family where I post Project Coyote and other conservation content. I have spoken at public meetings. I respond to Project Coyote Action Alerts. And I post occasionally on NextDoor to counter blatant misinformation, such as when an individual reports seeing a 75-pound coyote walking down their sidewalk. I don’t do that too often, though. I don’t want to be perceived as one of those NextDoor trolls.
Project Coyote is truly grateful to you Dan for your service over the years in so many ways. You’ve been a valued member of our pack! Anything else you want to say before we conclude?
Yes, as a matter of fact there is. As might be assumed from my earlier stories about my childhood, I am no longer young. Activities like canvassing, and even extensive tabling, have physically come to be quite the challenge for me, much as I have enjoyed them. I want to call on anyone who has stayed with this conversation this far to consider taking up my personal slack. You can volunteer too! Go to the Project Coyote Website and select the ACT tab. There is so much that anyone committed to compassionate coexistence can do.
Also, I spent my professional career as a development officer for nonprofit organizations, including for most of that career for a national advocacy nonprofit. Private gifts are the lifeblood of any great advocacy organization. Please join Chris and me by including Project Coyote in your charitable giving. Learn more about giving to Project Coyoteby selecting the website’s DONATE button. The Coyote Collective is a great monthly gift program, and you can also choose to make a one time gift there.
Thank you so much Dan! You and Chris have been devoted and dedicated supporters for more than a decade and we hope your stories inspire others to get involved in our work for the Wild Ones!
