"They were not turkey-size bones. They were smaller."
When Mark Kraus came across copious amounts of coyote poop on the trails of Montgomery Botanical Center, south of Miami, he couldn’t help but start dissecting it.
Kraus, a retired chair of the natural sciences department at Miami-Dade College, was particularly curious about coyote survival because they’re from the Great Plains, but have been thriving in South Florida suburbia for the past 15 years, changing the ecology.
Montgomery Botanical Center, with its fruit trees, lush open lawns and dense tropical thickets, offers plenty of coyote food: raccoons, possums, gray squirrels and Norway rats all reside there, as do hordes of invasive green iguanas and non-native peacocks.
Iguanas were brought to Florida from Central America as exotic pets. Peacocks, native to Southeast Asia, came to South Florida to be flaunted as living lawn ornaments for the wealthy of the 1920s and ’30s.
Kraus wanted to find out what coyotes choose to eat, given the broad menu. Piles of coyote scat later, Kraus found the answer, revealed in a new study.
Read more at the South Florida Sun Sentinel