As sunset arrives earlier each day, many Chicagoans have been hearing strange sounds in the dark: eruptions of sharp half-laughter underscoring the usual city noise, often echoing the passing ambulance sirens. One recent evening near Humboldt Park, the sound carried from somewhere deep in the distance, bringing the familiar thrill of an encounter with the more-than-human. A few minutes following the echoes revealed the source.
A pack of coyotes was slinking from the Natural Areas through the drained lagoon by the field house, which two months before had been a busy swimming beach. Most likely this was a family with nearly full-grown spring pups, entering the autumn dispersal season when they will split off for good. Most of the year, coyotes pass through the city unnoticed, so sightings like this are a rare opportunity.
Humboldt Park is a fitting place for such a haunting. It was named for Alexander von Humboldt, a Prussian naturalist who championed the idea of nature as a web of life: an interconnected whole where no single part can be understood in isolation. Decades later, landscape architect Jens Jensen used the park as a laboratory for the “Prairie Style,” using naturalistic landforms and native plants to evoke the grasslands the city had replaced, including a “prairie river” winding between the lagoons. Even the formal gardens are guarded by two bronze bison statues, cast long after bison had last been seen in the region. Over time, this park was built into an image of the prairie, filled with its ghosts.
Humboldt Park lagoon at dusk - photo by Cooper Forsman
The Prairie Wolf Returns
The coyote (Canis latrans) may not have been invited, but it cannot be called an intruder here. Early settlers called them “prairie wolves.” Their lineage stretches back to the Ice Age, when bigger, heavier-jawed coyotes likely preyed on young horses, camels and even bison. When that megafauna collapsed, coyotes shrank their bodies to fit the shrinking world around them.
Over the last two centuries, they adapted once again. As gray wolves were wiped out across much of the continent, coyotes experienced “mesopredator release”: with the apex predators gone, this mid-sized hunter filled the vacancy. Despite widespread campaigns to hunt and poison them, they spread into every state in the contiguous US, picking up wolf and dog genetics along the way. The eastern coyote that emerged is a novel creature created by disturbance, uniquely adapted to the world we have made. Today an estimated 1,700 coyotes live in Chicago, dubbed by researcher Stan Gehrt “the ghosts of the city.”
Despite their reputation as trash-raiders and chicken-stealers, coyotes primarily eat what a wild prairie would provide. When the Urban Coyote Research Project analyzed more than 1,400 local coyote scats, small rodents turned up in 42% of them, fruit in 23%, deer in 22%, and rabbits in 18%. Garbage or pet food appeared in under 2%, and cats in only about 1%.
Habitat isn’t only about flowers and pollinators: a working food web has a top, and in Chicago that top is the coyote. In Humboldt Park’s Natural Areas, volunteers tend native plants and remove invasive species, rebuilding the layered plant community that everything else depends on. This work doesn’t feed coyotes directly; it feeds the insects, rodents and rabbits that coyotes hunt. Every layer moves energy upward through the web of life.
Keeping the Web Clean
Knowing that everything is connected, pest control becomes one of our greatest responsibilities. Chicago’s main weapon against rodents has been anticoagulant rodenticide, which kills by internal hemorrhaging. This poison doesn’t stay in the rat; it moves through the web, poisoning owls, eagles, stray cats and coyotes alike.
Luckily, there are alternatives. Since spring 2025, the Wicker Park–Bucktown Special Service Area has placed a rat contraceptive in bait boxes behind its major commercial corridors, and Tallgrass Garden adopted the same approach this year. Rather than killing rats, the bait targets their fertility. None of this works without the basics, though: rats thrive in cities because we keep feeding them, and securing trash is the foundation of effective rat control.
Build It and They Will Come
A backyard prairie won’t summon a top predator (nor should it: a coyote that keeps its distance is doing exactly what it should), but the insects, mammals and birds that form the rest of the regional food web will flourish there. Here’s how to help with your own garden practices this fall:
Cut pithy stems high. Leaving 12–24" of hollow stems in late winter provides nesting habitat for insects.
Keep some seedheads. Coneflowers, asters and goldenrods provide winter food long after the blooms fade.
Plant fruiting native shrubs. Spicebush, native viburnums and dogwoods feed birds and mammals alike, and fall is a great time to plant.
Let native grasses stand. Clumps of little bluestem and prairie dropseed provide winter cover.
Seal up trash and compost so you aren’t feeding rats.
Skip rodenticide bait. Choose lethal snap traps or non-toxic options to keep the food web clean.
The coyotes will leave the lagoon before snow arrives, and next summer human families will be swimming where they once passed by. But beneath their feet, the old web keeps working. This prairie wolf has survived the Ice Age, colonization, and a century of poisons. It doesn’t need us to save it; it only needs us to learn to co-exist, in whatever small ways we can. On these cold autumn nights, when an ambulance passes by and something much older answers, take a moment and try to listen.