Top 15 Dan Flores Quotes

[C]oyotes have now become the most common large wild predators most Americans have ever seen... The tawny, tail-swishing, sharp-nosed wild dog of the American deserts is now our furtive alley predator everywhere from Miami to Anchorage, San Diego to Maine, and the stories are piling up.

Chaco unquestionably had coyotes in town; coyote bones are common in the archeological sites of the inner city.

A thousand years later we still use a form of the original Aztec name... coyotl, pronounced COY-yoht, accent of the first syllable... Their rich mythology produced numerous coyote gods... , or "Venerable Old Coyote"... sounds so much like the widespread North American god-avatar... that the empire-minded Aztecs may have borrowed him from tribes far northward...

[T]he truth is that coyotes have never been solely wilderness creatures. ...for the 15,000 years since we humans have been in North America, coyotes have always been capable of living among us. ...A coyote's primary prey happens to be... the mice and rats that flourish around and among us... By the time Europeans got to America, coyotes had long since sought out the major Indian cities of Mesoamerica.

Their colonization of our cities, from the small burgs... to the biggest, loudest, and most frenetic of our metropolises, has become the wildlife story of our time. It deserves some explanation.

Southwestern Hispanos... have long said that the only thing smarter than a coyote is God.

Across the history of life on Earth, animals and birds of many species have routinely colonized new country. That's enough a marker of adaptive success that biologists apply the term "cosmopolitan" to species that are especially flexible regarding... habitats... Evolving in America, the ancestors of horses spread across Asia, Europe, and Africa, where they became zebras and s. Bovine evolution in Southeast Asia eventually brought bison to North America... But the range expansion of a wild animal [i.e., the coyote] for thousands of miles in every direction, often through dense settlements of humans who in recent history have been committed to that animal's eradication, is truly remarkable. A suite of factors must be involved.

The ancestral canids that would eventually produce coyotes sprang from North American stock, a line of animals that evolved in the American Southwest. That ancient coyote line spawned animals that migrated to Eurasia and eventually to Africa to become Old World s. In North America, archeological sites from the late Pleistocene have yielded coyote remains from as far east as Pennsylvania and West Virginia, and genetic evidence indicates that coyotes thronged eastward out of their core range in the American West in at least two swarms, roughly between three hundred and nine hundred years ago. The truth is, roaming coyotes have probably been swimming the Mississippi River to eastern America during most decades since there have been coyotes.

In one of the myriad ways humans and coyotes eerily mimic each one another, like us coyotes are cosmopolitan species, able to live in a remarkable range of habitats.

Like Wilson and a slew of other authors working on what was once called "sociobiology" but is now usually called "evolutionary behavior" or "evolutionary psychology," I am convinced that there is a biological and universal human nature, and that it appears manifest in the human record.The question is, how might that insight... be folded into the narratives that give our immediate history meaning and power?

Optimal Foraging Strategy models... have asserted that what appears to be "conservation" among hunting peoples was (and is) actually a by-product of attempting to maximize hunting efficiency and use of time. Thus hunter-gatherers ignored depleted habitats and placed taboos on certain species not to achieve conservation but in search of maximum yield for minimum effort. As wildlife populations shrank, this hypothesis argues, hunters actually hunted more, and they range farther afield.

[M]any of us came... through a tradition in Western writing that harkens back to ... ... and James Malin (who pioneered in systematic ecological history). All these pioneers in the field wrote between the 1890s and the 1950s. Brilliant contemporary writers like and Richard White may have made environmental history "the coolest history around"... but they didn't invent it. ...For many writers in the twentieth century, from Webb to the 1937 Committee on the Future of the Great Plains to Frank and Deborah Popper, the Great Plains are the ultimate proving ground of environmentalism's doomsday predictions for the Modernist experiment in a massively altered landscape.

The humanities have usually left evolutionary nature to the biologists. But some of the other questions here are... posed by the multidisciplinary field known as .

[T]he human past... belongs not only to (say) the Blackfeet or the Mormons, but to all of us. ...[W]e humans cannot be considered as separate from the earth of our evolution. We, too, are "natural."

Whose natural West has this been all along? Is it evolution's superorganism? Or did the United States inherit a natural stage actually shaped by the very long human inhabitation? ...Why do places like Hispanic New Mexico, Mormon Utah, and Montana seem so different when nature would seem so similar in all three? Or are they actually all that different? ...[I]s there something else more universal that our richly layered cultures disguise, perhaps something as essential as an evolutionarily derived "human nature" that influences the way that we—all of us—see and interact with the flux we call the natural world?