Coyote Swam Miles to Alcatraz Island
- A male coyote that reached Alcatraz in January didn’t swim from San Francisco after all — park researchers now say he likely came from Angel Island. - DNA from the animal’s scat matched Angel Island coyotes, turning a presumed roughly 1-mile bay crossing into a nearly 2-mile swim. - That makes the stunt rarer, and it shows how boldly Bay Area wildlife is moving through human-shaped landscapes. (nps.gov)
Coyotes are already good at surprising people. But this one raised the bar. A male coyote that showed up on Alcatraz Island in January was first thought to have paddled over from San Francisco. Turns out the harder answer is probably the right one — National Park Service researchers now say he most likely started on Angel Island, which means the swim was nearly 2 miles across cold, choppy bay water. (nps([nps.gov) Why was this such a weird sighting? Alcatraz is not just a random shoreline stop. It’s a 22-acre island in the middle of San Francisco Bay, about 1.5 miles offshore, and it’s famous for being hard to reach even for humans. Seeing a coyote there was strange enough. Seeing one arrive by swimming made it stranger. Park staff said this was the first known coyote on Alcatraz since the Park Service took over the island in 1972. (parksconservancy.org) ### What did people think happened at first? When video first showed the coyote in the water near Alcatraz in January, the obvious guess was San Francisco. That route is shorter and easier to imagine. Early coverage treated the animal as a city coyote that had made a bold but not impossible crossing from the mainland to the island’s southern edge. (nbcbayarea.com)ystery after the headlines faded. The key clue came from DNA collected from the coyote’s scat on Alcatraz. That genetic material matched the coyote population on Angel Island State Park, not San Francisco, which flipped the whole story from “impressive” to “honestly absurd.” The animal’s exact whereabouts now are unknown. (nps.gov)? Distance, basically. A swim from San Francisco was a little over 1 mile. A swim from Angel Island is nearly 2 miles. That is roughly double the effort in water that is cold, tidal, and messy. The feat also fits a broader pattern — coyotes have been documented on Angel Island for years, including a growing family there that scientists have been watching since 2017. (nps.go([nps.gov)w do you even know one coyote came from another island? Not with absolute courtroom certainty — but with a strong ecological match. Researchers compared the DNA in the Alcatraz sample with known coyote populations around the bay. Angel Island came out as the likely origin. That doesn’t give a minute-by-minute route map, but it does make the old San Francisco theory much less convincing. (nps.gov)e live on Alcatraz? For a while, yes. Alcatraz has vegetation, birds, and freshwater sources managed on the island, so a coyote can survive there for some time. But it’s still a tiny, isolated place built around tourism and historic structures, not a normal long-term coyote territory. That’s why the bigger question became not just how he arrived, but whether he eventually swam back out. (nps.go([nps.gov)point here? The fun version is that a coyote outdid everyone’s first guess. The serious version is that wildlife keeps showing how flexible it is in the Bay Area. This animal crossed a human-defined barrier that looks final on a map. For the coyote, it was just water. (nps.gov) ### Bottom line The news is not ju(nps.gov)m Angel Island — a nearly 2-mile swim that turned a quirky sighting into a genuinely wild feat. (nps.gov)
