Where Do Coyotes Live in Silicon Valley? These Teens Are Mapping Their Movements

On a Friday afternoon after school, 15-year-olds Parham Pourahmad and Arnav Singhal walked through the changing colors of fall, surrounded by red, yellow, shades of amber, and lingering green leaves at Vasona Lake County Park, cameras slung over their shoulders.

The 152-acre Santa Clara County park is one of their favorite places to photograph wildlife near their neighborhood, especially the coyotes that have increasingly appeared in backyards and around creek trails across the South Bay.

Pourahmad started snapping these photos as a hobby during the pandemic, but his work has earned statewide and national recognition, including the Audubon Photography Awards’ Youth Prize for his image of two American kestrels perched on a post at Calero County Park outside San José.

But these days, it’s coyotes that draw most of his attention.

“There’s so much conflict we see between humans and coyotes: like coyotes eating pets. And as a result, people poison coyotes,” Pourahmad said. “That makes me want to help them out, both the coyotes and humans.”

A 2023 study analyzing 10 years of coyote-human interactions in San Francisco found that conflicts had increased in recent years, especially during the pup-rearing season and in areas with greater access to green spaces.

The animal control around Silicon Valley reported an increase in coyote sightings, according to the Los Altos Town Crier.

“Coyotes have their own neighborhoods, and each coyote you see isn’t random. So it’s kind of their home as well as ours,” Singhal said. He and Pourahmad attend Los Gatos High School together and are close friends. Singhal picked up photography after watching his friend’s dedication, and now spends several hours a week practicing alongside him.

The two teens founded the Silicon Valley Wildlife Group, a youth-led project to track coyotes across the region.

They collected every sighting they could since February: from their own photos, the updates posted by the Santa Clara County Vector Control and reports on Nextdoor and social media. They even invited residents to share encounters through a form on their website.

They compiled all this information into an interactive map with more than a thousand data points, color-coded by time and day, location, and behavior. Many sightings cluster along the creeks that run through South Bay neighborhoods.

“They use the many creeks we have, like Guadalupe River, Los Gatos Creek, Coyote Creek, and a lot more to move around in urban areas without being sighted,” Pourahmad said.

Those urban wildlife corridors, they realized, connect the Santa Cruz Mountains to suburban parks, golf courses and backyards, a kind of wildlife highway rambling through the suburban sprawl.

Filling the gaps

Urban ecologists have long suspected that suburban development pushes animals to adapt in surprising ways. Beverly Perez, a community resource specialist with Santa Clara County Vector Control, said the teens’ work helps put those patterns in context.

Perez said the biggest challenge isn’t managing coyotes, it’s managing humans. “Urban expansion shrinks their habitat,” she said. Coyotes learn to find food and shelter in cities, especially when residents leave trash, pet food, or even small pets unprotected. “That’s when conflicts start.”

Tali Caspi, a postdoctoral researcher at UC Berkeley who studies coyotes in San Francisco, said projects like the Silicon Valley Wildlife Group can help fill the gap in existing research and promote coexistence. She analyzes DNA to study the genetics of urban coyotes and uses motion-activated cameras to track their movements.

San Francisco’s coyotes have adapted to dense human environments, she said. Silicon Valley coyotes may behave differently, relying more on creek corridors and staying more elusive.

Coyotes play a critical role as apex predators, and they help keep balance in the ecosystem by controlling rodent populations and dispersing seeds in urban landscapes, she added.

The next layer of investigation

The teens’ map identified distinct territories and recurring coyote behavior. They can identify an alpha male or female by photos or reports of pets being chased, an indicator of coyotes becoming bold or defending dens.

Now they want to build more advanced tools. With help from researchers at UC Berkeley, they’re learning QGIS, a professional mapping software used by conservation scientists, to model how the coyotes move.

As part of their project, Pourahmad and Singhal visit schools and libraries to give talks about wildlife in the area and on how to coexist with wildlife, sharing tips like securing trash cans and keeping dogs leashed near open spaces.

“We want our map to be an inspiration for the community to help mitigate human-wildlife conflict,” Singhal said.

Over the next couple of years, they hope to build a Bay Area-wide dataset showing how wildlife adapts to human development, with the help of ten other high school students they’ve recently recruited.

Both teens say the project has shaped their aspirations to pursue careers in urban wildlife and ecology.

Pourahmad wants to study wildlife biology — particularly DNA analysis and the statistics behind ecological research. “I’m interested in the science of urban wildlife,” he said. “There’s so much we still don’t know.”

Singhal is drawn to a different path. “I want to become a lawyer,” he said. “I’m really interested in using what we’re learning now to influence policy or advocate for environmental issues.”