Laura Shepherd was out for a stroll near her home on Ward’s Island when she saw it, just there on the beach.

“I knew it was something big,” she says, recalling how she’d switched course to get a better look. “Then I saw the teeth and the snout and the paws, and realized it was a coyote. It was young and beautiful.”

Pushed onshore by heavy waves earlier this week, the coyote was already partially covered in sand, a corpse that immediately sparked furious speculation among islanders.

Had the coyote fallen through the ice out near Cherry Beach or the Leslie St. Spit? Had it drowned trying to swim across the Eastern Gap to the island?

There was no obvious sign of physical trauma. Had it been poisoned?

“I would really hate to think that someone poisoned that coyote,” says Shepherd. “It’s a beautiful thing and it would be a pretty horrible way to die.”

Hers would not, however, be the universal reaction on Toronto Island, where pet cats have been disappearing for the past year, some undoubtedly felled by the coyotes that first showed up there two years ago.

Coyotes may be recent immigrants to the city, but their presence has quickly become one of the most divisive issues in neighbourhoods across the GTA.

“The owners of cats and small dogs, and parents of small children, tend to be most nervous about having coyotes ranging into the neighbourhood,” says Shepherd, who’s lived on the island for 19 years. “You can’t not have a concern.

“On the other hand, you have those who want to have a pagan fire on the beach, celebrating the return of the coyote. And there are lots of people in between.”

“It’s a new world out there, in our yards and lawns,” says Maya Toman, an islander who lost her beloved cat, Kuglie, last fall. The culprit was almost certainly a coyote, since Kuglie never really strayed from Toman’s yard and his remains were found in a distant meadow.

The loss was “emotionally challenging,” she says, especially as Kuglie’s brother, Cagney, went into a long period of mourning.

“He would howl in the middle of the night, looking for his brother, waiting for his brother to come home,” says Toman. “It was heartbreaking.”

The irony is that we humans pretty much invited them into our midst.

The original range of coyotes was, broadly speaking, the central plains of North America. But colonists did two things very much to a coyote’s liking.

In clearing the land, they created the patchwork of fields, meadows and forests that serve as ideal habitat for coyotes. And they killed off and drove away their biggest natural enemy, wolves.

By the time the western coyote first came through Ontario, it did end up hybridizing with the remnant population of the eastern wolf, by then in dire straits. The resulting eastern coyote is larger than its western counterparts, even though its DNA remains overwhelmingly coyote.

Coyotes now range through all but the northernmost reaches of the continent, although the first confirmed sighting in this province didn’t happen until 1919.

An existing bounty on wolves was quickly amended to include coyotes, and wasn’t lifted until 1972, but it didn’t stop them from continuing their push toward the Atlantic.

They’ve even settled into deeply forested areas of Quebec, perhaps their least optimal surroundings, for the simple reason that coyotes are hugely adaptable.

They can, for instance, occupy different levels of the food chain in different places, with differing effects on the biodiversity around them. In western parks, for instance, they readily cede top position to wolves, but the presence of both wolves and coyotes tends to drive foxes to the margins and cougars to higher ground.

In southern Ontario, coyotes may rank atop the food chain, yet as omnivores their diet is ever-changing. Foxes, rabbits, hares, rodents and wild turkeys might be their preferred fare, but in rural areas they regularly prey on sheep and calves, and they’ve also been known to take down deer, particularly an injured one that has limped into the woods after being struck by a car.

Nuts, fruits and berries are also dietary staples, depending on the season. In Mississippi, their taste for watermelon has made them the bane of farmers, while in Nova Scotia they at times dine almost exclusively on grasshoppers. They’ve even been seen eating seeds from backyard bird feeders.

“If it’s edible and it’s out there, you can expect coyotes to eat it,” says Patterson. “They eat almost anything.”

And so in cities, they tend to become nocturnal as a way of avoiding contact with humans. “There are a lot of coyotes around and most of them are well-behaved and staying out of trouble,” says Patterson.

Rabies among coyotes is rare, so if they engage in riskier behaviour, or make bolder forays in close proximity to humans, it usually means that something has tipped on the risk/reward continuum.

For instance, a coyote that has been given food by a human at some point may lose much of its wariness around people.

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Weather can also play a part. Coyotes have a huge tolerance for both heat and cold. Temperatures, for instance, need to drop below minus 20 before they need to expend extra energy keeping warm.

A harsh winter tends to favour coyotes because it weakens prey less suited to severe cold. By contrast, a mild winter like the current one in Toronto generally makes it harder for coyotes to live off their traditional prey in parks and ravines, driving them ever closer to humans in search of food.

In the coming weeks, though, the city’s coyotes will have something other than food on their minds. February is their traditional mating season, and what people often mistakenly believe to be wolf-like packs of coyotes are nearly always family units.

Coyotes tend to mate for life, and in the city they’ll stake out 2 or 3 square kilometres as their own. So, while no official count has been made, there are probably a lot of them out there.

Even if we assume that only half of Toronto is home to coyotes — whether in parks, ravines, golf courses, abandoned industrial areas or rail corridors — there are probably at least 150 breeding pairs in the city.

Come April, they’ll each produce around five pups, for an initial, total population of more than 1,000.

Once the pups reach about 8 weeks, the parents will start teaching them to hunt. By autumn, some of the youngsters will have left to find their own territory, with the rest departing by the time next year’s litter arrives.

Many will travel great distances looking for habitat that most closely resembles where they themselves were raised, what they know best.

But mortality rates are high, and the overall population can rise sharply or fall quickly over relatively short periods of time.

While some coyotes have been known to live as long as 12 years, a more typical lifespan is half that. In Prince Edward County, for instance, where Patterson has been tracking the movements of coyotes equipped with radios collars, 45 per cent of them died in the first year, many of them felled on the road or shot by farmers.

Exactly when the first one arrived here is uncertain, but Robert Meerburg, education officer with Toronto Animal Services, says the city has been getting complaints about them since at least 1980.

But actual, physical encounters with coyotes are extremely rare. The recent attack on an Oakville girl, says Meerburg, was by far the worst incident in the GTA that he can recall.

Last year, the city received 228 citizen reports about coyotes. Mostly, people telephone the city to say they’ve seen a coyote or felt threatened by one, even at a distance. Injuries from coyotes are exceedingly rare, but some cases — such as the female hiker killed in Cape Breton — invariably make headlines.

“The problem with coyotes is that they’re very curious animals,” says Meerburg. “They will stare back at you. That’s what people get freaked about.”

But if we tend to misinterpret coyote behaviour, we also send them very mixed messages about our own intentions, not least by the debris we leave about.

Every time we toss a pizza crust or apple core into the shrubbery, we’re effectively leaving them a meal. If food waste routinely ends up at a specific site, then coyotes will simply associate that place with food and make regular visits. Coyotes, says Meerburg, “will take the easiest meal possible.

“If people are feeding them, they’re habituating them. That’s the wrong thing to do.”

The other certainty: coyotes are going to be among us for a very long time, so the more we understand how our behaviour affects theirs, the better. “There’s no reason we can’t live together.”