In Northeast Ohio, coyotes trot across runways at Burke
Lakefront Airport within sight of Cleveland's skyscrapers, and
dodge traffic on busy highways like U.S. 422 near Solon. In
Chicago a couple of years ago, one sauntered into a sandwich
shop in the downtown Loop and plopped down in the beverage
cooler. In New York, a frisky 35-pound male led cops, reporters
and TV news helicopters on an hours-long romp around Central
Park before being shot with a tranquilizer dart. Once the
denizens of southwestern deserts and Great Plains prairies,
mobile and highly adaptable coyotes have been on a relentless
eastward march for much of the 20th century, aided by suburban
land-clearing and the elimination of their chief competitor, the
gray wolf.Beginning in the 1990s, their presence escalated in
Cleveland and other big Midwestern and Eastern metropolises, not
just in fringe parklands, but in neighborhoods and the urban
core. City-dwellers who spot them in parks and back yards are
startled to find that a formidable tracker