Here's a great Natural Idea...one I would use at my new course:
From Sunday's NYT.
The Shy, Egg-Stealing Neighbor You Didn't Know You Had
By LAWRENCE DOWNES
The suburbs, pretty as they may be, are nobody's idea of nature in balance. Sure, they are lush, green places where people and their vehicles get along with flowers, vegetables, songbirds and the littler mammals. But this harmony is enforced with an iron fist. It takes lots of chemicals, artificial irrigation and gas-powered trimming and mowing to keep such an arbitrary ecosystem under control.
Leave it to nature to mount an insurgency against the tranquillity of the grass-and-pavement grid. Canada geese and white-tail deer are the most brazen intruders, multiplying beyond all reason and refusing to be subdued. The best-equipped predators, people, sidestepped the job, finding it distasteful. Instead they adjust their garden netting, check for ticks and brood about the tendency of their fallen Eden to keep collapsing into chaos.
But what if that didn't always happen? What if Mother Nature decided not to run amok but to tidy up?
Just such an amazing circumstance appears to be happening on the outskirts of Chicago. Research biologists there announced last month that they had stumbled across a possible answer to the problem of the proliferating suburban goose: the proliferating suburban coyote.
The researchers belong to the Cook County Coyote Project, which has spent nearly six years studying the habits of more than 200 coyotes in the northern and western Chicago suburbs. Among other things, they tried to determine what the growing numbers of these beasts might have had to do with another puzzling development: the sudden end of the goose explosion. The local population of Canada geese had soared in the 1980's and 90's, but by 2000 the increase had slowed to about only 1 percent a year. An unknown predator was assumed to be the reason.
The coyote was not an obvious suspect, being small and skulky and unlikely to stand up to a wrathful Canada goose. Examinations of coyote scat had seldom found damning traces of eggshell. But then infrared cameras exposed the coyote as a nest robber, one that carefully cracks open a goose egg and licks it clean.
Evidence like this bolsters the conclusion that coyotes, in their own wily way, have become keystone predators in a land long emptied of wolves and mountain lions. The Cook County project's principal investigator, Prof. Stanley Gehrt of Ohio State University, speaks admiringly of his subjects, who have withstood more than 200 years of hunting, trapping and poisoning and are more entrenched in North America than ever. Every state but Hawaii has them. They have spread into suburbs and cities, forcing biologists to revise their definition of coyote habitat to this: Basically anywhere.
Here is what is really strange: Humans have barely noticed. Egg-rustling, night-howling varmints are raising litters in storm drains, golf courses, parks and cemeteries. They are sometimes heard but seldom seen. In cities, they keep to themselves and work nights. There are coyotes, Professor Gehrt says, living in the Chicago Loop.
You could call that sneaky. Or you could call it discreet. Professor Gehrt said that one surprising discovery of the study was how little danger the coyote poses to his unwitting human neighbors. "The risk is quite low, as long as we don't monkey with their behavior," he said. If you assert yourself when you see one - by yelling, cursing and throwing sticks - it will respect your space and lie low. The coyote's tendency to avoid people - and more important, raccoons - has made rabies a nonissue, Professor Gehrt said, with only one case of coyote-to-human transmission ever recorded.
Coyotes will behave, he said, as long as people do not feed them. Leave nothing tasty outside in an open trash can or food dish, and definitely nothing small and fluffy at the end of a leash. Professor Gehrt says with confidence that the sensible suburban toddler has little to fear from the suburban coyote, but he will not say the same for the suburban Shih Tzu.
The Cook County Coyote Project is the largest and most comprehensive of its kind, but it is just one study. It is probably not the time to call for coyote subsidies and captive-breeding programs for goose-plagued subdivisions. But any effort to learn more about these creatures - like a four-year coyote study being done in Westchester County by New York State and Cornell University - is highly welcome. It is intriguing to consider the possibility that such a shunned, maligned animal may be a misunderstood hero. The suburbs could use well-mannered, responsible predators, and house cats are clearly not up to the job.
Sounds right to me!!