As temperatures rise, coyote encounters are expected to increase across the Bay Area.
The East Bay Regional Park District, which includes 73 parks across Alameda and Contra Costa counties, released an advisory this week on how best to stay safe when encountering the animals.
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Created with help from biologists at the park district, it provides five main tips to prevent adverse encounters: avoid hiking alone in case of emergency; keep children and pets nearby and dogs on a leash; be aware of surroundings when walking, jogging, or riding; stay on designated trails; and never attempt to feed a coyote.
The advisory also urges visitors to call the non-emergency park dispatch at (510) 881-1833 to report sick or injured coyotes or aggressive encounters.
Park district spokesperson Dave Mason said coyote encounters become more frequent in the summer months because more people visit parks, and because many pups born in the spring are beginning to mature and become more adventurous.
“They start to go out and discover their surroundings, and there’s naturally more sightings,” he said.
Coyotes, a longtime fixture of the Bay Area ecosystem, are rarely involved in instances of aggression, though they sometimes do occur. In 2020, a 5-year-old girl was hospitalized after a coyote attacked her at an East Bay park, and in 2024, a coyote bit a 10-year-old boy as he was riding his bike to school in Irvine.
To prevent such adverse encounters, the advisory suggests engaging in “hazing,” or intimidation, if coyotes get within 50 feet. People should maintain eye contact, be as big and loud as possible, and use an umbrella or other tool to scare the animal away.
Other park services in the Bay Area are also expecting an increase in coyote encounters in the coming months. Nadine Abousalem, senior communications officer for Santa Clara County Parks, said coyotes are now “all over the parks,” and that the number one thing to remember is to keep any food out of reach.
“Making sure that food is properly stowed away and not feeding wildlife is really, really important,” she said. “Feeding coyotes just makes them more used to humans and that causes an uptick in bites.”
Derek Neumann, field operations manager at the Santa Clara County Open Space Authority, added that the hot summer months often drive coyotes closer to water sources, and echoed Abousalem’s point about not feeding any wildlife at all.
“Some people will ask, what’s the concern with feeding squirrels?” he said. “One, it’s not natural for the squirrels.”
“But more importantly, it starts habituating animals to humans,” he said. “If we have more squirrels hanging around where humans are, the squirrels are a primary prey for coyotes, and that can bring the coyotes in closer to humans as well.”
Janet Kessler, a San Francisco-based amateur naturalist who has spent the past 18 years observing the animals using a 650mm handheld camera, said the key to understanding coyotes is to recognize how similar they are to humans. Their family lives in particular, Kessler said, often present “soap opera scenarios.”
One San Francisco coyote, she said, had become “unresponsive to [his mate], and was more interested in being fed by some people.”
“He would go off for hours waiting for food instead of spending time with her,” she said. “And so one day, she just appeared with a guy that was paying attention to her.”
In one instance, she observed a coyote pup spying on a sibling as it buried something, before digging it up for itself when the sibling went away. And in a classic example of what Kessler described as the “push-pull behavior” between pups and parents, a pup did a flip in the air only for its parent to “growl, like, please just leave me alone.”
“The core of their existence is their family life which, in its own way, is similar to ours,” she said. “That’s what they live for.”
It’s this devotion to their families that Kessler says leads coyotes to sometimes become more “proactively protective of themselves and their spaces.”
This includes the behavior of escorting, in which coyotes follow hikers at close distance until the hikers have exited the quarter-mile radius surrounding the coyote’s den.
The East Bay park advisory suggests that in these instances, hikers should walk calmly away. Kessler agreed, but added that if a coyote comes right at a person, they can scare it away by throwing a handful of gravel at its feet.
“It kind of disarms the coyote enough to make them stop and wonder, like hey, this is pretty impressive,” she said. The intent, Kessler said, is to not to hurt the coyote, but to send it a message to back off.
The East Bay park advisory recommends leashing all pets and even buying pets a vest that would prevent a lethal injury if a coyote were to attack.
Phoebe Parker-Shames, a wildlife ecologist who has led efforts to study coyotes at the Presidio Trust in San Francisco, said it’s especially important to take precautions when accompanied by dogs, because coyotes often view them as a threat.
“Evolutionarily, the canines that coyotes encountered were either other coyotes or wolves,” she said. “So they view dogs in the same way, and this focus on what they see as a threat can override their natural caution around people.”
Parker-Shames agreed with the advisory’s recommendation to keep pets leashed at all times, and added that all dogs should be on no longer than a 6-foot leash at all times, and that for small dogs, “the safest thing to do is pick it up and back away.”
“Our experience with coyote encounters in the Presidio is that dogs on leash are dramatically less likely to be injured or killed than those off leash,” she said.