Nature was close. Hearing the Coyotes in the hills around my house thrilled me. I'd intently watch my two dogs for a reaction. Neighbors reported that we would be wise to keep our dogs and cats inside the house at night, as that was when the small yellow coyotes hunted for food. Occasionally my family and I would spot a lone Bobcat or Coyote prowling Sagecrest Circle that scampered quickly into the hillside once we drove near. Mountain lions were also rumored to patrol the hills.
Today, Valencia Marketplace is one of the highest generators of tax revenue for Los Angeles County, and Stevenson Ranch has been completely built out, practically a city of houses in its own right. Pico Canyon is now a major thouroughfare to Stevenson Ranch, and from the gates of Mentryville, one can almost see residences built behind Sunset Pointe.
Ahh progress! Affordable (at least in the past) housing for our booming town. We've tamed that rustic landscape completely and replaced scrub and chapparal with landscaped lawns, beautiful patios, and wide boulevards.
And yet the coyote endures. At least once a week, as I'm walking my own dog late at night here in Newhall, I feel him tense up as one, then more coyotes make their sharp calls and yelps (a common misconception is that coyotes and wolves howl at the moon. They do not). I think most of the coyotes make their home in the hills directly south of Newhall and perhaps in and around Towsley Canyon. According to SCOPE, coyotes hunt rabbits, rodents and other small animals, but also eat berries. Some starve as their landscape shrinks year by year, but for the most part there is an active and adaptable population.
Tonight's coyote calls led me to do some brief searches into the past and current wildlife of Santa Clarita. Did you know that the last Grizzly Bear in the State of California was supposedly killed by one Cornelius Johnson not far from today's fire in Sand Canyon? I found a poem published in Tujunga in 1916 to commemorate the event:
The Last Grizzly of the Tujunga Hills, 1916
There were footprints big as elephant's
in the streambed, in the mud.
Prints that made the children fear.
And the smell of old dry blood.
It's bear! Said Pop Cornelius,
his heart was dull with dread.
Fear would linger on and on
until that bear was dead.
"It's a giant," the men agreed,
they said they'd watch their stock.
Cornelius thought of children
on their way to school, the walk.
Afraid that fish and berries
would not be filling for a bear,
he got his 30-30 out
saddled up his mare,
went out to set a great big trap
with a log attached to hold it.
Next day he checked. The log was gone
and the trap. That's how he told it.
He followed the trail of footprints
and bushes torn and shredded,
feared at every twist and fork.
This hunt was one he dreaded,
then saw the bear-chewed carcass
of a horse that'd sickened and died,
the mess that was made of the beehives.
The orchard fruit had been tried.
Cornelius didn't give it up,
he tired the bear and shot it.
The last old grizzly in the hills!
Neighbors trudged and brought it
down to the park beneath the oaks
skinned the beast and cleaned it,
cooked the meat on an open fire
for all to taste who'd seen it.
People slapped Cornelius on the back.
"Well done, old friend," they told him.
One rogue bear is gone from here,
safe now our crops, our children.
Those were the days when men and boys
held guns and knives at the ready
to fight for every inch they owned,
men who were tough and steady.
A statue of a grizzly bear covered with photographs and memories of Santa Clarita History stands today at Heritage Park.
The grizzly may have met his match in California, will the coyote? Should the Las Lomas and Lyons Ranch projects be built, I wonder where the coyotes of the Newhall Pass and the hills south of Sunset Pointe would go. Would they retreat further into the Santa Monica mountains towards Simi Valley? Similarly, I can only wonder what wildlife is hunting for food now in the wildlands west of Magic Mountain, where Newhall Ranch is set to be built. Will there even be a corridor for wildlife to travel on to a new home should their old stomping grounds be graded and built upon?
I have a feeling the coyotes in Santa Clarita will survive no matter what, but I would really miss their distinctive yelps and calls late at night if they disappeared from our hills. Most of us, I think, need that dual reminder that a truly wild Santa Clarita still exists and that nature wasn't always something you went and 'looked at.' Just ask Cornelius Johnson.
Santa Clarita wildlife