Coyote Sightings Increase in Pinellas County

Tim Smith, regional manager for Animal Action Trappers in St. Petersburg, said that all coyotes need is "shelter and a food source" to thrive.

In Pinellas County, "greenbelts, watershed areas, golf courses, and parks" provide ample shelter, he said.

"I've seen one on 8th Avenue South in St. Petersburg," Smith said.

Food is not a problem either. "The feral cat population is out of control - and it is a good food source for coyotes," Smith said.

Smith manages five state-licensed trappers and technicians who handle nuisance animal calls from Hudson south to the Skyway Bridge. "There are not many places in our territory that we don't see coyotes," he said.

Pinellas County hot spots include wooded areas around Walsingham and Taylor parks in Largo and even much farther south he said.

Most of Pinellas is suitable habitat for coyote.

"They're even on the beaches and on the barrier islands now," said trapper David Robert Lueck of St. Petersburg. "That would have been unheard of 10 years ago."

Lueck said coyotes are frequently seen from Sand Key to Treasure Island, south to Pass-A-Grille Beach, and in Ft. DeSoto County Park. They are also in Lake Seminole Park and in War Veterans Memorial Park at Bay Pines, he said.

Draw a line east from the beaches through "mid-Pinellas County" to Brooker Creek County Preserve north of Tampa in Hillsborough County, Lueck said. Wherever there are neighborhoods mixed in with "big woods" along that line, he said, you'll find coyote "clusters."

Pinellas County Animal Control operations manager Gary Andrews said in 2009 his department created an interactive map that allows people to log and describe coyote sightings.

From Jan. 1 through May 19, more than 160 coyote sightings in the county had been documented on the map, he said.

A pilot called the Clearwater Airpark terminal in February with an unusual problem: He couldn't land because coyotes were encamped on the runway.

"He had to fly around until (workers) could go out there and run them off," said Gordon Wills, Marine and Aviation Department operations manager for Clearwater.

That proved to be easier said than done, recalled Clearwater Airpark general manager Barbara Cooper.

"I thought they would be skittish, but they just don't move," she said. "We had to take a pickup truck out there to run them off."

Cooper, who has worked at the airport since 2004, starting noticing what appeared to be "big dogs - on the German Shepherd-looking side" - congregating in wooded areas north of the runway near The Landings golf course in 2010.

Cooper said a coyote was seen May 23 along the golf course fence and, last Thursday, a fuel lineman told her he saw a coyote out at a dumpster when he was emptying the trash.

Web links:
Pinellas County coyote page

Pinellas County coyote-sighting interactive map