Pets, Rodents Lure Coyotes to Suburbs : Animals: Ventura County residents who live near the hills are coping with nightly raids. But whose turf is it anyway?

Nearly every night, packs of coyotes roam Bennett Curtis’ avocado orchards in Santa Paula, munching on ripe fallen fruit and chewing through tough plastic irrigation pipe to tap the water inside.

In Ventura, Vicki Torf-Fulton knows just when the coyote cacophony will begin above her hillside home: The chorus of yips and yowls starts about 10 every night. And in Thousand Oaks, pet owners often awake to find the family cat the unlucky victim of one of the prowling predators.

Across Ventura County, residents who live near the hills are coping with an influx of coyotes into their urbanized environment, county animal regulation officials say. The furtive predators are making nightly raids onto farms, ranches and suburban homes, drawn by an explosion in the rodent population, said Kathy Jenks, director of the county Animal Regulation Department.

“We’ve had more rodents this year because of the spring rains,” Jenks said. “That makes the coyotes a little more visible because they’ve got so much more to eat in the hillsides.”

After months of feasting in the haunts farther away from civilization, coyotes are venturing closer to subdivisions to prey on mice, rats and other easy targets.

Farmers in the Santa Clara Valley for years have battled coyotes who use the cloak of darkness to slink into citrus and avocado groves, Agricultural Commissioner Earl McPhail said. Once there, they chew on irrigation lines looking for water, he said.

The activity picks up in the late summer and fall when natural water sources are at their lowest, McPhail said.

They also stop to munch on oil-rich avocados that have fallen to the ground, he said.

“You can always tell a coyote that’s raided an avocado orchard,” McPhail said. “Their coat’s real thick and shiny.”

Curtis said his workers must patch water lines every few days because the coyotes have increased their nocturnal raids this year. The new piping is not expensive, but the work is a nuisance, he said.

“It takes labor to do it,” he said. “I have to have a man full time just to check for holes in the lines when the water is running and to fix those that have been damaged.”

Controlling the creatures is difficult because they are so hard to trap, McPhail said. Instead, the commissioner advises farmers to set shallow pans of water near irrigation lines in the hope that they will drink from them.

But that strategy often doesn’t work, he said.

“They are canines and, just like a dog, they like to chew,” McPhail said. “They use the pipe to clean and sharpen their teeth.”

For suburban hillside dwellers, the greatest threat is to domesticated pets, particularly cats, allowed to roam at night, Jenks said. It is much easier for a coyote to catch a cat than a wild rat, squirrel or rabbit accustomed to eluding predators, she said.

“Cats are well-fed and lazy and a really easy target,” Jenks said. “If a cat is left out, it will be eaten, no doubt about it. Free-roaming cats are a favored morsel of coyotes.”

Two coyotes were recently caught in traps outside a Thousand Oaks home after the resident complained about nightly problems with the creatures, said Gail Miley, an official with Los Angeles County Animal Care and Control. (Thousand Oaks has hired the Los Angeles agency for animal control work.)

“With urbanization, coyotes have a better food source than ever before,” Miley said. “If they find a food source, they will keep coming back to it.”

To combat the problem, Miley and other animal control officials advise hillside residents to feed pets indoors and keep them inside at night or in cages reinforced with strong chicken wire. Pet food should also be stored indoors; garbage should not be left out at night, and brush and weeds should be cleared from homes to discourage rodents.

Jenks said small children should not be left unattended outside in coyote territory, although she stressed that the danger to toddlers is more myth than reality.

“Coyotes are not going to come into someone’s house and steal their children,” she said.

Torf-Fulton said she does not worry about her 2-year-old daughter’s safety because the family has built a fence to keep coyotes out. Although she hears the coyotes singing and talking in the hills above her Ondulando tract home, she has never seen one.

“My experience is that they are very timid and don’t approach humans,” Torf-Fulton said.

Instead of worrying, she and her husband sit back at night and wait for the nightly symphony, she said.

“We’re on their territory as far as I’m concerned,” she said. “We need to be far more considerate about their well-being than ours.”