The morning is sunny and uncharacteristically mild for mid-March as we tramp through the crunchy remains of snow, which up until a few days earlier obscured the carpet of dead leaves and was crisscrossed with coyote tracks. We stop in front of a small tree with an odd contraption strapped to its trunk. It’s made of a section of white plastic pipe anchored to a piece of lumber by a long bolt that the pipe can rotate around like a propeller blade. The pipe is sealed on the bottom end with duct tape and filled with dog treats.
It’s a puzzle of sorts, one that Raymond designed to test the coyotes’ problem-solving abilities as part of her PhD work at the University of Alberta. To solve it, coyotes need to rotate the pipe with a nose or paw until the treats spill out. She peers into the top of the pipe. “No treats!” An animal has solved the puzzle. She unlocks a motion-triggered trail camera strapped to a nearby tree and begins scanning the videos on its small screen to see who figured it out. After about a minute, she sighs: “It was probably this squirrel.” Squirrels usually get the treats by chewing through the duct tape. Mice sometimes dive into the top of the pipe, eating the treats and then exiting via small holes near the bottom—which Raymond made, presciently, as rodent escape hatches. She returns every few days to restock the treats.
In winter 2024, Raymond deployed the pipe puzzles for four weeks at a time at 26 sites across Edmonton, and 14 more at Elk Island National Park, about 50 kilometers (30 miles) east of the city. By comparing the results from the two locations, Raymond hopes to understand if there are cognitive differences between urban coyotes and their counterparts living in more natural settings. During the first round of deployments, her cameras captured 461 videos of coyotes; 140 of those showed coyotes displaying interest in a puzzle or interacting with it in some way. The experiment is ongoing, but patterns are already emerging. “We’re finding that urban coyotes are a lot bolder,” she says. “They’re much quicker to approach puzzles. They are less fearful of them.”
In 13 of those 140 interactions, the coyotes successfully solved the puzzle. While that may sound unremarkable, Raymond wasn’t initially sure the notoriously wary canids would be willing to interact with the puzzles at all. Notably, each of the 13 instances took place in the city. “It seems that this willingness to approach and explore is critical,” says conservation behaviorist Colleen St. Clair, Raymond’s advisor at the University of Alberta. “You can’t get food from a novel source unless you’re willing to approach it.”
Raymond isn’t sure yet whether the park coyotes were unable to solve the puzzles, or if the animals were just too cautious to persist long enough. The results from this year’s puzzle deployments may answer that question, but there are already clues. Test locations in the city ranged from less developed places—like the middle of golf courses with a lot of forested cover—to areas with more roads, buildings, and people, such as the neighborhood pocket park or a thin, forested strip between industrial yards. Coyotes across the city showed similar willingness to investigate the puzzles. But, tellingly, the majority of coyotes who successfully solved puzzles did so in the most urbanized sites.
Traditionally, scientists have tried to determine what animals’ minds are capable of by devising laboratory experiments to test them in captivity. This approach has the benefit of control: Researchers can keep every aspect of the experiment consistent while testing their subject’s reaction to a single changing variable. But captivity has major, often negative, impacts on animals’ behavior, limiting the conclusions scientists can draw. And the studies provide little insight into how animals actually live their lives in the wild.
Researchers like Raymond, Thornton, and Stanton are helping pioneer a different approach: testing the cognition of wild animals on their own turf, in ways that reflect the real challenges of living in urban environments. As Stanton puts it: “How can we test them in the places that they live, with questions that matter?”
Getting to know the minds of the animals in our midst has several potential benefits. It could show us how to minimize conflict between humans and urban wildlife, and could also answer intriguing scientific questions about how animals think and use their cognitive abilities to adapt to rapidly changing environments. What scientists learn might even change the way we think about the animals sharing our space—and our relationships with them.