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2012 — the present
The coyote: The wolf's smaller cousin arrived without any program at all. Fort Wayne's documented city record runs through its newspapers and its police: in April 2012 the News-Sentinel published a photograph of two coyotes roaming southwest Fort Wayne, in the Fall Creek addition off Bass Road near the University of Saint Francis; on 1 December 2020 the Fort Wayne Police Department addressed residents calling 911 about coyotes, in a post that joked through the cartoon signs of a coyote problem before ending seriously: "In all seriousness coyotes live with us. Yes, some are #CityDwellers but most stick to county areas." Coyotes are now established in all 92 Indiana counties. Fox Island County Park's trail cameras film them among the deer, and Fort Wayne Animal Care & Control's standing guidance (May 2024) is that the city can assist only with sick or injured wildlife — "remember this is their home!"
The bobcat: The bobcat is the newest return, and it is coming up the same rivers the deer came down. In June 2023 WANE reported DNR furbearer biologist Geriann Albers explaining that bobcats, having moved into southern Indiana in the late 1900s, are "migrating into northeast Indiana… they like to follow our river corridors… up into northern Indiana and over… down into our northeastern and eastern part of our state," with sightings rising as trail and security cameras multiply. The bobcat's Fort Wayne chapter is therefore a present-tense record of confirmed sightings accumulating along the Maumee and its tributaries, not a restored population with a date — and this section prints it at exactly that strength.
The bear that isn't: For completeness: Indiana's four confirmed modern black bears (2015 in St. Joseph County, 2016 in the south, 2018 in Clark and Floyd counties, 2021 in Vanderburgh County) include none in Allen County, and the state has no breeding bear population. If a bear walks into Fort Wayne's record, it will arrive the way the 2015 bear arrived in South Bend's county — as a dispersing young male from Michigan, confirmed by the DNR, and dated. Until then the county's bears remain where this section found them: in the 1830s.
Sources:
- Allen County Genealogical Society, "Animals of Allen County, Indiana" (the News-Sentinel coyote photograph, April 2012; the FWPD post of 1 December 2020; Fort Wayne Animal Care & Control, 23 May 2024), acgsi.org.
- WANE 15, Rex Smith, "More bobcat sightings are occurring in northeast Indiana; why are they coming here?," 20 June 2023 (Geriann Albers, Indiana DNR), via acgsi.org.
- Indiana DNR, "Fish and Wildlife: Black Bear" (the four confirmed bears, 2015–2021; no breeding population), in.gov.