The Present Tenants: Coyotes in the Meeting Room, a Buck on Main Street

November 2024; the outdoors press of the 2010s

The modern urban-wildlife record of Mishawaka is not a survey. It is a meeting, and a memory. The meeting is documented at press strength: on 12 November 2024, about forty Mishawaka residents met with city officials about coyotes — a meeting carried in the press by Councilman Matt Mammolenti, who told WNDU he had received many calls from constituents concerned about coyotes coming closer to homes, with small pets the particular worry. The Department of Natural Resources' answer, as the station reported it, was the agency's standing one: it receives such calls every day from all over the state, coyotes are really no threat to people, they come into neighborhoods for small rodents and accessible trash, and it had had no reports of any pets or people being attacked. The entry is the present state of the city's wild record in miniature — a resident predator population established enough to fill a meeting room, a state agency declining alarm, and no incident in the record to settle the argument either way. The memory is the deer herd's type specimen. The outdoors press of record, in a column on urban deer and rural coyotes, reaches for it as common local knowledge: "Remember that monster buck that was killed by a vehicle on Main Street in Mishawaka last November?" A very large buck, dead by collision on the city's main street in a November of the mid-2010s, remembered years later as the obvious example of its theme — the restored herd of the state programs, two generations on, at home enough in the city to die on its principal street, and ordinary enough that the column needs no name, no date, and no explanation. Between Chapman's rarity of 1880 and that sentence runs the whole deer entry above; the coyote, which has no Chapman entry at all — the county's chapter does not list it among the county's animals — now holds the meeting. The two together are Mishawaka's documented urban wildlife present: uncounted by any survey, and documented instead at the strength of the institutions that noticed them.

Principal sources

1. WNDU, "Coyotes create concerns for some Michiana residents, especially small pet owners," 14 November 2024 — the 12 November Mishawaka meeting, Councilman Matt Mammolenti, about forty residents, the DNR's response.
2. Michiana Outdoors News, "Rural Coyotes Prey on Fawns; Urban Deer are Thriving" — the Main Street buck, carried as outdoors-press record.
3. Chapman, History of St. Joseph County (1880), Chapter II — the deer a rarity in 1880; no coyote in the chapter's lists.