All this week I have been thinking about the story in SFGate where a coyote was spotted for the first time swimming to Alcatraz. A visitor saw it and talked to the volunteer who didn’t believe him until he pulled out his phone and showed her the video.

San Francisco coyote swims to Alcatraz for first time ever

It was a late Sunday afternoon like any other on San Francisco’s Alcatraz Island. The day was winding down, and Aidan Moore, a guest relations employee for Alcatraz City Cruises, was at the dock of the tourist attraction helping visitors disembark. Suddenly, one of the tourists approached him, wide-eyed: They had just seen a coyote swimming to shore, something that has never been recorded before.

Mind you its a mile and a quarter swim from the city, which is why they put a prison there in the first place. The idea was that if the bars couldn’t keep you then the sharks would.

But not this coyote.

Christine Wilkinson, a conservation scientist and carnivore ecologist who has studied coyotes for UC Berkeley and the California Academy of Sciences, has a couple of theories. First, she speculated the canine was most likely trying to find a territory of its own. She thinks the animal came from the pack that lives in the Coit Tower area, a territory that has very little green space, making the jaunt particularly appealing. Though coyotes usually seek out new territory in the fall through early winter, an individual doing so in January is not unheard of, Wilkinson said, especially since it’s now mating season for the animals.

That reminded me of beavers dispersing when the are ready to start out on their own. I imagine they go a little farther a field each day exploring and then finally day they are too far from home to make it back to the  lodge by morning. They have no idea where the are headed or what they’ll find. And they are as ill equipped over land as this coyote was in the water. but still many travel across miles to find  place to settle.

Wilkinson noted the coyotes on Angel Island likely formed their pack after one of the animals swam over and called until a mate arrived. She wondered if the individual on Alcatraz will try something similar.

Isn’t that an amazing paragraph? I think of that  bedraggled coyote alone on landscape. “Island-of-the-blue-dophining it”  without a pack as he scrounges for  nested cormorants and gulls eggs and dries to find enough condensed fog to drink.

And waits for the  full moon to HOWL for a companion.

Maybe Bernie Krause made the same mistake we all do. Maybe that fellow wasn’t looking for a mate. Maybe he was just looking for SOMEONE.