{"id":682,"date":"2026-08-01T12:53:14","date_gmt":"2026-08-01T19:53:14","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.airs.com\/blog\/?p=682"},"modified":"2026-08-01T12:53:14","modified_gmt":"2026-08-01T19:53:14","slug":"the-predator-prey-cycle-next-door","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.airs.com\/blog\/archives\/682","title":{"rendered":"The Predator\/Prey Cycle Next Door"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<p>I&#8217;m a member of Next Door, a web site that has somehow taken over neighborhood mailing lists. The only Next Door posts I ever look at are the ones about animals: lost cat, found cat, what is this animal (it&#8217;s usually a grey fox), and so forth.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>This casual reading has led me these purely anecdotal observations:<\/p>\n\n\n\n<ul class=\"wp-block-list\">\n<li>During the pandemic, coyotes moved into town. There were a lot of posts about &#8220;just saw a coyote,&#8221; &#8220;coyote walking down the street,&#8221; &#8220;coyote tipped over my garbage can.&#8221;<\/li>\n\n\n\n<li>Soon after, cats started to disappear. Lost of &#8220;lost cat&#8221; postings. In real life every street corner around our house\u2014no exaggeration, literally every street corner\u2014had one or more &#8220;lost cat&#8221; posters. I personally saw a coyote running up the street carrying half a dead cat body.<\/li>\n\n\n\n<li>After a while, there were no more &#8220;lost cat&#8221; postings. Presumably the cats were wised up or gone or kept indoors.<\/li>\n\n\n\n<li>Several months later, I started to see &#8220;mangy coyote&#8221; and &#8220;sick coyote&#8221; postings, and even &#8220;dead coyote in my yard.&#8221; This is the point in the predator\/prey cycle when the prey are gone and the predators starve.<\/li>\n\n\n\n<li>Now the gophers have moved in. &#8220;What do I do about gophers in my garden?&#8221; The local park has easily 20 gopher mounds. I&#8217;m guessing that both cats and coyotes keep gopher numbers down, but there aren&#8217;t many cats or coyotes around just now. And not enough grey foxes.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n\n\n\n<p>Looking forward to the next step in this cycle.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>I&#8217;m a member of Next Door, a web site that has somehow taken over neighborhood mailing lists. The only Next Door posts I ever look at are the ones about animals: lost cat, found cat, what is this animal (it&#8217;s usually a grey fox), and so forth. This casual reading has led me these purely [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-682","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-random"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.airs.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/682","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.airs.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.airs.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.airs.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.airs.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=682"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.airs.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/682\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":683,"href":"https:\/\/www.airs.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/682\/revisions\/683"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.airs.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=682"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.airs.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=682"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.airs.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=682"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}