A video circulating on social media this week has forced San Franciscans to confront an uncomfortable truth: even the coyotes can no longer afford the city.
The footage shows a lone coyote swimming through the San Francisco Bay toward Alcatraz Island, its head bobbing above the water like a rideshare driver who accepted a fare without checking the destination first. After paddling more than a mile through freezing water and aggressive currents, the animal drags itself onto the rocks of the former federal prison, where it immediately appears to regret everything.
“Astonished, of course,” said Janet Kessler, a self-taught naturalist who has spent about 20 years documenting coyote behavior in San Francisco and has likely seen more weird things than most people who live here. Kessler received the video from a friend and said the coyote’s condition was concerning but not surprising.
“He can barely make it,” she said to CBS News. “He’s depleted. He is shivering. He is cold.” In other words, the coyote is exactly like everyone else in the city who doesn’t work in tech.
Coyotes are known to live on nearby Angel Island, but this is the first documented case of one reaching Alcatraz, which is a place historically reserved for the desperate, the confined, and people who ran out of better options.
I’m sad to hear our furry friends are now facing similar circumstances.
Kessler believes the coyote may have felt intense territorial pressure within San Francisco, a city where space is limited, competition is brutal, and everyone swears they were here first. Kessler kinda sounds like a YIMBY.
“This one was probably pushed around by other territorial owners and decided he could make this trip,” she said. “So he attempted it, and he made it.” A bold move, though not necessarily a good one.
Whether the coyote survived its first night on Alcatraz remains unknown, but Kessler says the island offers enough resources to get by, at least temporarily.
“There are banana slugs,” she said. “There are rats. There are mice. There are birds.” There is also no running water, but recent rain left puddles across the island, making Alcatraz roughly as livable as half the apartments currently listed on Craigslist.
The video was shared on Facebook by a man who works on Alcatraz, who said it was given to him by a tourist. Kessler praised those involved for keeping their distance and not attempting to help, pet, or gentrify the animal.
“Leave the coyote alone,” she said. “This is it doing what it does best.”
After decades of study, Kessler says coyotes are extraordinarily adaptable. Some have lived in San Francisco for generations, quietly learning how to avoid traffic, tourists, and tech campuses. Whether this one chooses to stay on Alcatraz or eventually swim back, the takeaway is clear.
“They are survivalists,” Kessler said. “Ready to push their envelopes.”
Even if that envelope involves freezing water, rock walls, and realizing that Alcatraz somehow still has better boundaries than most of the city.
If that coyote can survive swimming across the Bay to Alcatraz, maybe you can survive leaving that room you’re renting in San Francisco for your own studio apartment in Oakland.
Who knows.
