Coyote Hal mum on trek to Big Apple

The actor John Travolta may have popularized the culture of the urban cowboy on the big screen years ago, but it took a dashing youngster named Hal to make the urban coyote into a genuine New York City folk hero.

Unlike our Maine coyotes, who prefer to slink through the woods in obscurity, howling in the night on occasion to assert their furtive presence, Hal the coyote dared to take a bold bite out of the Big Apple, as well as a few city pigeons along the way.

By the time his adventurous journey had ended Wednesday in Central Park, the year-old tawny critter had proved to his reclusive country brethren everywhere what Frank Sinatra had so famously said of New York in song: that if you can make it there, you can make it anywhere.

Hal had indeed made it there, slipping unnoticed into the heart of the city that never sleeps until a tranquilizer dart in the rump finally stopped him in his tracks. Hal now shares a place of wildlife distinction with Otis, the coyote captured in Central Park in 1999 that cleared the way for others of his species.

But where Hal came from, how he got to town and why he would attempt so ambitious a trek are all questions that only he can answer. And Hal, the wily coyote turned elusive roadrunner, is not talking.

That left wildlife officials to speculate this week about his reasons and his route, while the New York media fed entranced Manhattanites every detail possible about the antics of this exotic wild creature in their midst.

Some experts suggested that Hal might have wandered into the city after being driven from his home far away by older coyotes. Others speculated that Hal had succumbed to spring fever and went out looking for love.

Wally Jakubas, a coyote expert with the Maine Department of Inland Fisheries and Wildlife, thinks Hal might just have been testing his burgeoning sense of independence.

“Typically young coyotes go through what’s called a dispersal, which is like when a teenager moves away from home,” Jakubas said Thursday. “And they can travel long distances, sometimes hundreds of miles.”

Hal’s rigorous path to the city, some have theorized, began in the wilds of Westchester County.

From there, the 35-pound coyote might have trotted into the Bronx and then into Manhattan across a railroad bridge at a narrow water crossing called Spuyten Duyvil. It’s also possible that Hal paddled across the water to the island and then wandered down 72nd Street to Central Park West.

However he managed to negotiate the busy city streets and enter the park without being seen, the city’s park commissioner said, Hal “had to be a very adventurous coyote.”

Hal began making tantalizing headlines not long after hitting town. Park-goers reported to officials early Sunday morning that they’d spotted a wolf skulking around the 66th Street transverse. Someone else called from a taxi in the park to say he’d seen a hyena. A late-night dog walker reported seeing an animal that might have been a wolf or maybe a coyote.

Hal laid low for a while, dining on park birds and leaving telltale piles of feathers in his wake. When he was spotted at the 4-acre Hallet Nature Sanctuary – hence his city name – the coyote hunt was on. Pursuers converged on the site, aided by an NYPD helicopter equipped with a thermal imaging camera. But Hal eluded them by scampering over an 8-foot-high fence.

The chase was called off on account of darkness and resumed early Wednesday morning. That’s when a member of a crew filming a movie at the Wollman Rink, a public ice-skating facility near the sanctuary, told The New York Times that she saw a coyote chasing after a woman’s little dog. Hal looked hungry, the woman said.

By now, Hal was big news. Television crews trailed the creature through the park from hovering helicopters, while a horde of police officers, park police and reporters gave chase on the ground. They cornered him by the Heckscher Ballfields, but the nimble Hal gave them the slip. He swam across the sanctuary pond, noshed on a duck, and then slip-slided his way across the skating rink, where, the Times reported, “an actress in a wig was doing figure-eights.”

While the chase was under way, Mayor Michael Bloomberg assured his fellow New Yorkers that Hal posed no threat to their safety.

“This is New York,” he said, “and I would suggest that the coyote may have more problems than the rest of us.”

Good as he was, however, not even the cagey Hal could outfox his pursuers forever. When he showed up at a wooded section of the park called the Ramble, a police sharpshooter took aim with a tranquilizer gun and ended the exhilarating chase with both a bang and a whimper.

Hal, a coyote with chutzpah, was soon fast asleep in the back of a pickup truck, perhaps dreaming of his once-in-a-lifetime great adventure in the big city.

“Well, I do hope he had some fun while it lasted,” Jakubas said.