Coyote Infestation: Residents Want Action

“In the evenings, we hear them making their kills,” Richard Sacks said about coyotes slaughtering their prey near his home on Brierhill Road.

Such incidents are making Deerfield residents nervous about their safety as well as that of their pets in venturing outside.

“I carry Mace with me now in the backyard when I’m gardening,” his wife, Lousie, said about her fear of coyotes that often walk across the lawn at midday. “You don’t even feel safe in your own backyard.”

The Sacks along with several others have noticed a drastic increase in the local coyote population over the past year.

“We keep a baseball bat by our backdoor,” said their neighbor, Terry Schwartz, after a recent scary incident involving her small dog.

“He barked to go out,” Schwartz recalled, then noting she had to quickly run after him when her housekeeper heard the dog squeal. “A coyote was three feet from the dog.

"Later, I found out that my dog had bites on him when he went to get groomed,” she said.

While Schwartz’s pet sustained minor injuries, other animals haven’t been as lucky. In April, in Highland Park after the dog escaped from its fenced-in yard and confronted them.

While Richard Sacks said Deerfield police told him nothing like that has happened in his area, he still thinks something needs to be done--and many of his neighbors agree.

“This was a really healthy, full, really well-fed coyote,” Juliet Plonsker, another Sacks neighbor, recalled about watching a coyote eat a raccoon in the middle of the day on her property about a month ago. “We had vultures in our yard…It was like a safari.”

Another neighbor was able to snap photos of the kill, which Patch has featured above.  

The growing problem with coyotes prompted the Sacks to reach out to village officials during a board meeting earlier this month.

“We’re in a dense suburban setting. This is not an appropriate place for the expansion of this kind of population,” Richard Sacks told board members.

He suggested hiring relocation experts to capture and move the coyotes to another area.

According to the Illinois Department of Natural Resources, coyotes can be found throughout the state but are "least abundant in the northern two to three tiers of counties." However, the Chicago area has seen an increase in their population over the years. The Lake County Forest Preserve's website states that coyotes are not dangerous to people and actually "have a natural fear of humans." The site goes on to say that coyotes only become aggressive with people when they go to feed or interact with them. 

“I, for one, would hate to see some small child attacked because we didn’t take the steps to make it inhospitable or moved to a different locale,” said Sacks.

A concern some village officials sympathized with.

“It would make me crazy,” Mayor Harriet Rosenthal told the board.  “We’re going to investigate this and see what we can do.”

Action Sacks hopes the village follows through with.

“We find ourselves with a public safety issue,” he said. “Certainly, this is something I think some resources should be devoted to.”