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If you live here, you almost certainly have heard them call from afar. But have you heard the quiet of coyotes when they’re up close?

Editor’s note: this was a live one. One judge said that it wasn’t really about a neighborhood. Most of the neighbors mentioned aren’t human, and the houses largely loom in the background. But plenty of places have these in-between spaces, natural incursions into the urban landscape. Or in this case, not so natural — there is a homeowners association involved, after all. And it had so much of what we look for in a Reader story: exploration, encounter, conversation, reflection, history, good writing, and a strong sense of place.

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Do you know where, exactly, coyotes live? In the dip of dusk, when you hear them howl, do you know where they are? Have you watched them chase their siblings in circles, greet each other with soft grunts, or bask on a sun-baked boulder? If you live here, you almost certainly have heard them call from afar. But have you heard the quiet of coyotes when they’re up close?

Coyotes have a vibe unlike that of any other animal. A knowing. Who knows us better? Rats, maybe. Coyotes know what we eat and the pets we keep — where we walk, how we live, and how to live among us. They’re now established in our densest cities, and all across the country, but they’re from around here. They’re among us, living lives unseen — unless you follow the howls and learn where they hang and what they get up to.

Tucked behind hills that are themselves hidden by an elfin forest, you’ll find an old avocado grove. Actually, you probably won’t find it: it doesn’t have an address, or even a name. You wouldn’t notice it if you drove by. You have no reason to go there, and you might have a few reasons not to. I learned of it only because of my partner. After we fell in love, she brought me home to meet her family, and to see where she was from. She took me to the desert, to mushroom caves, to crumbling sea cliffs — and on dawn dog walks deep into the old grove.

Ever since then, whenever we visit her family, I walk the grove. We find a way to spend at least a month here each year. Over the past ten years, I’ve gone on a lot of walks. I go twice a day: an hour before sunrise, and an hour before nightfall. I’ve run into rattlesnakes and ravens, tarantulas and phainopepla, bobcats and quails. I’ve met white pelicans and black swans, coastal California gnatcatchers and black-headed grosbeaks, sage sparrows and greater roadrunners, cactus wrens and hooded orioles, Western skinks and California thrashers. When I started, the old grove’s curious combination of natural chaparral and orchard-gone-wild harbored such an abundance of wildlife, it rivaled any park or preserve I’d seen — even though it was just a few dozen acres, a brambly island in a sea of housing developments. Mornings, I walk until the sun peeks over the neighboring peak, the light goes too bright, and the world falls flat. I aim to get home before the heat hits — but this is contingent on the coyotes.

She took me to the desert, to mushroom caves, to crumbling sea cliffs — and on dawn dogs walks deep into the old grove.

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I’m a wildlife filmmaker; I look for animals a lot. I’ve camped among musk ox, followed forest elephant trails to track gorillas, accepted an Arctic wolf stealing my snow-leopard-print hat. I’ve been peed on by a chimp in Kibale (incidentally) and an orangutan in the Kinabatangan (intentionally). I’ve leaned out of a chopper’s open door over herds of mountain caribou, hid in a hide to watch a wedgie rip up a ‘roo, gazed upon golden-fleeced vicuñas grazing below Chimborazo. But nowhere else have I found an exciting animal so often, so casually, or so consistently. And after a decade of this, I can promise you that a coyote’s quiet is something special.

For the first few years, I tracked the grove’s coyotes mostly through camera traps. But then something changed. That’s the rub here. I call the grove “old” because my arrival coincided with its demise. Over the last ten years, I’ve watched as gardeners cut it down to coppices. It hurt to find each fresh cut, almost like losing a patch of old growth forest, and that feeling confused me. I found I cared about the grove as if it were natural, even though it was far from it.

Beside each tree sprout, little white sprinklers, plastic mushrooms spinning rainbows in the afternoon light. Avocados are thirsty trees. It’s wet where they’re from, in the Mexican highlands. There, the trees can live for hundreds of years. Up here, where water is scarce, they live only as long as someone waters them. Unlike palms and Torrey pines, they can’t survive only on sea fog and morning dew. When the water ran low, the grove had to go.

In the stories native to this place, those told by the Payómkawichum (Luiseño) and Kumeyaay, Coyote teaches us. Inspired by those old stories, and seeking to honor them, I follow Coyote too. I need Coyote’s help here, to carry the tale of losing a place I love: an abandoned, enchanted orchard, a faux forest that should not exist, the place where I came to know Coyote. The old stories are still here — let’s not forget that the very name coyotl is Nahuatl — but they’re not mine to tell. I’ll share this: in many of them, Coyote dies, or is killed — and then returns. Often, none the wiser.

Coyote is hard to get to know. But I try my best, finding and following their trails, contorting through holes in the fence, crawling through dog-sized tunnels in the chaparral, even picking apart their poop. I find berries, feathers, tiny bones. Last week, I found a dropping that was pure purple from prickly pear. The dogs and I come home smelling sweetly of sage, twigs in the hair, burrs in the fur, scratched and scraped up.

Coyote is always moving — slipping, slinking, and stalking through the landscape. You can meet one anytime, anywhere — or not at all. In the grove, you could meet coyotes twice in a single walk, or not see one for weeks. They run routes, loops, and circuits. Checking on spots. Checking on food, change, and each other. They notice everything. They leave signs everywhere: for each other, for the dogs, for you and me: Coyote is here. One morning, in the wee hours, from the kitchen table, I watched a coyote prance up onto our porch, poop on it, and then slip back into the darkness. Maybe he’s getting me back for marking up his territory, I thought. Telling me, I know where you live.

Coyotes know what we eat, where we walk, how we live, and how to live among us.

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Meetings are fleeting, but coyotes have such a presence; they linger on the land. After an encounter, shapes in the chaparral start to trick and tease. A low forked branch appears as ears, a pointed stump as a curious head. You wait for movement, wondering: is Coyote still here?

Many animals feel like they’re part of a place, but almost in the background. They’re there, around, but flitting about, adding song or sound, in and out of sight, existing in the in-between. You sense them more than you meet them. Coyotes are not like that. If you get the right one, in the right mood, she’ll engage you, but with total quiet. Her silence seems to say, I see you, I acknowledge you. In that moment, you get a hint of who she is.

My mom keeps five parrots, and had budgies, lovebirds, and cockatiels before that. Growing up with them taught me to see the personalities of birds in the wild. Our dogs taught me to see coyotes in much the same way. In the grove, I learned to recognize the different coyotes’ characteristics, their individuality. But only as they learned the same of me. Together, we found some sort of understanding. Some want more space than others, and if I pay attention to that, they respond. They let me watch them hunt, lounge, dig up mice and munch avocados, frolic together and nuzzle each other.

But they are not my dogs. I trust my dogs. I don’t trust coyotes. They’re tricksters. If you think there is one, there are two. If you think there are two, there are three. Last August, for the first time, we ran into a proper pack, a group of three… or five? They can exude a sense of menace too, especially when you can’t keep count, and they appear and disappear in such close proximity. When will one try for the smaller dog? Am I ready? A particular pair makes you tingle, their body language saying: I’m not scared of you. Once, we saw two (or three) scare a bobcat up a tree.

A coyote, of course, is a desert dog. But not the coyotes of the grove. Raised here, they have become specialists of the faux forest. For generations, their families have hunted, denned and raised pups among the avocados. They venture out to the surrounding areas — fragrant coastal sage scrub, hot and dry chaparral — but the grove is home. Refuge.

What makes the grove so special to me is the chance of encountering them. And, then, of discovering which coyote I’ve encountered. Around the grove, there’s at least the Old Lady and Bum Leg, No-Tail and his friend. A big-eared little lanky one and the sidewalk scatterer. I find his work everywhere, including on the walk home. I go visit coyote and coyote comes to visit me. There’s at least one yippy one, and a spot he likes to yip from. He has a high hillside, and a hidden hole in the fence. He scolds us wherever we run into him, then retreats to his spot up there. A clever pair always lets us see only one of them at a time. One keeps our attention, walking alone uphill, while the other spooks us by disappearing. Or by only appearing in the photos later, as I look through them and realize two different coyotes circled us that day.

A bold male stays well ahead of us, keeping his distance, but not letting us interrupt his hunt. He gives the dogs a glance, a shake of the fur, then lopes off. I want to follow, see where he goes, what he’ll catch, but instead, I grant him his space, his hunt, his quiet. He drops down toward the water, revealing yet another coyote trail to try someday.

Eight out of nine days in a row we meet at least one, missing only on the morning I told my partner of our streak and knew I’d ruined it. In a sea misty morning, two yelped at us from the fog, incessantly, even as we skirted their hilltop spot to give them space. The yippy one had found a friend. For over twenty minutes, they threw barks and yelps and wails, even a new call — a cackling crescendo — I had not heard before. We see coyotes so often; if they’re barky or on edge, we just give them space, leave them be.

I can’t trust the coyotes. They’re tricksters. If you think there is one, there are two. If you think there are two, there are three.

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Another morning, I turned to find a coyote right behind me. The sighthound pup had dragged us down a trail, sniffing something out. I let her lead, could feel she was onto something. We dropped into a draw, and despite her alertness and excitement, we found nothing. We stopped, scanned, sniffed. Waited. Still: nothing. We waded through a series of spiky shrubs and grasses, then onto the dirt ranch road. There, just as we turned uphill, I felt the pup pull. I turned to check on her, and saw a coyote a few feet away. Coyote had snuck up right behind us — while we were out looking for coyotes.

More than once, we run into the Old Lady and she won’t stop eating her avocado. She barks at us between bites, with her mouth full. One morning, she’s right below us, but the dogs don’t notice. She just sits and waits. She’s so close, I can hear her breath. I stop too, keep quiet, and aim simply to be present with her. After a moment, she stands, sniffs, and then slips away down to the rushes by the water, just like last time.

The grove is always changing, especially when left to go wild. This summer, I paused on a grove walk to discover our mutt’s face covered in tiny seed-burrs. I looked down and found that my legs were covered, too. Our sighthound pup was even worse off, infested with the seed-burrs like a demon beast from Princess Mononoke. I remembered the seed-burrs, but couldn’t find the plant they came from, on the land or online. They’re smaller than cockleburr or knapweed, a tiny terror. Trying to write about them at least made me find the plant: slender, branchy, purple-stemmed. I picked a few, brought them home, and still couldn’t ID them. The dogs found the samples and dragged them into the house, seed-burring the furniture.

I ran the bath, washed the dogs in a land without water. Slathered the sighthound in conditioner, combed and picked and pulled. She shook, shivered, whined, even snapped at my fingers. Leaped out of the tub again and again. For over an hour, I picked seed-burrs off her toes, ears, elbow tufts. There was always another one. They slid more easily off the wiry hair of the mutt, a terrier-mix from the streets of San Diego. As for me, I skipped the sting and just cut off my leg hairs.

How the coyotes must suffer, I thought. They must be covered in these. With no one to pick them off, the seed-burrs would remain, twisting, pulling, matting their fur. I thought of an Annie Dillard essay, read long ago, about all the ailments of wild animals: parasites, infections, poorly-healed wounds. In my video recordings, I notice a rough, raw injury on a young coyote’s rear haunch. How the Old Lady moves like she’s super sore.

Near the end of the last visit’s last walk, I decided to add one more loop. As we dipped down, the turn offered a new angle back upon the old grove. Just where the avocado trees meet the chaparral, I spotted the Old Lady. She was slow and quiet enough that, once again, the dogs never noticed her. Somehow, I signaled to her that she need not worry. She gave a glance, took a few steps. Another glance, then another. But she didn’t dash, or bark, or alter her plans or change her way. My thoughts circled like my walks. Quiet coyote, old, sore, and slow, hunts avocado.

Mesoamericans first cultivated wild avocados thousands of years ago, far to the south of here. As with coyote, our name is a corruption of the Nahuatl: ahuacatl. An avocado tree is ahuacaquahuitl. Avocado groves arrived in San Diego just over a century ago, with plantings in Vista in 1915 and 1916. The keeper of our old grove, Vincente, guessed that this particular planting was only forty years old. The forest I fell for was just a moment. And a strange one at that. Born at a time when we had enough water to waste, enough to grow giant avocado trees far from their natural range, enough to turn semi-arid hills semi-tropical. Water is precious here. Sacred. Catch some and create a forest. Lose it and the forest falls.

Across Southern California, avocado groves are disappearing. It’s hard to imagine, in our hotter, drier world, that they’ll ever make sense here again. And they have to make sense to exist here; it won’t happen by nature, or by accident. On a bordering hillside, conservationists have planted prickly-pear and cane cholla, anticipating the desert’s dominion. When the grove started to go, did the coyotes understand why? I didn’t. Why conjure a forest from thin air, give it decades to grow, and then destroy it? When I first came, a grovekeeper sometimes lived on the land. He had a trailer tucked into the hillside, enclosed in the grove sweeping the slopes above him. The trailer’s just a rusted-out chassis now. The slopes open, the trees all gone.

The trees died a few years ago, in the depths of the drought, when the farming company cut the water. They went white, then stood stark there for years, skeletons running down the ridgelines. After that, almost no one came. Often, I didn’t even see Vincente. Then, when he did start coming, he started cutting. First he took the dead ones down, and then he started on the stands that were still living. One here, another there. Each one stung.

The grove coyotes’ world crashed down around them, appearing re-arranged in logpiles, punctuated by stumps, replaced by weeds and woodchips. Those weeds swept in fast, racing the sage scrub and chaparral to claim any newly opened space. The coyotes reacted too. Where in the past they had remained hidden, now they let themselves be seen. One grew angry, assertive, almost aggressive. He barked at human intruders, whether they came to cut or not. Another remained reserved, but still changed her ways and stepped out of the shadows. She kept her calm and her distance, and was unhurried and unafraid. But she was also clearly upset by something.

The old grove was no true wilderness, no site of conservational interest. It never was. If anything, its demise freed up some of the little water available here. And the little space. Enclosed by homes and housing developments, culs de sac and thoroughfares — a neighborhood in the more traditional sense — the hillsides it once spanned offered rare room for wildlife. Maybe that’s why it hurt to lose it. Even so, I couldn’t understand why I felt so upset. I’d fallen for a forest that should not exist. I felt solastalgia — grief over lost nature — for an unnatural and unsustainable place. The nature-culture I grew up with couldn’t justify that grief; it needed nature to be natural. And yet.

We can look forward, but we can also look back. I miss the avocados, but why not the acorns and oaks that preceded them? A native forest would look very different here. A riparian woodland, such as would grow along the now-dammed creek, would be flush with sycamores, cottonwoods, willows. Before the avocados, before the dam, before the white man came and cleared the land for cattle and firewood, in a slightly wetter, cooler climate, the hills around the creek have even hosted oak woodlands, the sort of place where people found food, shade, shelter, medicines, and materials for thousands of years. The Payómkawichum and Kumeyaay did not need to water their forests.

I went to talk to Vincente. I asked him why they were cutting the grove, though I already knew the answer. Too much water. Vincente told me he cares for half a dozen orchards like this — he calls them avocado ranches — and he showed me where the coyotes gave him grief. “The coyotes go to the sprinklers, the pipes, broken, everything, destroyed. Everything,” he said. “Everything, you leave it here, they’re going to destroy it.”

“Why do they do it?” I asked.

“I don’t know,” he laughed.

“What do you do to stop it? You have to fix it?”

“I have to fix it,” he said. “Every weekend.” He shook his head. “Every weekend.”

“Do you like the coyotes, or do they make you mad?”

“Ah, it’s okay. I’m working right here, they’re coming right there.” He gestured an arm’s length away.

“They’re not scared, huh?”

“Nah, uh uh. Last week, I stopped the truck, he comes right here: ‘Yow, where you going?’” The coyote told him off. I asked Vincente how many coyotes he thought lived in the old grove. “Pssh, maybe ten,” he guessed, adding: “I see them every day.” That was even more than I thought.

Coyotes drew me to the old grove, but they are not the only reason I go. Sometimes, I won’t see one for a week or two. I go for the sky, blasts of impossible purples and pinks that hit so hard, you can barely breathe. For the way the sage scrub perfumes the dogs, how they carry its scent home, the land lingering on their fur, a snuggle bringing a waft of the place. And there are even deeper draws: an unusual new bird, a surprising new insect. (Last week: a devil’s coach horse beetle, a surprise to almost step on.) Even mythical creatures.

A nearby neighbor, Tom, camera traps near the grove in search of a legendary big black cat. He’s nearly certain that one passes through here; he’s heard stories of sightings. And there was the strange evening he had, watching a very worried coyote just about lose it near the end of the grove. Tom shared video of the frantic coyote on his phone as evidence. He’s decades older than I am; we get breakfast sometimes to talk trapping. Pumas sneak around these parts, I offer. Even in Los Angeles, if you can believe it. Could be a very dark morph. Tom demurs. This cat’s bigger, darker. Jaguar.

On my grove walks, I also find thought, relief, quiet. Peace. Usually, we just wend from the far western edge, below the water tanks, to the far east, where housing developments tumble down to the water. You can wander much longer, though — drop down behind the dam and loop around, track the shore of the reservoir, even follow the creek all the way to the sea.

The old grove is now a strange land of stumps sprouting saplings. After a couple years of grumbling through them, one random morning, the sprouting suddenly registered, and I suddenly saw the coyotes for what they are. Imagine, I thought, living in a world that’s healing. Not wounded, or cooking, or dying, but returning, repairing, blooming. Imagine what that would feel like! Imagine if my toddler, or his kids, or his kids’ kids, get to live in a world like that, a wild-ing one. That’s what the coyotes bring here, and to wherever they inhabit, no matter what’s happening to the land around them. The grove’s gone but they’re still here. They lured me into love with this place; now they guide me through its ghost, leading the way into the unknown. Who better to engage the change?

Last year, the farming company gave up and started trying to get out of their fifty-year lease, launching a legal battle with the homeowners association who own the land but do not want the expense of maintaining it. When developers built up the area, the county preserved the grove-to-be under an open space easement. It would not become houses, but its future was uncertain. Solar farming, nuts, fruit, and wildflowers were all proposed. Then something shifted. I’d been away since August, and this winter, when I returned, the grove was different. The brush had been cut back, the weeds cut down. There was the tiniest echo of the orchard. It had become a working landscape again.

“That’s a good thing, right?” my partner asked. I grumbled my disagreement, but didn’t know why I felt bummed about it, even slightly bitter. Perhaps because, on this winter’s grove walks, I find fewer animals — of any sort.

For a month this winter, most mornings, a half dozen gardeners appeared. They planted straight sets of saplings from Ventura, lining slopes high on the hills. Solar-powered motion-detecting alarms hid among the saplings, little whirring, screeching robotic red-tailed hawks, flashing red and green to deter deer. They didn’t work: more than once, I flushed bucks stalking saplings.

This morning, we walked out to a chorus of coyotes. It was still very dark. Their calls rang from so many spots, I couldn’t place where they were. Over there, and there, and there too! They sang, not in panic or distress, or even territoriality, it seemed, but simply for song. Their chorus so light and warm, it sounded as if they sang to each other. To check in, to connect, to call.

Later, trying to track down a two-inch tree frog, I found snails sleeping in curled leaves of sage, curling closed against the cold. The eastern edge was quiet, except for a burst of mourning doves, a dash of scrub jay. We looped around the edge, then back up a cement trough to the high ranch road home. Just before the final bend, an ambulance wailed. A moment passed, then the coyotes called in response, letting their howls hang and linger, singing like the siren. They sounded on the far side of the peaks, over the water, far away.