High schoolers photograph rare coyote in Bay Area park

Arnav Singhal was at Guadalupe Oak Grove Park in San Jose with his father and 4-year-old sister on a recent Friday afternoon when he saw something dart across the grassy clearing and leap onto a gnarled tree branch.

The 15-year-old sophomore at Los Gatos High School had been waiting for this moment. He reached into his backpack to retrieve his Canon R7 camera and tried to get the shot as quickly as he could: a coyote that stared back at him with an unusually piercing gaze. Arnav’s sister, preoccupied by the playground, couldn’t have been less concerned, while his dad kept a close watch on both of his children, warning his son to keep his distance.

The first thought that crossed the teenager’s mind: His plan worked.

Since March, Arnav and his friend and fellow photographer Parham Pourahmad have been culling data from the Santa Clara Vector Control District, Google Earth and Nextdoor to create a map of coyote sightings. Their goal is to monitor how ubiquitous the urban canines’ presence is in the South Bay but also to help reduce human-wildlife conflict and raise awareness around the native California species. So far, as part of their burgeoning nonprofit, the Silicon Valley Wildlife Group, the duo have tracked 1,000 sightings and 50 possible territories, one of which was the park just a few miles from Arnav’s home. 

It wasn’t until a couple of days later that he met up with Parham, also a 15-year-old sophomore at Los Altos High School, to show him the pictures. His friend pointed out something he hadn’t noticed: The coyote had blue eyes, a rare genetic mutation that scientists still don’t know much about.

“It was a one-in-a-million sighting,” Arnav said.  

Daniel Dietrich, a photographer who operates a wildlife safari company in Point Reyes National Seashore, was the first to spot a coyote with the mutation back in early 2018. The animal was trotting toward a large puddle in a field, and he followed it with his camera as it approached the water to drink. Like Arnav, he didn’t notice its eyes until he looked at the photos later, and when he started contacting some of his ecologist friends to confirm what the sighting could be, the news spread like wildfire, spurring headlines in National Geographic, Atlas Obscura and Smithsonian Magazine.

“It was really amazing to think that this could be something new to science,” Dietrich told SFGATE in an email.

Since then, subsequent sightings have been “very rare,” Dietrich said, noting just two other coyotes with baby blues have been documented in Point Reyes, while a couple of others were observed closer to Sacramento and Santa Cruz. “They could indeed be spreading out,” he said.  

Coyotes are born with blue eyes, but the icy hue typically fades into a golden-brown as they mature. The reason why a few of the animals have retained the striking feature is unclear, though some experts initially speculated the animals could have interbred with domestic dogs. Benjamin Sacks, director of the mammalian ecology and conservation unit at UC Davis, has been conducting genetic work on samples from local blue-eyed coyotes but told SFGATE the research has been “somewhat uninformative” so far, “although we tentatively ruled out that it is the same mutation that causes blue eyes in huskies.”

In 2022, Bay Nature’s Kristin Hugo spoke with James Brooks, then a Ph.D. candidate at the Wildlife Research Center at Kyoto University, who theorized the blue eyes could be a sign of domestication of the species at large. Brooks and his colleagues published an article in the scientific journal Behaviour in 2020, which found that coyotes in areas with more housing density were more brazen when they interacted with human-made objects like camera traps. They also had anomalous physical characteristics, like black or brindled fur or white patches.

More research is necessary, but Brooks reasoned that urban environments could be shaping not only coyotes’ behavior but also their appearance. Those hanging out close enough to be photographed by humans “therefore may be expected to show some of the morphological outcomes we see in domestic animals,” he wrote. 

Because the phenomenon is so localized, there’s also the possibility that the trait emerged at random in a coyote a few generations ago, and somehow, it just stuck. Juan Negro, an evolutionary biologist who has studied animal coloring for decades, told National Geographic it’s possible blue eyes are less advantageous for coyotes, leading to issues with light sensitivity and their ability to camouflage. But it’s less of a concern given the animals have no natural predators in the Bay Area — meaning the trait could likely continue to expand. 

Arnav and Parham estimate they’ve logged hundreds, if not thousands, of hours for their photography and mapping project. (Their main mode of transportation is Arnav’s parents’ Chevy Bolt, and they typically go out on weekends at sunrise or sunset to avoid interfering with schoolwork.) 

“I think for me, my inspiration was Parham,” Arnav said of his friend, who started taking photos of local wildlife to pass the time during the pandemic and went on to win a Wildlife Photographer of the Year award from the Natural History Museum last year for his shot of a young Cooper’s hawk eating a squirrel. “Just seeing his photos and how great they were, it gave me that spark: I want to do this.” 

The duo have dreams of seeing their research published someday and said they are working with UC Berkeley Ph.D. student Neville Taraporevala at the Schell Lab to learn more about tracking the movement of wildlife through a camera trapping project they plan to take part in over winter break in December. In the coming years, they also hope to lead nature walks, cleanups and other related presentations.

Seeing the blue-eyed coyote may have been a fluke, they said. But it also serves as a reminder.

“These coyotes do exist in our backyards,” Parham said. “We hope people are aware of all the nature we have in our area.”