Officials in Superior have stepped up efforts to discourage coyotes from making their homes in town, following a recent sighting of a pack and the discovery last week of an eviscerated dog in a residential neighborhood.
Employees with the Superior Parks, Recreation and Open Space Department spent part of Wednesday throwing ammonia-soaked tennis balls into suspected coyote dens along Rock Creek. Coyotes are in the middle of breeding season and looking for places to give birth to pups.
Wearing long green gloves to pluck tennis balls out of a bucket of the foul-smelling liquid, the town staffers focused on a greenbelt zone bounded by Indiana Street and Rock Creek Parkway, just north of Coalton Road.
“We upped our operational intensity in trying to identify the dens,” said department director Martin Toth. “Then we try to discourage them in humane ways. Generally, what we’ve seen in the past (with the tennis balls) is a decrease in activity.”
The theory, Toth said, is that the pungent odor of the tennis balls resembles the scent of another animal marking its territory and convinces coyotes to find a new place to build a den.
Get more on this report, including a video, at .
