By Rachel Swan,ReporterSep 10, 2024 (SFChronicle.com)
Self-taught naturalist Janet Kessler engages with her audience after her talk on the urban coyote population in San Francisco at Park Branch library on Aug. 31.Manuel Orbegozo/Special to the Chronicle
The crowd was standing-room only at San Francisco’s Park Library, where a self-taught naturalist, Janet Kessler, dimmed the lights and flicked on a slide projector.
A screen filled with dazzling close-ups of urban coyotes — those rangy canines that lurk in parks, backyards and school playgrounds — suddenly rendered beautiful. Audience members “ooohed” as Kessler discussed the animals for more than an hour, holding the room in her thrall on a hot Saturday afternoon in August. At one point she played audio of a howling pack, and people seemed delighted by the shrill song.
Fans call Kessler a coyote whisperer and say she provides a valuable public service. Coyotes have become more visible and unpredictable in San Francisco, provoking fear after one attacked a 5-year-old girl in the Botanical Garden this summer. People clamor for information about the animals. Kessler has answers.
But some city officials say she’s gone too far, spreading unvetted information, putting up her own signs in public parks and generating so many complaints from the public that the Animal Care and Control department began putting together a file on what they called “Janet Kessler’s misbehavior.”
More than 300 records obtained by the Chronicle create a complex portrait of Kessler, a fierce protector of coyotes who is perpetually at war with regulators. They say she unfairly criticizes their work while encroaching on their turf. She says she is just trying to help.
“They could use my information,” Kessler said during an interview at her home just east of Twin Peaks, where rose bouquets deck the kitchen table and a large coyote portrait hangs in the living room. In the past Kessler said she has worked collaboratively with Animal Care and Control, toward their shared goal of promoting harmony between people, dogs and coyotes.
Now, she said with a sigh, “they see me as a threat.”
She pointed to a map laid on her dining room table of 22 coyote family “territories” she has uncovered in San Francisco. Kessler has sent the map and other materials to city agencies, hoping to be useful. The city has mostly rebuffed her offers.
Virginia Donohue, executive director of Animal Care and Control, acknowledged in an emailed statement that most of the department’s messaging “is consistent with Ms. Kessler’s.”
Somewhere along the way, their relationship frayed. Donohue said her department “has issues concerning (Kessler’s) interactions with coyotes, the methods she uses to obtain photographs, and the misinformation she has spread about our work.”
Spokespeople for the Recreation and Parks Department said, similarly, that while they appreciate Kessler’s enthusiasm and passion, her behavior has “disrupted the city’s efforts to care for our natural areas and keep residents and wildlife safe.”
As Kessler pursues her independent field work, “she has trespassed into habitat restoration sites and other restricted areas, harassed city staff, and spread misinformation on social media regarding coyote incidents in city parks,” the park spokespeople wrote in an emailed statement. “Unauthorized flyers posted on our property direct people to her materials, which often conflict with expert recommendations.”
Reflecting on that tension, Kessler looked downcast.
“Being passionate carries the risk of being unintentionally antagonizing,” she said.
On one occasion in June 2023, two Animal Care and Control officers spotted Kessler while patrolling for coyotes near Hellman Hollow picnic area in Golden Gate Park. Kessler was standing in front of a den and darted behind trees as the officers approached, “seeming to avoid us,” officer Carlos Ortega wrote in an activity log.
“She appeared to be taking photos or videos of us on her cellphone,” Ortega wrote.
Kessler said she does not recall the incident, “but I do try to keep aware of what is going on when it comes to coyotes.”
Though Kessler is, by definition, a hobbyist, she has amassed a following, through social media and a prodigiously updated blog. She delivers lectures on coyotes at schools, libraries or garden clubs and she has exhibited photographs several times in San Francisco’s Randall Museum gallery.
A longtime animal lover, Kessler, 75, has trailed urban coyotes with a camera for 17 years. It all began on a morning in 2007, when she and her dog crossed paths with a playful female coyote on the western end of Twin Peaks. What started as a fascination led to a scientific pursuit. Kessler began photographing the canines with a zoom lens, analyzing their behavior and counting their territories. From 2008 to 2022 she gathered the animals’ scat, submitting it, she said, for DNA studies at UC Davis.
Kessler is tenacious, prowling wooded areas each day and hunkering outside coyote dens, documenting observations in her blog. She has strategically placed field cameras in parks and private yards — with permission from homeowners — checking them each day at dawn and dusk.
“I’ve never known anyone to be more focused on anything than her,” said Kessler’s son, Topher Kessler, beaming as his mother packed up her slide projector after the Park Library talk. Topher and his brother, Patch Kessler, fondly recalled Thanksgiving dinners when their mother left abruptly, because she loves to observe coyotes at dusk.
Benjamin Sacks, an adjunct professor who specializes in wildlife genetics at UC Davis, acknowledged that Kessler supplied fecal samples for several of his students’ research projects. One looked at how many coyote family groups live in the city. Another studied dietary differences among coyotes in different areas, contrasting the ones clustered in restaurant districts with their counterparts in Golden Gate Park or the Presidio.
“It’s fair to say Janet helped contribute to some interesting studies,” Sacks said, noting, however, that he does not generally read Kessler’s blog or follow her talks, and would not consider her a close research associate.
Many of the records reviewed by the Chronicle document Kessler’s efforts to educate others. Over the years she has complained to Animal Care and Control about people who feed coyotes or allow their dogs to get too close. Yet, there are complaints against Kessler as well. People have accused her of chasing and harassing wildlife, with at least one complaint noting that coyotes tried to evade Kessler and act stressed out by her presence.
“Whenever I see a coyote running I see Janet running behind them,” a woman wrote to city administrators in 2017. “I think it’s terrible what she is doing and this week it was clear the coyotes didn’t want her around.”
Officials have closely monitored Kessler’s social media activity, taking screenshots of posts they view as misleading or as potentially undermining the city’s work. One such post was a Facebook comment Kessler made in October 2018, accusing Animal Care and Control of chasing a coyote at Buena Vista Park. When a staff member shared it with Deb Campbell, the department’s public information officer, Campbell pushed back. Their exchange took place in text messages obtained by the Chronicle as part of the public records request.
“She knows we weren’t chasing him,” Campbell wrote. “It’s her effort to make us look bad so she can be the expert.”
In an email thread between staff at multiple city departments the following year, a natural resources specialist from Recreation and Parks said he believed Animal Care and Control had kept a file on Kessler’s misdeeds, “in case they ever try to cite her, but I believe the thinking is we don’t want to provoke her right now since she’s been helping us gather intel on coyote feeding.”
Indeed, Kessler has staked out and identified multiple feeders for Animal Care and Control, even as their communications turned combative.
The conflicts intensified in 2019, when Kessler began voicing objections to signs that the Rec and Park crews had installed in city parks, advising people to be wary of coyote dens. On several occasions park officials accused Kessler of removing the signs and putting in her own — creating hassles for staff members who then had to replace them. When she spoke with the Chronicle, Kessler denied taking down any city signs, though she maintained that her own signs are more informative, more eye-catching, and urgently needed — claims that exasperate city staff.
“We do not allow individuals to post signage in our parks whenever they please,” Rec and Park outreach coordinator Andrés Patino wrote to Kessler on Sept. 19, 2020, asking her to immediately take down illegal signs she had posted at Holly Park and Bernal Hill.
Kessler’s response was defiant: “I’m not just anybody putting up signs ‘just whenever I please,’” she wrote. “I’m putting up something that I’ve requested to be worked on for months and months.”
This month Kessler reached out to Board of Supervisors President — and mayoral candidate — Aaron Peskin, asking whether he could help investigate “slanderous claims” by Recreation and Parks that she had violated three guidelines for co-existing with coyotes: never feed them, leash your dog, and follow trails signs or closures.
“That is false. I support and follow those guidelines,” Kessler wrote in her email. It drew a baffled reply from Peskin, who said he didn’t know how to respond, and forwarded the email to Rec and Park.
Despite the feverish nature of these correspondences, Kessler and the city have largely kept their arguments behind closed doors as Kessler continues to build her profile.
A spokesperson for San Francisco public libraries said the Park branch librarian had no inkling of Kessler’s long and complicated history with other city departments when she pitched her coyote talk, presenting herself as an expert.
“It’s not part of our usual process to check with every city department before booking somebody,” the spokesperson said.
The talk was a success, with the audience listening intently as Kessler shared coyote anecdotes, videos of romping pups and maps with clustered dots to denote their territories. At one point, she compared herself to Jane Goodall, the seminal English primatologist.
It’s an analogy Kessler makes often, offering one distinction: Unlike Goodall, Kessler said, she tries to maintain a “wall of separation” from her subjects. Both the Goodall comparison and the “wall of separation” statement have drawn derision from city staff who collect the wildlife harassment reports about Kessler.
The coyote whisperer is determined to find common ground.
“We’re working for the same thing,” she said. City workers, she added, have the mistaken impression “that I’m in their way.”
Reach Rachel Swan: rswan@sfchronicle.com
Sep 10, 2024
REPORTER
Rachel Swan is a breaking news and enterprise reporter. She joined the Chronicle in 2015 after stints at several alt weekly newspapers. Born in Berkeley, she graduated from Cal with a degree in rhetoric and is now raising two daughters in El Cerrito.
