Strange Bedfellows

Last summer, after an eight-hour drive and a 3-mile hike, Emma Balunek retrieved 11 memory cards from the camera traps she had set up in the northern part of Wind Cave National Park in South Dakota. Balunek did a quick review of her images to make sure all the cameras were functioning properly and because she was eager to see if she had captured what she was looking for. And she was in luck: In an image rendered blurry by a recent rainfall, a coyote, standing tall, looks out in the distance, while a badger ambles by.

“It’s always so exciting and definitely a relief when I see an image of them together on there,” Balunek said. “I’m like, ‘Wow, this is actually working.’ I’m shocked because you’re finding a needle in a haystack.”

Coyotes very occasionally snack on badgers (the reverse being even rarer), but in what is surely one of nature’s strangest partnerships, the two species are sometimes able to move past their, um, differences and hunt together for prairie dogs or ground squirrels. The association has been known for centuries by Native American Tribes, whose stories refer to badgers and coyotes as brothers or cousins, and later by settlers and naturalists, but it has been relatively little studied. Balunek is hoping to fill some of the gaps and learn more about why a badger would want to go anywhere near a potential adversary.

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One reason the badger-coyote relationship is so challenging to observe is that badgers are hard to see and get close to, so Balunek, a wildlife photographer and graduate student at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, decided to set up cameras at five sites, including Wind Cave and Valles Caldera National Preserve in New Mexico. She’s also collecting citizen scientist observations from other places including Grand Teton and Yellowstone national parks. (If you’ve seen a coyote-badger pair in the wild, consider filling out this form.) This is the largest-scale effort to date to document this uneasy alliance, but even with a network of some 75 cameras strategically placed near prairie dog colonies, Balunek likely won’t end up with abundant images of the dynamic duo. For one thing, badgers and coyotes might choose to walk behind — rather than in front of — the cameras. “Even if we’re not getting detections doesn’t mean that they’re not there,” she said.

The badger-coyote twosome is not the only partnership between species. Birds such as titmice and chickadees often forage together, for example. In the Red Sea, groupers shake their heads in front of giant moray eels to signal their desire to hunt together, with the eels trying to corner fish in holes while groupers wait for them to dart in the open water. But the badger-coyote couple stands out among other interspecies associations, not only because the two mammal predators are sometimes mortal enemies, but also because badgers are fierce and usually solitary.

“To be honest, I was somewhat skeptical about the whole thing because it seems so odd,” said Daniel Thornton, a wildlife ecologist whose array of cameras set up in Washington state to document the movements of Canada lynx happened to detect several badger-coyote pairs.

The most in-depth study of the relationship was conducted in the National Elk Refuge, a protected area just south of Grand Teton National Park, in the 1980s by Steven and Kathryn Minta. The couple implanted radio transmitters into dozens of badgers and collected prodigious amounts of data on the animals’ life cycle and behavior over the course of about three years.

Equipped with binoculars, the Mintas would hide behind bushes sometimes for hours on end, often in freezing temperatures, and record coyote-badger interactions that frequently occurred hundreds of feet away. The Mintas observed that more often than not, coyotes hunted alone, but when they teamed up with badgers, they appeared to hunt ground squirrels more effectively. Usually, a badger would start digging with the coyote patrolling nearby, but occasionally the two animals would rush an area simultaneously and scatter their prey, which the coyote would catch above ground and the badger would trap in the ground squirrels’ burrows. The Mintas could see that coyotes caught more squirrels with their mustelid acolytes around, but they didn’t know what happened underground. They speculated that the extra time badgers spent there meant they too were getting more prey.

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“It was just one of those inferences that we made,” Steven Minta said.

It’s a crucial one because it implies that the association is mutualistic, which would mean that both animals benefit, rather than parasitic, meaning that the coyote is taking advantage of the badger. Other anecdotal evidence from the Mintas’ research suggests that the badgers do get something out of the partnership and freely choose to associate with their occasional predator. For one thing, coyotes, standing much taller than their badger buddies, could survey the landscape for prey. Also, coyotes and badgers seemed at ease with each other, occasionally rubbing noses or touching while resting. Coyotes, which are social animals, often tried to initiate play. “Their mouth is open, and it looks almost like a smile,” Steven Minta said. “It’s an open, friendly display.”

Balunek would love to learn more about the communication between the two species, but she’s set out to answer more manageable questions, such as to what extent the partnership is disrupted by the presence of humans and whether the animals refrain from teaming up while raising offspring to avoid exposing their litter to their partners’ predatory instincts.

While Balunek’s work does not involve lying in wait for long stretches, as the Mintas did, it is demanding in other ways. Her five sites are spread across four states, and Balunek visits each one of them every couple of months to retrieve the cameras’ memory cards. She estimates she has already driven some 15,000 miles on those trips, and reaching individual sites can require snowshoeing through deep snow while carrying batteries, backup cameras and other heavy equipment. Most of the cameras are mounted on T-posts, which bison, elk and cattle like to rub against, so to prevent any damage or interference, Balunek had to build fenced enclosures around the posts. The cameras have yielded hundreds of thousands of images.

The rewards have been few, but occasionally, gems surface, such as a video captured one December afternoon at her southeast Colorado site, where a coyote watches as a badger appears to be digging for mice, a scene that is both useful and aesthetic. “The light is just really soft and lovely,” she said.

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Balunek knows that, by the time she finishes her fieldwork next year, her trove of coyote-badger images might not be extensive despite her best efforts, but she has another goal in mind for her work. She first became interested in the prairie when her dog, Coral, began sticking her head down prairie dog burrows in Fort Collins seven years ago, and she grew to love this often-overlooked ecosystem. “There’s such a subtle beauty to the prairie,” she said. “What I love about it is you have to get to know it. You have to put in the time and learn to appreciate it.” The prairie is under threat from urban sprawl, commercial agriculture, invasive species and climate change, and she wants her research into badgers and coyotes to help others realize how vibrant it is.

“There is stuff out here,” she said. “There are animals making their lives and thriving.”