Coyotes seen near Wrigley

CHICAGO – Wild baseball fans might be a standard sight at Wrigley Field, but a pair of wild coyotes milling around Chicago’s historic ballpark – surrounded on all sides by bars, restaurants and busy streets – wasn’t what one photographer was expecting on a busy Friday night.

So he quickly grabbed his camera.

“They were just kind of chilling,” freelance photographer Will Byington said. “They were hanging out and not even doing much. They were kind of just checking out the scene on a Friday night in Wrigleyville. It was like they were on a date, taking a stroll.”

Byington said he was shooting a concert at a bar across the street from the stadium in the Wrigleyville neighborhood, notoriously crowded and often rowdy on weekend nights, when he saw the two coyotes hanging out by the statute of former Chicago Cubs player Ernie Banks, near the ticketing area.

“It was kind of like they were looking for tickets,” the 34-year-old Chicago resident said with a laugh. “They went by the ticket window and unfortunately found it was closed, so they were ready to move on to the bar.”

Wildlife ecologist Stanley Gehrt, who has extensively studied coyotes living in and around Chicago, said coyotes have been in the area for the past decade. He said the latest data shows there are at least 2,000 coyotes in Cook County, where Chicago is located.

“That’s their territory. They live there,” Gehrt, who works at Ohio State University, said of the unusual pair.