San Francisco, CA
Video shows coyote swimming in San Francisco Bay as population grows on Angel Island
It was a sight that prompted even seasoned wildlife watchers to do a double take: A coyote swimming in San Francisco Bay a quarter of a mile off Angel Island.
“I was surprised because it was so far from land,” said California State Parks environmental scientist Bill Miller, who saw the coyote last month while aboard a boat bound for the island.
At first he thought it was a seal or a sea lion. Then he saw the pointed ears.
The canine’s snout sliced determinedly through the water as it dog-paddled along, before eventually turning around and swimming back to Angel Island.
Staff at Angel Island State Park posted a video of the unusual encounter to Instagram, prompting concerned comments from people who assumed the coyote was in distress. Miller had the same thought at first, but the coyote appeared to be a strong swimmer, he said.
In any event, State Parks has a policy of not interfering with wildlife, he said.
This wasn’t the first time a coyote has attempted to make the mile-long trip across Raccoon Strait between Angel Island and the town of Tiburon in Marin County.
At least one of those voyages was successful. Before 2017, there is no record of coyotes ever existing on the island. Scientists are now studying about 14 coyotes that live there, all of them related, to see how they interact with the island’s once-plentiful mule deer.
A coyote trots on Angel Island in San Francisco Bay in April.
(California State Parks)
The first coyote who swam across to Angel Island was alone, said Casey Dexter-Lee, a State Parks interpreter who lives on the island and has worked there for nearly 25 years. It may have been chasing prey or seeking new territory, but no one knows for sure, she said.
About a year later, a second canine appears to have made the trip, potentially enticed by the first coyote’s calls echoing across the strait, she said.
“We could hear them talking back and forth, especially at night,” she said. “So it’s possible that encouraged the second coyote to swim over.”
Another hypothesis, which is supported by genotype data, is that a lone pregnant female initially swam over and gave birth on the island, said Brett Furnas, an environmental scientist with the California Department of Fish and Wildlife.
Either way, the coyotes found a ready food source in the fawn of mule deer, which themselves have a controversial history on the island. Their numbers were controlled by human hunting for millennia, first by the Coast Miwok people, and then by the U.S. Army, which used the island as a military base, Dexter-Lee said.
When the island became a state park in the late 1950s to early 1960s, the population exploded, leading to concerns about starvation and prompting the state to regularly cull the deer, she said. The population appeared to have stabilized in recent years, until the coyotes came.
Preliminary estimates suggest the deer population has dropped by about half — from roughly 100 to fewer than 50 — since the coyotes’ arrival, Miller said. He is working with Furnas and others at the Department of Fish and Wildlife to study how this predator-prey relationship will play out. The research effort is in its second year of what scientists hope will be five.
Researchers have set up game cameras to capture images of deer and coyotes, and they regularly collect scat from both species. From that, they can learn what the animals are eating and collect DNA that enables them to identify individuals and tease out family relationships.
They’ve learned that the coyotes are all descended from one female. The population is in its third generation and is mostly consuming rats and mice.
The Angel Island mole, a unique subspecies endemic to the island, seems to be just a small part of their diet, which came as a relief.
It’s unclear what will happen to the island’s coyotes in the future. One big question is whether there’s enough food to support what is now a sizable and growing population, Furnas said. On top of that, he said, coyotes tend to want to disperse and establish new territories. And yet the long trip across the bay, with its strong currents, is not an easy one.
Furnas pointed out that the coyote seen swimming in the bay wasn’t trying to reach the island but to get away.
“That’s consistent with dispersal,” he said. “I think some of those coyotes are now saying, ‘Hey, we want our own territory,’ and they’re trying to swim back to Marin.”
Few things are more valuable in the Bay Area than real estate. In San Francisco, the median house price is now over $2 million. Last month, at least seven houses in the city sold for $1 million over the asking price, and buyers regularly offer to pay in cash or waive contingencies to stay competitive. Yet there is one thing that remains even more valuable than a house, and possibly more valuable than money itself: stock in Anthropic or OpenAI.
Last week, 160 Noe Street, an Edwardian home in San Francisco’s desirable Duboce Triangle neighborhood, was listed for sale at $2.9 million—or the equivalent amount in Anthropic or OpenAI shares, as based on those companies’ current valuations. Rachel Swann, the listing agent, says she was inspired to set these unusual terms after meeting several Anthropic employees at an open house for a different property. “These people have a lot of paper wealth, but they don’t always have the liquidity to do things they want,” Swann says. Some of these employees were expecting to come into as much as $50 million from their Anthropic shares, and wondered if they could use that as leverage to buy a house, according to Swann. “This kept coming up over and over again.”
Swann’s listing is unconventional, but not singular. In April, an investment banker named Storm Duncan offered to exchange his Mill Valley home and an adjacent parcel of land for Anthropic shares. And in May, Vijay Chattha, who owns an agency that does PR for tech companies, listed his Healdsburg home for $2.5 million, or $2 million in Anthropic stock. “I want to sell my house, and I want to invest in Anthropic,” Chattha says. “Why not combine the two?
Chattha’s house—a three bed, three bath with a pool and a bocce court in a part of Sonoma County that abuts some of the region’s most famous wineries—also comes with coveted short-term rental status, allowing the owner to list it on platforms like Airbnb. Only a handful of properties in Healdsburg come with that status, and only about a dozen come up for sale in a given year.
Chattha is offering a $500,000 discount to Anthropic employees because he believes the value of Anthropic shares will grow faster than any other investment, and his vacation home in wine country is the best bargaining chip he has to try to access them. “If you look at Anthropic’s growth last year, it’s insane,” he says, noting the $380 billion valuation the company claimed in February. “Now they’re raising at $965 billion. That’s three X in like three months.” He added that he was open to exchanging the house for shares in Anthropic, but not OpenAI, because he prefers using Anthropic’s products.
The real estate listings come at a time when investors are salivating at the record-high valuations of Anthropic and OpenAI, and even those considered wealthy by Bay Area standards are feeling FOMO about the affluence that could come from these companies’ debuts on the stock market. (On Monday, Anthropic submitted paperwork for its initial public offering; OpenAI is also reportedly preparing to file in the coming months.) Despite the unprecedented valuations of these companies, many people believe their stock prices will only go up, and that anyone who gets a piece now could win the jackpot.
People are clamoring to buy equity in OpenAI and Anthropic on the secondary market, leading to a frenzy of transactions that may or may not be legitimate. As a result, Anthropic updated its policy around “unauthorized Anthropic stock sales” this spring, which notes that “if someone purports to sell Anthropic shares without proper board approval, that transaction is invalid.” A spokesperson for Anthropic pointed back to this policy when asked about the possibility of exchanging company shares for real estate.
Welcome to our running tally of Election Night results. Or, as this is California, well beyond tonight, as results continue to trickle in.
The first batch of results should arrive at 8:45 p.m., with three more to follow tonight. The Department of Elections has the breakdown.
San Francisco is voting in three special elections, for District 2 and District 4 supervisors and for a Board of Education member. Both supervisor races are referendums on housing, especially District 2, while the main backdrop of the D4 race is all the hot feelings around the fate of the Sunset Dunes Park (nee Great Highway).
The winners of all three special races will have to compete again in November for their seats.
Keeping it local, SF is also voting on four ballot measures. Prop A is for a bond to pay for an emergency water-system. B is for term limits. C and D are dueling measures related to the “overpaid CEO” tax. (Links go to our reporting on each race or issue; or click here for our Election 2026 page.)
Vote local, think national: Which two candidates will advance to the November election to replace Nancy Pelosi?
Statewide races include the primaries for governor, education superintendent, lieutenant governor, and much more.
Polls close soon. If you haven’t voted yet, find your polling station here.
Tuesday, June 2, 5:40 p.m.
Two and a half hours until our polls close. Before we go down the local rabbit hole, a reminder that other states have primary action today: New Jersey, Iowa, New Mexico, South Dakota, and Montana.
Why does it take so long to get results in California? CalMatters has you covered on that story. We shouldn’t expect a call tonight on the governor’s race.
The last big election was November 5, 2024. (Remember?) Ten days later, there were still races to call in San Francisco.
So if you’re waiting for the pundits (and maybe even us) to tell you What It All Means, you might have to wait a while.
More from The Frisc…
San Francisco, CA
San Francisco voters to decide on dueling measures on Top Executive Pay Tax changes
San Francisco voters weighed in Tuesday on two competing measures that seek to change the Top Executive Pay Tax, with one of the measures also including a change to the Gross Receipts Tax.
Should both measures pass, the one with the most votes will take effect, according to the propositions’ legal text.
Currently, the measures state that most businesses with San Francisco gross receipts up to $5 million are exempt from the Gross Receipts Tax. And businesses that use more than half of their city payroll for in-house administrative and management services pay an Administrative Office Tax instead of a Gross Receipts Tax.
The Top Executive Pay Tax is a tax some large businesses pay if their highest-paid managerial employee earns more than 100 times the median pay of their San Francisco employees. Businesses that have city gross receipts up to $5 million and are not subject to the Administrative Office Tax are exempt.
Proposition C
Proposition C states it would increase the number of businesses that could be exempt from the Gross Receipts Tax and would stop any further increases to the “Top Executive Pay Tax” after a final rate bump.
The proposed measure says it would raise the Gross Receipts Tax exemption ceiling to $7.5 million. The $7.5 million ceiling would also apply to the Top Executive Pay Tax exemption.
As for changes to the Top Executive Pay Tax, Proposition C states it would implement the 2028 tax rate increase in 2027, but then stop any future increases.
Supporting Proposition C are Rodney Fong, CEO of the San Francisco Chamber of Commerce, and Chris Wright, senior vice president of Advance SF, an organization of companies, which includes Bank of America, OpenAI, Waymo, the SF Giants CEO and others.
Fong and Wright, in their argument for the measure, say giving businesses more tax breaks would help keep more employees on payroll and would give companies the ability to “contribute to city services in a predictable and balanced way.”
Critics of Proposition C, such as the San Francisco Tenants Union, slam the measure as “billionaire-backed” and argue it would kill the Top Executive Pay Tax and would hand out more tax breaks to businesses at a time when the city is in a budget deficit and faces cuts to essential services.
Proposition D
Proposition D also seeks to change the Top Executive Pay Tax, which is collected from some large businesses where the highest-paid managerial employee earns more than 100 times the median compensation paid to other employees.
If approved, the measure would change the calculation of the tax using the compensation of all employees, not just employees based in San Francisco. Top Executive Pay Tax rates would also be increased for San Francisco gross receipts and payroll.
Supporters have billed the measure as a way to counteract federal cuts to Medicaid. A report by the City Controller’s Office said the measure could result in $250 million to $300 million in additional revenue.
“Proposition D is the solution to our budget deficit. It asks large corporations — not small businesses, not working families — to contribute a little more,” supporters said in the city’s official voter guide.
The measure has the backing of most of the Board of Supervisors, along with labor unions and Rep. Nancy Pelosi.
Opponents, including Mayor Daniel Lurie and state Sen. Scott Wiener, have argued Proposition D would negatively impact the city’s recovery following the COVID-19 pandemic.
“San Francisco is already one of the most expensive cities in the country to live and do business. Adding extreme and unpredictable tax increases risks driving employers away just as we are trying to bring jobs, workers, and foot traffic back downtown,” said Supervisor Matt Dorsey in the city’s voter guide.
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