They recognized it as a coyote.

A second sighting was also reported by school employees on Sunday, the memo said, although police couldn’t confirm that one.

I’m a graduate of Columbia’s journalism school (just two buildings south of Lewisohn Hall) and an adjunct professor there, so I can attest that seeing a coyote on campus is pretty unusual. (Squirrels, rats, and pigeons, yes. Coyotes, no.) But considering the spread of this iconic Western animal across the Northeastern United States in recent years, it can’t be considered a big surprise, either.

Back in 2006, a coyote led police — not to mention photographers, helicopters, tourists, and the news media — on a wild two-day chase through Central Park before he finally succumbed to a tranquilizer dart. “Hal,” as park workers nicknamed him, was a media sensation, but he wasn’t the first coyote to try making a home in Manhattan.

Several weeks before “Hal” swam across the Central Park duck pond to avoid capture, another coyote was found dead on Manhattan’s Upper West Side (apparently hit by a car). Since 2006, more coyotes have been sighted and captured. Last month, one was nabbed at a cemetery in Harlem. And just last week, a photographer took pictures of a coyote crossing a frozen Central Park pond.

Where are these Western intruders coming from? Probably The Bronx, which is the only borough of New York City that’s part of the mainland United States. (For those unfamiliar with New York geography, Manhattan is its own island, as is Staten Island, natch. Brooklyn and Queens make up the western shore of Long Island.) Over the last decade, coyotes have established a home there, and like other animals (including skunks) they’ve started migrating to the other boroughs via bridges and railroad tracks and frozen rivers in wintertime (during warmer weather, they swim).

Coyotes used to confine themselves to the Western United States — largely because their competitors the wolves had claimed the East for themselves. But with wolves largely wiped out in these parts, along with the Eastern forests they called home, coyotes — more naturally adapted to open spaces and grasslands — started spreading this way. A 2006 Salon story by Christopher Ketcham explained their colonization this way:

The coyote, ingeniously plastic, always adapting, saw opportunity. He pushed east and north and south, assuming the niche of top dog, and today his numbers nationwide are more than twice what they were in 1850. The coyote, says wildlife ecologist Justina Ray, “is the most successful colonizing mammal in recent history.”

The rate of expansion was astonishing. According to Ray, who works with the Wildlife Conservation Society, the coyote’s march during the 20th century covered thousands of miles, even reaching isolated regions in the Atlantic provinces of Canada, including Nova Scotia and Cape Breton Island, arriving in Newfoundland on sea ice as early as 1987.

Today, coyotes live in or near every major American city. They are reported in Atlanta, Toronto, Portland, Maine, running across a schoolyard in Philadelphia, hiding under a taxi in Chicago, and everywhere in the metro west, including Denver, Phoenix, Los Angeles, and Las Vegas. A landmark study from Ohio State University, to be published this spring, tracked coyote behavior in urban Chicago for six years, concluding that the Windy City’s coyote population was vastly larger — at least 2,000 and growing — and more successful than ever expected. Urban coyotes, the study found, live longer than their country cousins, their range per pack is more compact (much like urban humans), and they hunt more often at night (also like urban humans). The study also found that the creatures likely do not pose a threat to people.

That last sentence should come as a relief to Columbia students and other Manhattanites, because it looks like we’re going to have to get used to coyotes as neighbors. Spring is when coyotes disperse from their packs to establish new hunting grounds. So the sightings so far this winter could be just a prelude of what’s to come.

Now that I know what they’re after, however, I won’t be too concerned about running across one. After all, they’re just doing what all New Yorkers engage in from time to time: hunting for real estate for a growing family.

Good luck to ‘em.

This story originally appeared at OnEarth magazine.

Interestingly, the debate has nothing to do with relocating the wild bison to Ted Turner’s private Montana ranch, which is the tension at the heart of Hillary’s story. Instead, it’s about what we should call these majestic animals. Are they bison, buffalo or both?

I’m a word nerd, so I decided to look into it.

From a scientific standpoint, the question is an easy one. Their scientific name is Bison bison (the animal so nice they named it twice?), so “bison” is the most accurate way of referring to them. (The plains buffalo, a subspecies, is actually the Bison bison bison.) The American animal is only distantly related to the “true” buffalo found in Africa and Asia.

But culturally, traditionally, colloquially, etc., it’s a little more complicated. “Buffalo” is the common name for bison, one that you’ll hear used frequently throughout the West. (As a kid living in Oklahoma, I certainly never heard them referred to as “bison.”)

The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service calls them “American buffalo” on its website. There’s a buffalo nickel. There were buffalo soldiers. There’s a Buffalo National River (in Arkansas) and Wood Buffalo National Park (in Canada). There’s even a popular song: “Oh give me a home where the buffalo roam …”

So the name “buffalo” — scientifically correct or not — is woven into the fabric of American society and the history of the West.

In his 2008 book American Buffalo, Steven Rinella explores the history of the name. As with so many good English words, Shakespeare is involved:

First off, it’s important to be clear that there is no difference between the American buffalo and the American bison. The word ‘buffalo’ likely originated in a roundabout way involving the English. In Shakespeare’s time, military men often wore a type of protective jacket known as a buff coat; these coats were thick and soft and make of undyed leather. When Englishmen arrived in the New World, they would often describe any animal that yielded such leather as a “buff,” be it a moose or a manatee. Eventually all of the other North American animals acquired their own particular names, and the largest of them, the American buffalo, walked away with exclusive rights to the title. The named bounced around a bit — buffs, bufle, buffle, buffalo, buffaloe — but it had begun to settle into its modern form by the time of the American revolution.

The problem with the word ‘buffalo’ is that it has already been given away a couple of times earlier, once to the water buffalo of Asia and once to the Cape buffalo of Africa. Taxonomists, the people in the business of naming and classifying organisms, saw this as a problem, particularly because the American buffalo is not closely related to either of those creatures. As a solution, they began promoting the word ‘bison,’ which had already been used in the Latin name of a closely related European animal, the wisent (Bison bonasus). It seems as though these efforts to clarify the situation were in vain: we’ve now got an animal with two perfectly serviceable names, and many discussions about the animal inevitably begin with the question, ‘What’s the difference between buffalo and bison?’

So the fact that the question erupted on Facebook should come as no surprise. I also asked NRDC’s wildlife experts, who are engaged in trying to preserve and protect the bison, what they thought about the name.

Andrew Wetzler, director of NRDC’s Wildlife Conservation Program, says he personally likes “buffalo” because it’s more evocative of the West. A good analogy, he says, is the mountain lion, which has a number of names depending on culture and location — cougar, panther, puma, etc. — none of which would be considered incorrect.

Matt Skoglund in NRDC’s Montana office says that as long as people are discussing ways to protect the animal, he’s happy with whatever name they use. Commenter Loren Mickelson makes the same point on Facebook: “Who cares what we call these animals as long as (their) continued repopulation on their native lands is continued?”

To that end, I recommend that you read the article that touched off the discussion: Homeless on the Range. Whatever your preferred name, if you care about these animals, you’ll be interested in the story it tells about an effort designed to help repopulate them across the West, and the hang-ups that effort has encountered.

Photo: Ralph HockensReason No. 137 that I love commuting by bike in New York City: I get to watch baby hawks go to flight school.

Last year, I was fascinated and then heartbroken by a pair of red-tail hawks that built a precarious-looking nest over the West Side Highway, produced a trio of hatchlings, then lost their offspring before they got a chance to take flight, apparently to rat poison.

So I was happy — but concerned — this year when the hawks returned to Riverside Park and took up in a new tree, this time just off the West Side bike path that I frequently ride to work. (New York real estate experts would no doubt call this new nest an upgrade — it has great views of the Hudson River.)

I didn’t watch the pair as closely as I did last year, because I had a newborn of my own that took up most of my attention this spring. But I did check the updates occasionally at blogs that obsessively follow urban hawks, and I always looked up at the nest when I passed by their tree.

Riding home last week, I noticed more commotion than usual. Photographers — call them hawkarazzi — were pointing their lenses skyward, and parks employees were surrounding the hawks’ tree with a temporary fence and signs warning dog walkers to keep their pooches at bay.

The baby hawks were learning to fly.

I pulled my bike over and craned my neck up with everyone else. I quickly spotted mom and dad high in the branches, watching as their new trio of youngsters tested out their wings. As a new father myself, I felt a shared sense of pride with the plucky birds who — like me — call Riverside Drive their home.

Much has been written about the connection that New Yorkers feel with their hawks — particularly the famous Pale Male, who nested for years on a Fifth Avenue co-op overlooking Central Park that he shared with Mary Tyler Moore. (The Riverside Park hatchlings are likely his descendents.)

For my part, I think it’s a sense of validation and connection to nature — that even here on the island of Manhattan, one of the most densely packed cities in the world, I can see hawks building nests and raising their offspring, and I can do it from the back of my bicycle while riding alongside the majestic Hudson River.

It’s one of those hidden treats, those shared experiences that make life in New York so rewarding and exhilarating, despite its daily hassles and challenges and the constant queries from non-New Yorkers along the lines of: “You’ve got a kid now. When are you going to move out of your tiny apartment and into a real house in the suburbs already?”

If the hawks can make it here, they can make it anywhere — and so can the rest of us.

I think there’s another appeal to hawk watching, as well: A sense that if nature survives and thrives in an environment like New York City, surrounded by all the concrete and chaos, then maybe things aren’t as bad as we sometimes fear they are. Maybe the world as we know it will shrug off the pollution of our atmosphere, the changes in temperature, the loss of thousands of species, the massive shifts in climate that science tells us are coming. Maybe nature — and we — are tougher than we think.

Of course, that kind of hope can also bring disappointment.

I stopped by the nest again on my ride home last night and learned from my fellow hawk gawkers that one of the three fledglings had been hit by a car and killed. Reports say that it was flying low while carrying a dead rat in its talons — probably the first meal it had caught on its own. Nature may be resilient, but there are dangers around every turn.

Still, the dead fledgling’s siblings hadn’t given up. There they were yesterday evening, up in the trees, taking short flights from limb to limb and following their father as he enticed them farther away from the nest with a dead squirrel in his grasp.

I wished the fledglings luck and continued home. Soon, if they survive, the young hawks will fly off for good, leaving an empty nest behind. Surely there are safer places for the adult hawks to raise a family than this busy spot on New York’s Upper West Side, but selfishly, I hope they continue to return year after year.

I want to bring my own son here one day, to point up into the trees and hope that he shares my sense of wonder and inspiration at what’s learning to soar just above our heads.

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Investments in clean energy — such as those encouraged by the American Clean Energy and Security Act — would produce several times as many jobs as the same amount of money spent on traditional fossil fuels, according to new studies released Thursday by a coalition of environmental groups and research institutes.

Lower-income Americans in particular would benefit, according to a report from the Political Economy Research Institute at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, which was commissioned by the Natural Resources Defense Council and Green for All.

Upgrading the U.S. economy to rely less on fossil fuels would create a surge of manufacturing and construction jobs that would include renovating homes and buildings to be more energy efficient, tapping clean energy sources such as wind and solar to produce more electricity, and building better transit systems and other infrastructure improvements.

“For a generation, this is the great opportunity in our economy: rebuilding our energy infrastructure,” said PERI’s Robert Pollin at a news conference Thursday morning.

A separate report produced by the Center for American Progress and released jointly Thursday found that a $150 billion annual investment in clean energy could create a net increase of 1.7 million American jobs and significantly lower the national unemployment rate.

Clean energy investments take dollars that would be spent on energy from overseas and instead invest that money in local, homegrown energy sources and improvements in energy efficiency, which saves homeowners and businesses money, said Bracken Hendricks, a CAP fellow.

That’s why clean energy investments create more than three times as many jobs as the equivalent investment in traditional fossil fuels, he added.

The bottom line, said NRDC executive director Peter Lehner, is that the United States will spend trillions of dollars on energy over the coming decades, in one sector or another.

“It will spend that money stupidly, or it will spend it smart,” Lehner said. “If we spend it well, it will have tremendous impacts throughout the economy.”

That’s especially true for people with lower levels of education, according to the NRDC and Green for All report. It found that about half of the 1.7 million new jobs created by a $150 billion investment in clean energy would be available to workers with a high school degree or less, providing opportunities to lift low-income workers out of poverty.

The study confirms that a “non-polluting economy” provides more opportunities for people of color and people in urban areas, said Phaedra Ellis-Lamkins, CEO of Green for All.

NRDC’s Lehner added that “the two reports provide solid evidence why we need to move forward”  by encouraging Congress to pass the American Clean Energy and Security Act, which is expected to be considered soon by the House. He added that the studies show that opponents of the bill — who raise the specter of economic losses if it’s enacted — “have no facts to support them.”

Although ACES is not perfect, Lehner said, it’s a starting point for capping global warming pollution and investing in clean energy — and the need for clean energy investments and the resulting benefits to the U.S. economy have never been clearer.

Related Links: See Who’s Working in the Clean Energy Economy

When I was growing up, my family lived in New Orleans for several years, on the north shore of Lake Pontchartrain. One of my father’s friends had a boat, and he liked to take it out shrimping. My dad and I would often join him and his son.

I loved those early morning boat trips (except for the time that I got very seasick — probably my fault for snacking on Fritos — and the trip that I’m about to tell you about). The lake was so big that you could barely see the shoreline.

On one occasion, our nets were coming up empty, so my dad’s friend steered the boat toward the mouth of the lake where it meets the Gulf of Mexico and ventured into a cove where he hoped to find some shrimp. Soon, the boat started dragging. We feared that the net had gotten snagged on the bottom of the lake. But when they winched it in, the cause turned out to be quite a bit scarier for my 10-year-old self.

The boat had gone right over a school of stingrays, which had probably ventured into the lake from the Gulf, and our net was full of them. As the net came up, it looked like they were going to spill into the boat. My dad and his friend struggled to release them without damaging the boat or the fishing equipment, but eventually they had no choice but to cut the net away.

I watched from the prow as those ghostly stingrays spread out beneath us, silently gliding away from the hapless weekend fishermen who had inadvertently disturbed them.

Drawing food from the sea is one of the most fundamental interactions that we can have with the our oceans, and I’m glad that I have those early experiences in New Orleans to draw upon. The stingray incident taught me a respect for the ocean and its creatures — and a concern for how we interact with them — that sticks with me today.

The fish we choose to eat — and the way we fish for them — can have a tremendous impact on our oceans. As part of a personal goal to eat healthier, I’m trying to increase the amount of fish in my diet. It’s a lean protein with great health benefits. But there are risks, as well: Some types of fish can be contaminated with mercury and PCBs, and sometimes seafood is harvested in a way that’s bad for the oceans.

A new Sustainable Seafood Guide from the Natural Resources Defense Council can help me — and you — make better choices about what we eat. It provides seven basic guidelines to follow when shopping for seafood or ordering at a restaurant, as well as specific advice about America’s five favorite types of seafood, from shrimp to tuna to fish sticks.

I was a little disheartened to see that many of my favorite varieties of fish — grouper, halibut, orange roughy, cod — had landed on the recommended “avoid” list. (Pacific cod and halibut are OK, but the Atlantic varieties are badly depleted.) I was aware of the overfishing problems that many species face, but this put it in pretty stark terms.

Today is the first-ever World Oceans Day, designated by the United Nations as an occasion to celebrate and protect the world’s oceans. And there are certainly a lot of problems facing our seas — overfishing, habitat destruction, acidification, water pollution, giant trash vortexes in the Pacific … the list goes on.

We might not be able to tackle all of those big problems all at once. But as NRDC’s Laura Pagano suggests, one way that each of us can make a difference right now is to make smarter choices about the seafood we eat and understand its impact on the oceans.