The Coyote Walks was an annual walking project and artistic research initiative led by Dillon de Give that explored the invisible relationships between urban environments and the “wild.” The project took its inspiration from the real story of Hal, a young coyote that appeared in New York City’s Central Park in 2006 and became the focus of intense media and public attention before tragically dying after being released back toward the wilderness. This event foregrounded questions about how nature intersected with daily life in the metropolis, and what it meant for humans and animals to cross the boundary between city and wildness.

At its core, The Coyote Walks invited participants to ask: How might a coyote have found its way into — or out of — a dense urban setting? To engage with this question, the project organized a small-group itinerancy each spring. Over roughly three days and about 15 miles per day, walkers trekked out of New York City along speculative routes that loosely followed the paths a coyote might have taken — favoring green corridors, avoiding dense development when possible, and imagining animal logic in human landscapes.

The walk functioned simultaneously as commemorative ritual, creative research, and embodied inquiry, using slow movement on foot as a way to connect city life with ecological and psychological awareness. Routes varied from year to year and were documented on a public map that traced each year’s path from Central Park to locations in the surrounding wilds — from Peekskill and Suffern to Northport and beyond. These maps illustrated tentative lines between built and wild spaces, encouraging slow reflection on how landscapes, minds, and communities interwove.

Walking The Coyote Walks became more than a trek: it was a gesture of curiosity and connection, a literal and metaphorical attempt to bridge the city and the non-human world through shared movement and observation.