When someone makes a call to Mike McMillan, it’s not uncommon to detect panic on the other end of the receiver.

As the owner and founder of McMillan Wildlife Control, McMillan’s daily routine consists of rescuing those Knoxvillians whose daily lives have been invaded by creatures of the wild.

“He doesn’t realize he’s in an urban environment versus a rural environment,” McMillan said of the behavior of the urban coyote, a predator, though not peculiar to Knox County, that has certainly earned its fair share of local fame.

From scattered neighborhood sightings to run ins with domestic pets, the coyote occupies a particular space in the urban mindset that, while certainly imaginative, isn’t always founded in reality.

In Knoxville, as in any urban environment that lacks a wide range of biodiversity, the coyote largely sits at the top of the food chain, humans withstanding.

Before the arrival of Europeans on American soil, however, the ecology of Knox County and surrounding Appalachia looked very different from how it appears today.

The eastern cougar, generally presumed extinct despite its presence on the endangered species list, used to sit on top of Knoxville’s ecological food chain. Below the cougar stood the red wolf, a canid that occupied a similar niche in the environment before the arrival of the coyote.

The red wolf, like the cougar, also failed to stand up against human incursion into its habit, largely as a result of federally funded programs designed to eradicate their populations.

Though some 50 red wolfs are known to roam the woods of North Carolina, similar recovery endeavors have failed to take root in East Tennessee, with the last such project ending in large scale starvation and complaints from local farmers whose livestock became victims of the struggling species.

So enters the coyote, an omnivorous creature whose booming populations have touched every continental state, including Tennessee and Knoxville.

For Joseph Clark, research ecologist with US geological survey and expert in the ecology of large carnivores, the success of coyotes in Knoxville can be attributed to any number of factors, none of which are particularly related to the geography or environment offered by East Tennessee.

“The phenomenon is pretty ubiquitous,” Clark said of the coyotes expansion across America.

Originally found only in U.S. Southwest, the coyote was allowed to spread across the continent on the coattails of European and colonial expansion, who provided new habitats, sources of food and the elimination of competing predators from other environments.

Combined with their adaptability and high rate of reproduction — a coyote litter yields eight to nine pups on average — the coyote was bound for success nationwide.

Though they occupy a similar ecological niche as the now absent red wolf population, the urban Knoxville coyote is still considered by many to be an invasive species.

For Clark, however, the question of what do about coyote populations in East Tennessee is largely a moot point, due largely to the overall failure of any and all efforts to eliminate their populations across the nation.

“No one has ever been able to prevent the spread of coyotes in any extent,” Clark said. “They’re here to stay regardless of what we want.”

And stay in Knoxville they have, largely at the expense of the domestic dogs and cats with whom they share their environment.

McMillan, who has trapped over 100 coyotes over the course of a lifetime, said that while coyotes usually show no qualms about attacking the domestic pets that occupy Knoxville’s back yards and front porches, they almost always stop short of attacking humans.

He recalls a particular incident in which a local woman, frightened nearly to death by the sight of a coyote, took to cowering behind her front porch column before eventually contacting McMillan’s business.

Though this may be many people’s first reaction when coming across a wild animal, McMillan stresses that in order to avoid the rare, though certainly not impossible run in with a coyote, the key lies in how you present yourself.

“If you are afraid of the coyote, it can sense that in your body language, in the motions that you make, he can sense fear whether it’s a human or another animal,” McMillan said. “That’s how they establish dominance.”