Some cool spring evening, as dusk bleeds onto the horizon, you may find yourself listening to more than the sounds of children playing and traffic coursing in the distance. You may hear the call of the wild -- even from your suburban back yard.

As development continues an insistent march from urban to rural areas, some of Mother Nature's more adaptable specimens are making themselves comfortable with being closer to the planet's top predator, man.

		Listen in Dave Dunbar demonstrates one of his coyote calling devices. Mr. Dunbar talks about how his coyote calls are made.

Among the most adaptable is the coyote.

John Frey knows a thing or two about coyotes, having spotted their telltale tracks in the woods behind his home on Mercer Road near the McGuire Memorial Home in New Brighton.

A broadcast engineer for Diversified Media Group in Cranberry, he was installing equipment one morning when he spotted three coyotes "sauntering" southeast, a stone's throw from where he stood near Rowan Elementary School in Cranberry.

"That's just something you don't see every day,'' Mr. Frey said. "It looked like something you'd see on 'Wild Kingdom!'"

Mr. Frey said he has noticed with increasing frequency over the past several years what looked like dog prints in his yard, "But they're not our dogs. They're coyotes."

"I guess I've gotten used to the idea that we'd see signs of them in a rural part of Beaver County. But seeing them in Cranberry was strange,'' he said.

Mr. Frey has black Labrador retrievers and can recognize their web-shaped paw prints easily. "A lab is built for water travel. They have web-shaped paws so they can swim," he said. "A coyote's is more like a German shepherd. It's very flat."

Based on his expertise reading paw prints, Mr. Frey said only half-jokingly that his neighbors always check with him when they are missing a pet dog or cat. "I'm becoming the default expert on coyotes. It's entertaining."

It's not so much that coyotes are encroaching on suburban areas as it is that people are encroaching on coyotes, said Samara Trusso, wildlife management supervisor for the Southwest Regional Office of the Pennsylvania Game Commission in Ligonier. The office covers Allegheny, Beaver, Washington, Greene, Armstrong, Indiana, Westmoreland, Fayette, Cambria and Somerset counties.

"Farms in Washington County and Westmoreland and Beaver County, they're being sold and they're being developed. Coyotes could have been there for some time. But all of a sudden, we're talking about them as encroaching on us and it's more accurate to say that we're encroaching on them,'' Ms. Trusso said.

Ms. Trusso said that what is happening around the suburban Pittsburgh region is mirroring what's happening throughout the Northeast.

"New York, Connecticut, Massachusetts, all across the Northeast, there are more and more reports of coyotes,'' she said.

In Beaver County, there were 60 calls in 2005 -- the most recent year for which information is available -- compared with none in 2004, 10 in 2003 and nine in 2002. In 1995, there were 20 calls.

Though the hard statistics don't bear out a burgeoning problem, Game Commission officials are confident the coyote population is increasing in this region. In fact, state regulations for baiting and hunting coyotes were relaxed in 2006, a reflection at least in part of the realization that the coyote population isn't facing any particular threats.

"We understand that coyotes are here. The population is rising, and we don't want to put too many restrictions on anybody who wants to pursue these animals and help to try to reduce the population,'' said John Smith, regional law enforcement supervisor for the Game Commission.

Coyote hunting is allowed year-round and baiting -- as long as the baiting is done outside of state game lands -- is now allowed along with the use of some hunting devices such as those electronic devices that mimic a tail flicking.

Dave Dunbar, of Slippery Rock, said he sees no reason that coyotes and suburbanites can't live in arms-length harmony. "Keep your pets indoors, bring your pet food in at night, and there shouldn't be any problems. They're really an amazing animal and if we leave them alone, they'll leave us alone,'' he said.

Mr. Dunbar, who owns Critter Buster Game Calls, has made the Eastern coyote his business, in more ways than one. He not only makes and sells devices that can mimic the howl, yip, bark and ki-yi of the coyote, he has made himself an expert on their habits and habitat in an effort to complete a film about them.

Over time, he came to admire the coyote as "adaptable and opportunistic. I have great respect for them,'' he said.