At 9:40 a.m. on December 17, 2010, a caller along the Chicago lakefront reported a stray dog stranded on the ice off Fullerton Avenue. When emergency crews arrived and looked out across Lake Michigan, the animal sitting hundreds of yards offshore on a drifting slab of broken shelf ice turned out to be a wild female coyote.
Winter winds had snapped a chunk of the shoreline ice shelf loose and pushed it out into open water with the coyote on board. At one point she slipped into the lake and spent roughly ten minutes trying to swim back toward the city, only to find the near-freezing water too cold to survive. Exhausted and soaked through, she hauled herself back onto the floating ice slab and curled up as the current carried her farther from the beach.
The Chicago Fire Department launched both a helicopter and its heavy steel-hulled fireboat, the Christopher B. Burke, a tug built to crunch through winter lake ice. Why send a marine unit and an air crew for a wild canine? Department officials pointed out a practical city rule: if rescuers do not go out and get an animal off the ice, some bystander on the beach will inevitably walk out onto the thin shelf to try it themselves and end up needing a human rescue.
By the time the fireboat nudged up against the drifting floe around 10:45 a.m., the coyote had been out on the water for more than an hour. Icicles hung from her wet belly fur, she was shivering violently, and the cold had left her nearly frozen to the slab.
An officer from Chicago Animal Care and Control leaned over the rail, slipped a catch pole loop over the coyote's neck, and hoisted her onto the deck. She was so stiff with hypothermia that she remained completely immobile and did not put up a fight.
"The coyote was kind of happy to be out of the water," Chicago Fire Department Captain Mike Fox told reporters after docking at Belmont Harbor. "They put a blanket on her and once she got to shore she started getting a little more active." Even veteran firefighters on the boat admitted they were thrilled by the call, noting that people rarely get that close to a wild coyote even at the zoo.
Because it was the week before Christmas, the rescue crew named her Holly. That afternoon, city officers transferred her to Flint Creek Wildlife Rehabilitation in suburban Barrington, a center run by director Dawn Keller that had become the region's go-to trauma ward for urban coyotes.
When Holly arrived at the center, she was suffering from frostbite, dehydration, and minor cuts from the sharp lake ice. Staff warmed her up, treated her frostbitten paws, and placed her in a quiet recovery pen away from people so she would not lose her fear of humans before returning to the wild. For one morning on Lake Michigan, a species that spends its life dodging traffic and slipping down Chicago alleys needed a steel icebreaker and a wool blanket to make it to spring.
Flint Creek Wildlife kept Holly through the winter while she recovered. In February 2011, they opened the back of a van and let her go. The location of the release was never disclosed.
Image is for illustration purposes only.
Source: CBS Chicago (2010) / NBC Chicago (2010) / Daily Herald (2011, 2015) / Flint Creek Wildlife Rehabilitation.
Chicago Firefighters Rescue Coyote Stranded on Lake Michigan Ice
