Coyote swims to Alcatraz for first time ever, baffling experts |
It was a late Sunday afternoon like any other on San Francisco’s Alcatraz Island. The day was winding down, and Aidan Moore, a guest relations employee for Alcatraz City Cruises, was at the dock of the tourist attraction helping visitors disembark. Suddenly, one of the tourists approached him, wide-eyed: They had just seen a coyote swimming to shore, something that has never been recorded before.
“I didn’t believe them to start with,” Moore, who has been working on the island for the past two and a half years, told SFGATE over the phone. But the guest insisted they had the video to prove it. They held up their iPhone to show him the screen, and sure enough, there it was: a coyote paddling through the water and eventually reaching the craggy coast on the southern edge of the island near the Agave Trail, panting and shivering.
Moore said he never got the guest’s name, but asked them to AirDrop the video to his phone. He then called in the sighting over the radio to the park rangers on site, who went to the trail to look for the animal. By then, it had already disappeared.
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“I suspect he fell into the water chasing something and was swept away,” Moore said.
The captain of the boat told him there were some unusual currents in the bay that day, likely runoff from recent storms that were coming........