I would be surprised if the Coyote would be quick to get back into the water after such a difficult swim. It would, I suspect, want to recover and find food. So I support the theory the Coyote is just hiding somewhere. The island is small but not that small that it couldn’t hide somewhere.

I wonder if a turtle drowned halfway across.

If a Coyote could do it, all those famous escapees must have had too.

That roadrunner thought he'd be safe hiding out on the notorious prison island...

It's a 1.5mi swim.

I remember visiting Angel Island (a 0.5mi swim) and seeing the abundance of raccoons they have, and asked a ranger how they got there. They also swam.

Growing up on a lake I would regularly watch deer swim the quarter mile back and forth between the shore and a nearby island, with no problem.

Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=br4-VsvRcII

Poor thing, talk about going in the wrong direction :)

Impressive though.

If you time things right, and don't get swept out to sea, it's the 54 degree water that is the real danger. I'm no medical person, but it sure seems like that the animal is suffering from hypothermia and fatigue. I'm sure it'll have happy hunting once it recovers.

This sort of thing is a huge problem here in New Zealand. The only native mammal here is a bat, we have mostly birds which evolved for a really long time with only avian predators. So they’re hilariously poorly adapted for surviving standard predators (cats, rats, dogs etc) which first the Maori and subsequently Europeans brought. For example, many of them are flightless and tend to freeze when threatened - works well against eagles but is a terrible idea when threatened by a cat.

As a result, we have many animals, mostly birds, which are totally unique and also critically endangered. Many of them can only survive on offshore islands which have been comprehensively cleared of predators at vast effort and expense. The islands need to be relatively accessible since humans have to get to them to maintain them, but it turns out that once in a while a predator will swim quite vast distances for no apparent reason, and it only takes one to mess up years of painstaking work. Quite apart from killing a bunch of birds whose total remaining numbers might range from the tens to the hundreds of individuals.

I didn't think anti-bot stuff could get more annoying but to sit there and hold a button for like 20 seconds straight with nothing else on the screen to look at is incredibly boring and annoying and I gave up and left the page 3/4 of the way through it.