Driving through a busy commercial neighborhood in Sault Ste. Marie, Ontario, last week, I was amused to see a young coyote lope across a main road while traffic waited at a red light.

I suspect most people who saw it thought they were looking at a scruffy dog, but there was no question it was a coyote, much like the one I saw sauntering along the bike path next to Interstate 275 near Detroit two weeks earlier.

On Friday morning, CNN broadcast a story about coyotes that have attacked three children in California in recent weeks. The wild dogs came right into people's yards and neighborhood playgrounds and tried to drag away toddlers.

A couple of years ago, Kathryn Trudeau looked out her living room window into her Dearborn, Mich., backyard and saw a coyote casually killing a woodchuck. The retired Detroit Free Press photo editor grabbed a video camera and got the entire tooth-and-claw drama on tape.

Each of those stories is a reminder that while we humans like to think of ourselves as the lords of the Earth, we share even our most urban places with a vast number of other creatures, and some of them, like coyotes, can live almost invisibly right under our noses.

I suspect something may be going on that has affected the food supply of the California coyotes and made starving animals desperate enough to forage openly where there are a lot of people. That area has been suffering from drought for several years, which may have reduced the supply of mice and other small creatures.

About 25 years ago, my wife and I owned a summer cabin on Vancouver Island in British Columbia, and one year we arrived to discover that we apparently were following in the footsteps of the world's greatest puppy salesman. It seemed like every other house in our woodsy neighborhood had a new dog.

Then one of the neighbors explained that Vancouver Island, which has a very mild oceanic climate, had endured one of its rare cold winters. Driven by starvation and deep snow, the wolves that live in the chain of mountains that form the island's spine moved to the lowlands, where they found domestic dogs to be easy pickings.

If I could hunt pheasants anywhere I liked in Michigan, I'd probably pick the empty lots on the east side of the city of Detroit. I've seen a lot of nice roosters there.

Most of the time the wild things that live a secret existence under our noses go unnoticed or are just a minor nuisance. We don't pay much attention until a cougar in California kills a jogger in a county park, or a coyote attacks a child. Then we tend to overreact, with frantic people who couldn't identify a cougar if it bit them on the butt demanding that every last one be wiped out.

Michigan seems to be especially rich in urban and suburban wildlife. Deer and rabbits are the scourge of gardeners in many neighborhoods, and raccoons have found they can make a comfortable living scrounging in garbage cans.

And my guess is that coyotes, one of the most adaptable creatures around, are going to become more common in urban areas all around the state. With a little common sense, we can learn not just to live with them but to enjoy the occasional glimpse of a wild world we are increasingly leaving behind.