Coyote Becomes First Big Animal Seen on 101 Wildlife Bridge

The coyote walked the Wallis Annenberg Wildlife Crossing in Agoura Hills weeks before the bridge's Dec. 2 ribbon-cutting.

A coyote crossed the 101 Freeway in Agoura Hills in the dark, a bone, or maybe a stick, clamped in its jaws, and its paws never touched the pavement.

It walked over on the Wallis Annenberg Wildlife Crossing, the planted bridge between the Santa Monica Mountains and the Simi Hills that hasn't officially opened yet. Cameras have now caught a coyote up there twice, last week and again Thursday morning, which puts it ahead of every other large species, LAist reported. "This is amazing — obviously, the wildlife are not waiting for our opening date," Beth Pratt, president of the Wildlife Crossing Fund, told LAist.

It didn't take long. A camera on the deck caught a coyote heading north at about 1:37 a.m. Wednesday, hours after park service biologists set the cameras up, FOX 11 reported, citing National Park Service camera logs; LAist put the latest sighting on Thursday morning. Underneath it ran 10 lanes that carry more than 300,000 vehicles a day.

The first hint came Oct. 28, when a camera photographed a coyote climbing the bridge's southern slope, FOX 11 reported. Pratt told LAist nobody can say yet whether both pictures show the same animal.

That makes the coyote the 101 crossing's first, even though deer got onto an unfinished wildlife bridge earlier this year. Those deer were in Siskiyou County, on a different crossing over U.S. Route 97.

The animals here were never far away. Mountain lions, bobcats, mule deer, coyotes and gray foxes kept turning up on a dirt trail next to the site near Liberty Canyon, as field teams watched it before and during construction, FOX 11 reported. The bridge is what's new.

Pratt told LAist it feels right that a coyote went first, calling it a sort of L.A. mascot alongside the mountain lion P-22. Seth Riley, wildlife branch lead at the Santa Monica Mountains National Recreation Area, told FOX 11 that the bigger test is whether the bridge actually stitches back together land the freeway split decades ago, and that answering it will take years.

The partners behind the project plan a ribbon-cutting Dec. 2. The park service is adding more cameras and will release images, but there won't be a livestream.

"We can't, for security reasons, because this is L.A., and if there's a mountain lion going across, somebody's gonna go try to pet it," Pratt told LAist.

Source: LAist, retrieved November 6, 2026. Other sources: foxla.com.