A Coyote in the Desert, and What It Taught Me Today

I made a whole-plate ambrotype this morning of a coyote that died on my property. I actually found him/her a couple of weeks ago. The smell hit me before the sight did. That heavy sweetness that stops you in your tracks. I followed the breeze until I saw the body tucked into the scrub. I photographed it digitally that day and shared it on my blog because the moment stayed with me. Something about the way the desert had already begun its quiet work of reclaiming him/her.

Today felt like the right time to return with a glass plate.

Standing over him/her again, I could see how much had changed. The fur had loosened even more. The skull had become more visible. The boundary between animal and earth was almost gone. It felt right to honor that transition with a process that knows something about time. Collodion doesn’t tolerate distance. It makes you slow down. It makes you witness.

“This is the terror of death: to have emerged from nothing, to have a name, consciousness of self, deep inner feelings, an excruciating inner yearning for life and self-expression, and with all this yet to die.” - Ernest Becker, The Denial of Death

The plate holds that feeling. The shallow focus collapses the edges and pulls you to what is left of the face. The rest drifts into darkness. He/She is both here and not here. Present and dissolving. That tension sits right inside the questions I keep asking in my doctoral work. What does it mean to create in the presence of decay? How do we metabolize the truth that everything we love eventually falls apart? How does mortality shape the way artists see the world, sometimes long before we have language for it?

Finding him/her weeks ago was one thing. Photographing him/her in collodion felt like something else entirely. Digital is quick. It registers what is in front of you and lets you walk away. Collodion asks you to stay in the discomfort. To hold the smell of decay in your body long enough to make something honest from it. It asks for witness instead of reaction.

That is the heart of what I am researching. Death is not symbolic. It is physical. It has texture and smell and weight. And when we allow ourselves to stay present with it, even briefly, something shifts. We sense that the same cycle is waiting for us too. We sense the thinness of the line between our lives and everything dying around us.

Artists often walk toward that truth instead of away from it. Not for shock. Not for spectacle. But because the residue left behind is often where meaning begins. Facing a dead coyote on my land is not the same as losing someone I love, but the psyche doesn’t separate these encounters into clean categories. It only knows that life has ended. It knows that we are part of the same story.

I decided today that I will return to him/her each month and make another plate. Not to chase a morbid curiosity, but to witness the transformation all the way to bone. To let the process of decomposition teach me something about time and surrender. To let the land speak through the changes in the body. The final plate, when only bones remain, will carry a different kind of truth. I want to follow that arc all the way through.

When the image came up in the developer, the darkroom felt quiet in a way the desert rarely does. I felt that mix of sorrow and clarity Becker writes about. The strange ache of being a symbolic creature in a temporary body. We know we will die, yet we continue to make. We continue to reach for something that feels true.

This plate reminds me why my work matters. Not the plate alone, but the act of standing with what we usually avoid. My research is not about death as abstraction. It is about how we live with its reality. How we create meaning alongside the knowledge that nothing lasts.

The desert keeps teaching this lesson. Today it arrived through a coyote already turning back to dust.

The Coyote That Died on My Land

A couple of days ago, I caught a strong smell outside while working on a photograph. It was sharp, pungent, and unmistakable. Death has a particular odor that bypasses thought and goes straight to the gut. It made me queasy for a moment. Human death is worse; its scent lingers in your psyche as much as your senses, but this was still hard to shake.

I live on two acres, so it could’ve been anywhere. But the breeze was steady from the south, and the smell was heavy enough to trace. I didn’t walk a hundred feet before I saw it: a coyote, fully grown, laid out in the dirt as if sleep had taken it mid-motion. I hear them often at 4 a.m. Their calls ricocheting through the desert, a chorus of wild life that reminds me I’m not alone out here. They’re ghosts most of the time, heard but rarely seen.

My first instinct was to call animal control. But after thinking about it, I decided to leave the body where it was. Nature doesn’t need me to manage it. I’ll let it return to itself. When the flesh is gone and the bones are bare, I’ll bring them into my studio and make photographs.

For me, that act isn’t about morbidity; it’s about continuity. As Ernest Becker wrote, “All organisms are torn between the desire to live and the knowledge that they must die.” This coyote’s death is part of the same existential equation that drives art. Otto Rank saw art as the individual’s answer to mortality, a symbolic act of defiance, and an assertion that something of us can endure. Terror Management Theory later confirmed it empirically: the awareness of death propels us to create meaning, to build culture, and to leave traces that say we were here.

The coyote reminds me that no creature escapes this truth. Yet, there’s a strange grace in its stillness. The desert will do what it’s always done; it will metabolize the body, slowly, beautifully, until there’s only bone and dust. In that process, I see a mirror of the creative act: transformation through decay.

In time, I’ll photograph what remains—not as documentation of death, but as witness to the cycle that keeps everything alive.

Theory Note: Death, Art, and the Creative Instinct

Becker believed that culture, and by extension, art, is humanity’s way of managing the terror of mortality. We build symbolic worlds to convince ourselves that our lives matter, that something of us endures beyond the grave. Otto Rank expanded this idea, seeing the artist as a kind of “hero of creation,” transforming existential anxiety into symbolic immortality through the act of making. Terror Management Theory offers the scientific echo: when reminded of death, people turn to creativity, meaning, and worldview defense to restore equilibrium.

This coyote, in its silent return to the earth, embodies what Becker, Rank, and the TMT researchers all touch upon: the dance between decay and creation. In death’s presence, we’re reminded why we make anything at all.