Greg Breining

The regal American chestnut once reached across the deciduous forests of the Appalachians and Eastern Seaboard. Its abundance was astonishing: Up to one in four of every large tree in eastern forests was a chestnut.

Native wolves had been eradicated and the forests of the eastern United States long cut down when residents of western New York first began to notice the arrival of coyotes in the 1940s.