Nick Stone Schearer makes his home in Orinda, where he likes to jog at sunset. Frequently, he runs into a couple out with their dog searching for a coyote who might play with the pooch, behavior that dismays but does not shock a filmmaker whose new documentary, “Don’t Feed the Coyotes,” observes the interaction between humans and wild canines.
The film is an opening night selection at this year’sGreen Film Festival of San Francisco, where Schearer gently applies the lessons he learned in making it, suggesting that the couple should not encourage interactions between their dog and coyotes.
“我只是喜欢,我不知道这是一个good idea for them, for the coyotes or for your dog,’” Schearer told The Chronicle in a recent phone interview. “For them, it’s probably like, ‘Hey, this is a beautiful thing. We’re going out in nature, our dog playing with the coyotes.’ ”
It’s an interesting contrast to “Taking the Reins,” the other opening night film on the double bill kicking off the festival at the Roxie Theater on Thursday, April 14. The documentary by North Bay native Gunther Kirsch focuses on the Koopmanns, stewards of an Alameda County ranch that has been in their family for more than a century. Unlike the suburban couple treating a wild animal as a playmate for their pet out of ignorance of nature, the Koopmans are deeply intimate with the natural world that surrounds them.
“Their relationship with the land and their livelihood, ranching, protects the watershed and wildlife habitat. It is just like a Garden of Eden, and they are trying to keep it that way,” Kirsch said.
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That the two films are playing together is a bit of clever programming. “Don’t Feed the Coyotes” focuses on the return of that wild canine to San Francisco over the past 20 years, establishing territory in an urban environment, while in “Taking the Reins,” the encroachment of development in an expanding Bay Area makes the Koopmann Ranch’s survival all the more remarkable. Both show how each animal — coyote and human — struggles to stake its claim on Earth.
Schearer and Kirsch began making their films at around the same time, Schearer in the summer of 2017 and Kirsch in 2018. Schearer moved from New York to the Bay Area in 2015, living first in San Francisco for a few months before heading to the East Bay. He would run across coyotes in the hills from time to time, but what inspired his documentary was seeing Janet Kessler, a self-taught naturalist known as the “Coyote Lady of San Francisco,” quoted in a news article about a coyote attack on a small dog.
“I just went down this rabbit hole of research,” Schearer said. “She’s got a really extensive blog and an Instagram account. I started seeing all that work that she’d been doing for a long time. It became pretty clear that she was a unique person doing something different.”
For Kirsch, the path to “Taking the Reins” began with a visit to the Koopmann Ranch in Sunol. In his capacity as a cinematographer, he went out there to shoot burrowing owls that make their homes on the ranch, one of many species — from golden eagles to badgers and deer — that coexist with the Koopmanns’ cattle. Habitat is key to the survival of the ground-living owls, and during an ATV tour of the ranch Clayton Koopmann explained how he moves the cattle around to graze so as not to disturb them.
“He was a captivating person,” Kirsch recalled. “He started telling me about the ranch and everything and I was just like, ‘Oh my God, this is so cool!’ It was a cool story and a cool character right from the get-go.”
In a sense, both “Don’t Feed the Coyotes” and “Taking the Reins” are stories of nature pushing up against the modern world. In the case of the coyotes, the concrete environs where they have settled, or even more pastoral enclaves like the Presidio, are not kind. The coyote population remains small despite successful breeding because coyotes leave their parents to establish fresh territory and often fall victim to speeding cars.
The Koopmanns in “Facing the Reins” have also seen the viability of their ranch threatened at various times throughout its existence. It might have been easier and undoubtedly would have been profitable to sell out to developers when inheritance taxes left the ranch teetering in debt, but the documentary limns the creative ways the family regained its financial footing.
“These are real people living real lives, and they are doing so much good,” Kirsch said. ” I see the Koopmanns as this beacon of hope. We need to create more of this type of stewardship, this human interaction model with the environment.”
Similarly, Schearer hopes that “Don’t Feed the Coyotes” will also get people to think about their relationship to the wild creatures in their midst. He notes his neighbors aren’t alone in wanting to interact with the coyotes, which adds one more existential threat to the animals’ survival as they get too used to humans.
“They want to establish some kind of relationship with the animal, and that’s a huge challenge,” he said. “We shouldn’t be making them our pets or our friends. … Keeping the balance is tough.”
Green Film Festival of San Francisco:Opening night films “Don’t Feed the Coyotes” and “Taking the Reins” begin screening at 6 p.m. Thursday, April 14. $10-$15. Roxie Theater, 3117 16th St., S.F. Also streaming online through April 24. The in-theater portion of the festival continues through April 17. For the full schedule, visitsfgreen2022.eventive.org.