The sighting made the rounds on Reddit over the weekend — a single post, no photo attached, just the intersection and the time and the matter-of-fact tone that characterizes most genuine wildlife encounters: saw a coyote near Broadway and Columbus, moved on pretty quickly. A handful of replies followed, a few people sharing their own near-misses in the Outer Sunset or up near Twin Peaks, someone noting that coyote activity tends to tick up in late winter when juveniles disperse from their family groups and start ranging for new territory.

North Beach is not the obvious stop on that circuit. It's dense and lit and loud on weekend nights, the sidewalks outside Vesuvio and Caffe Trieste reliably occupied until well past midnight. But Columbus Avenue is also a straight corridor that runs northeast from the edge of Chinatown toward the water, and the blocks around it quiet down fast once you're off the main drag. A coyote reading the terrain would find the geometry sensible enough.

Coyotes have been documented across most of San Francisco's neighborhoods over the past decade — a function of a stable urban population centered in the western parks that has gradually learned to move through gaps in the built environment. They follow drainage corridors, cut through cemeteries, cross under freeways. Broadway at 3am is, from a certain angle, just another gap.

Nobody reported the animal behaving aggressively or appearing disoriented. It moved on, as the post said.

Someone walking past that corner tomorrow will see nothing unusual — the same coffee-stained sidewalk, the same neon, the same pigeons working the gutters. The coyote left no visible record, which is more or less the point.