Posted on 09/09/2001 3:41:24 AM PDT by 2Trievers
By JOHN HARRIGAN COYOTES ARE are a regular part of the mix around our place, one family ranging the swamps and ridges between our farm and the Beloin place, and another pack making themselves known from the woods behind Wayne and Liz Richards' house. In their hunting, these coyotes behave more like wolves than coyotes, hunting in packs, which are really families, and using wolf-like tactics and communication. Our coyotes, bigger than their Western cousins, have learned to take bigger prey, a key to survival in a harsher climate. During summer the adults are teaching their young to hunt and celebrate the kill. Thus there are a lot of shrill adolescent cries in the night. September is payoff time, when the pups are big enough to truly help. The big dogs we have doing guard duty in the sheep pastures, the Maremmas, can hear the coyotes' communicative yips during the hunt, and don't seem inclined to bark out any "stay away" warnings — not just then, that is. Neither do the Malamutes. But when the coyotes are all sitting around singing in unison, presumably celebrating success, all four dogs chime in. And the Malamutes, of course, sound more like wolves than the coyotes do. People are often incredulous when they learn that we have a pretty extensive sheep operation, partly because they envision me as a desk-bound news guy and can't imagine me on a tractor or fixing fence, but mostly because of where we live — smack in the middle of prime fox, bear and coyote country. So the first question is often, "What do you do about the coydogs?" The term "coydogs" was coined back in the '50s, when coyotes began to appear in significant numbers and people weren't really sure what they were. They were assumed to be the product of some sort of brush wolf mating with domestic dogs, creating a whole new species, the coydog. It took wildlife biologists only a couple of years, of course, to breed and then breed back pups from captive "coydogs" and find out, sure enough, that they always bred back to the dominant strain, coyote. So there are no true "coydogs," save for those one-generation individuals. Still, the term persists. There is great interest in why our coyotes are so large and how they go there. One theory was that in their eastward migration they had to go north around the Great Lakes. Because the larger animals in a litter have a better chance of survival in a cold climate, natural selection produced a bigger animal. Nice story, but the latest wrinkle is that red wolf genes have been found in our Eastern coyotes. And evidence is mounting that the wolf we had here in the Northeast in antiquity, before they were supposedly wiped out by advancing civilization, was not the environmental movement's poster child, the gray wolf, but the lowly red wolf instead. In fact, I think in the form of our coyotes we are seeing a whole new subspecies of wolf evolve before our very eyes. In our arrogant selectivity we persecute it and revile it and denigrate it as a "worthless" coyote, a "varmint." How are we ultimately going to reconcile that attitude and track record, with our supposed unabashed worship of its not-too-distant cousins? John Harrigan's address: Box 39, Colebrook, N.H. 03576. E-mail: hooligan@ncia.net
Woods, Water and Wildlife
Coyotes do eat a lot of field mice and rats. Funny to watch them jump around trying to catch the mice.
Some of the orchardists in that area like the coyotes for that reason. Mice do a lot of damage to the bark of young trees.
Coyotes do eat a lot of field mice and rats. Funny to watch them jump around trying to catch the mice.
Remember the "magic numbers": 5.56, 7.62, and 12.
Finally, someone on FR who understands and uses correctly the term "species."
At my work place the other day, some idiot actually insisted men and women were different species.
She wasn't attempting to be cute, or funny, she was just stupid.
The redingtons bred some cyote into sled dogs about 15 years back; trying to build a tougher trail dog; didn't work out. They kept one dog out of the litter, and I have a dog several generations down the line from that failed attempt. This dog literally hides in her doghouse and is about as nervous and sneaky as can be. The kind of dog that will never get close to people. She actually sleeps all day and becomes active at night. Just reeks of cyote. Funny how that 10% cyote blood has such power in her makeup. Very dominant gene or trait. Needless to say, they never got the stronger dog from the experiment.
I say this as an avid conservationist, but I quiver with indignation at the way ignorant and powermad former socialists are abusing the constitution and the law in the name of preservation.
A socialist is a communist without the balls to admit it.
I doubt they are "former," few if any communists ever change.
They just learn to hid behind a less truthful cover name such as
"DemocRAT."
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