Saw a Coyote? on our Land

[extrakt0r]

Heard the Coyote last night around 11pm howling. Pretty cool. Went out on the deck and shined a flashlight in the general direction and it shut up and I didn't hear it again.

With a 5 and 4 year old and 8 week old puppy is there anything I need to worry about with them? Do you think they are coming to the house to look for food? We are not "in the country". Our neighborhood has 10-25 acre lots. So this is rural-city IMO.

 

[dragoneggs]

Heard the Coyote last night around 11pm howling. Pretty cool. Went out on the deck and shined a flashlight in the general direction and it shut up and I didn't hear it again.

With a 5 and 4 year old and 8 week old puppy is there anything I need to worry about with them? Do you think they are coming to the house to look for food? We are not "in the country". Our neighborhood has 10-25 acre lots. So this is rural-city IMO.

10 to 25 acre lots is not rural city in my book. I would make sure your pets are in at night. I love coyotes... having a mixed coy-dog for 13 years and don't wish anything bad on wild or tame animals.

 

[troutsqueezer]

Keep small dogs and cats in. Big or even average size dogs are ok outdoors.

 

[dragoneggs]

Keep small dogs and cats in. Big or even average size dogs are ok outdoors.

Agreed. It's the small animals that are your worry. Medium and bigs will take care of themselves... my experience is the coyotes will not pick on them.

 

[TomSeller]

Small pets inside at all times unless you are outside with them. Coyotes are around during the day as well.

 

[extrakt0r]

The dog is a Border Collie so hoping she will be ok when older. She will be indoor who sees a lot of outdoors like us.

Rural-City to me is you are far enough away from the City to see the stars, but close enough to still see the city light aura at night if you look that way.

 

[DianneInVA]

OH BOY can I see the starts. I moved here this spring from metro DC area (Springfield VA). The Northern Minnesota sky ove Bagley looks like a glittering explosion in comparison. If I look toward town, I can see a faint glow reflected on cloudy nights.
Its noisier here than it was in Fairfax. I hear cows and turkeys, dogs and an occasional coyote. LOVE IT.
Honoring our Veterans today.

 

[dave1949]

This whole article is interesting. There has been a lot of discussion about wolves-coyotes-dogs mixing so I quoted only that portion.

In the section on feeding, it says it may be possible to distinguish between coydog and coyote kills based on the carcass condition, but the specifics aren't made very clear.

Coyote - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Interspecific hybridization

Coyotes will sometimes mate with domestic dogs, usually in areas such as Texas and Oklahoma, where the coyotes are plentiful and the breeding season is extended because of the warm weather. The resulting hybrids, called coydogs, maintain the coyote's predatory nature, along with the dog's lack of timidity toward humans, making them a more serious threat to livestock than pure-blooded animals. This crossbreeding has the added effect of confusing the breeding cycle. Coyotes usually breed only once a year, while coydogs will breed year-round, producing many more pups than a wild coyote. Differences in the ears and tail generally can be used to distinguish coydogs from domestic or feral dogs or pure coyotes.[34] Breeding experiments in Germany with poodles, coyotes, and later on with the resulting dog-coyote hybrids showed that, unlike wolfdogs, coydogs exhibit a decrease in fertility, significant communication problems, and an increase of genetic diseases after three generations of interbreeding.[35]

Coyotes have also been known, on occasion, to mate with wolves, mostly with eastern subspecies of the grey wolf such as the Great Plains Wolf, though this is less common than with dogs, due to the wolf's hostility to the coyote. The offspring, known as a coywolf, is generally intermediate in size to both parents, being larger than a pure coyote, but smaller than a pure wolf. A study showed that of the 100 "coyotes" collected in Maine, 22 had half or more grey wolf ancestry, and one was 89% grey wolf. The large eastern coyotes in Canada are proposed to be actually hybrids of the smaller western coyotes and grey wolves that met and mated decades ago, as the coyotes moved toward New England from their earlier western ranges.[29] Ontario Ministry of Natural Resources research scientist Brent Patterson has revealed findings that most coyotes in Eastern Ontario are wolf-coyote hybrids and that the Eastern wolves in Algonquin Park are, in general, not interbreeding with coyotes.[36]
Similarly, on a population level, Roland Kays, curator of mammals at the State Museum of New York has obtained preliminary DNA evidence for eastern coyotes suggesting interbreeding and a genetic makeup of 85 to 90% coyote, perhaps 10% wolf and slightly less than 5% dog?a giant Canis soupus", in his words.[37]

The red wolf is thought by some researchers to be in fact a wolf/coyote hybrid rather than a unique species. Strong evidence for hybridization was found through genetic testing, which showed red wolves have only 5% of their alleles unique from either gray wolves or coyotes. Genetic distance calculations have indicated red wolves are intermediate between coyotes and gray wolves, and they bear great similarity to wolf/coyote hybrids in southern Quebec and Minnesota. Analyses of mitochondrial DNA showed the existing red wolf populations are predominantly coyote in origin.[38]

Coyote-Wolf hybrids continue to expand in numbers, and are now being found from Canada all the way down to Virginia.[39]

 

[kop]

opening day tommarow in ny to warm hope it gets cold soon .the coyotes here dont last long most of the dairy farmers dont like them. well have to get ready for tommarow see ya

 

[Sodo]

There has been a lot of discussion about wolves-coyotes-dogs mixing

Here's a couple pics of coyotes that I took in our backyard in Seattle. They look like showdogs.