On the trail of wily coyotes along the Gulf Coast.
When the Super Blood Wolf Moon glowed with a spooky orange-red over a golf course near our house last month, I heard the eerie howling of wolves.
Wait a minute. Those weren’t wolves, those were coyotes. Or were they? As reported recently, a coyote with red-wolf DNA was found in Galveston.
The red wolf that commonly roamed the Gulf Coast in the 19th and early 20th centuries was declared extinct in 1980. Before its demise, though, it apparently mated with the coyote, whose progeny may now carry red-wolf genes; their graybrown fur is burnished with red, like the Blood Moon.
Shortly after the discovery of a coyote with wolf ancestry, people began telling me they had been hearing wolves in their neighborhoods. Not likely. Just because a coyote carries remnant DNA from a wolf doesn’t necessarily make it a wolf.
Wolves are nowhere to be found in Texas. We killed them to extinction in the state and have severely decimated their populations throughout the U.S. Coyotes would have suffered a similar fate were they not clever enough to adapt to urban environments and lucky enough that we eliminated their chief competitors, the wolves.
Coyotes are smart, stealthy, nocturnal predators. They can detect and avoid lethal traps. They avoid people. When their numbers are being killed off by people, they reproduce at a higher rate. The irony in killing coyotes is that we get more coyotes.
Farmers and ranchers must contend with coyotes preying on livestock such as calves, lambs and chickens. Having grown up on a farm, I know about coyotes killing chickens — even though stray dogs were a worse menace.
Urban coyotes go after rabbits, rodents and other wild animals scurrying through neighborhoods. They also eat waste foods that urbanites notoriously strew on streets.
I understand the concern for pets, but our dogs and cats shouldn’t be roaming free. Indeed, free-roaming cats are killed by free-roaming dogs far more often than by coyotes.
My cat stays indoors and attacks golf balls on the floor.
Coyotes could potentially attack a small dog left outside unattended. But coyotes would not attack a dog of similar size unless in self-defense.
A persistent myth claims that a coyote will lure a dog into a pack to be ambushed. What really happens is that a dog chases a coyote that runs for its life to the pack, which defends the fleeing coyote.