Meet the coyote, one of nature’s great tricksters
The conversations were as old as the South Texas brush country in which they occurred, although they could have happened in just about any wild or even marginally feral corner of the state.
One side opened with a long, moaning howl. The immediate answer — a sharp series of yips — came from what sounded close to the original howl. Maybe even the same spot. Then it quickly became a free-for-all. Warbling, barking, shrieks, screeches, yapping, howling, yips, whines and what sounded for all the world like a high-pitched laugh.
The voices were mixed and shifted in pitch and volume, sometime talking over each other and sometimes sounding like a series of very different vocalizations seamlessly strung end to end. The cacophony lasted perhaps a minute, then ceased as suddenly as it started.
And that began the second conversation.
“That was incredible,” Susan, my spouse and hunting partner, whispered as we looked wideeyed and smiling at each other from our adjacent hides at the bases of two big mesquites where we were trying to call wild turkeys within shotgun range. “How many coyotes do you think that was?”
“Sounded like a bunch,” I answered. “But with coyotes, it almost always does. They’ll fool you.”
Coyotes fool a lot of people.
Busting the myths
In many Native American mythologies, coyotes are portrayed as tricksters prone to confuse, confound and misdirect those around them. This portrayal certainly fits.
“There’s a lot of misperceptions about coyotes,” said Dr. Scott Henke, a researcher at Texas A&M University-Kingsville.
He said some of the confusion comes from the animals’ “trickster” behaviors and others from uninformed or misinformed human beliefs about these iconic wild canids.
Henke would know. Over his more than 30 years as a scientist and teacher, Henke has worked on numerous projects involving coyotes, most of them in South and West Texas.
Results of some of that research illuminate many of those misperceptions concerning coyotes.
For one, coyotes fool many folks with their size.
“People think they’re bigger than they truly are,” said Henke, who has been chairman of the Department of Animal and Wildlife Science at A&M-Kingsville’s Caesar Kleberg Wildlife Research Institute since 1992. “They have those long legs and all that fur, so they look big when you see one running across a field. But they are not as large as people believe.”
Henke said he often hears hunters, ranchers, landowners and others who’ve had close encounters with Texas coyotes talk about animals weighing 40-60 pounds or more.
He has captured and weighed well over a thousand Texas coyotes, and he hasn’t seen one nearly that big.
“The average weight is 22-25 pounds,” Henke said. “The biggest I’ve ever seen weighed 36 pounds, and it was a huge, fat animal. I have yet to see a 40-pound coyote in Texas.”
Just as coyotes aren’t as large as many believe, they are not the slavering predators of livestock and wildlife they often are portrayed to be.
“They aren’t strictly carnivorous by any means,” Henke said.
Coyotes are omnivorous, with much of their diet consisting of insects (grasshoppers are a big item), fruits, other plant material. They are opportunistic, focusing on whatever’s most abundant at the time, be that mesquite beans, prickly pear tunas, rabbits, mice, blackberries or just about anything else edible.
Yes, they occasionally will take a deer fawn or raid a quail or turkey nest. But killing coyotes won’t necessarily benefit those species.
“There’s a belief that coyote control is necessary to help deer and quail populations,“Henke said. “But it could actually do more harm than good.”
Conditions such as those caused by drought that increase exposure of fawns and ground-nesting birds to predation by coyotes make survival of those animals iffy anyway.
“That same fawn taken by a coyote was likely to die from something else,” Henke said.
It is worth noting that the areas of Texas with healthy coyote populations also hold healthy deer populations, with some having overpopulations of deer. And a good percentage of coyotes’ diet is carrion; the fawns coyotes often are blamed for killing may well have succumbed to an unrelated misadventure.
Reducing coyote populations could result in higher losses of some wildlife such as quail or turkey by increasing predation by other species.
Skunks, raccoons, foxes and snakes are major predators of groundnesting birds such as quail. Coyotes are major predators of those smaller animals, often killing them on sight to reduce competition for resources.
Fewer foxes, skunks and raccoons means less predation of quail and turkey. (Urban and suburban coyotes also play an important role in reducing populations or feral cats, a major predator of wildlife including birds, small mammals and reptiles.)
Texas coyotes are not the pack animals most imagine them to be, Henke said. Most live in mated pairs or family groups of parents and their latest offspring which, come autumn, will leave their parents to make their own way in the world.
One of Henke’s recent research projects illuminates another misperception tied to coyotes.
“I looked at how accurate people are at discerning how many coyotes they hear howling,” Henke said.
Sound advice
As with Susan and me on that late afternoon in La Salle County this spring, anyone who has heard coyotes crank up their voices knows it can be a rich and often mystifying experience.
What begins as the howl of a single coyote often becomes what sounds like a back-andforth between several. The vocalizations bounce back and forth, shifting from yelps to howl, shrieks to laughs, barks, warbles and piercing yips, their pitch changing in mid-call.
So how many coyotes are we hearing? How good are we at parsing individuals from the jumbled din?
Not very good, Henke’s research indicates.
After a discussion on the subject with a rancher friend as they listened to coyotes howl on a Texas evening, Henke devised a fascinating experiment. He trapped a total of four coyotes, one at a time, placing each in kennels built for earlier coyote research.
Henke bought sound recording equipment and a two-tone siren. He then used the siren to trigger the coyotes to howl. He recorded a single coyote howling, two coyotes howling, then three and finally all four calling together.
Henke set up booths at local grocery stores in the Kingsville area and invited folks to don headphones and listen to one of the four recordings and guess the number of coyotes they heard.
Anyone who has heard coyotes know how tough a challenge this is. Coyotes have at least a half-dozen vocalizations and can shift them seemingly at will, going from a low howl to a highpitched yip and directly into a wavering warble. One coyote can sound like several, making it tough to know just how many coyotes are calling.
Henke’s research proved this. The 427 participants in the project could discern differences in the number of coyotes howling each time a coyote was added. But they consistently overestimated the number of coyotes, often significantly.
Participants believed they heard as many as five coyotes when they were hearing one or two animals, as many as eight when they heard three coyotes, and guessed they heard as many as 12 when they were hearing just four.
“Only 10 percent of the participants guessed the correct number of coyotes,” Henke said.
And the accuracy of participants’ guesses had no relationship with their experience hearing coyotes in the wild. Henke asked participants for information including their age, sex, if they lived in an urban, suburban or rural area, and if they were a rancher/farmer or other occupation.
“It didn’t make a difference if they were urban residents or if they were older rural residents who’d heard coyotes all their lives,” he said.
This manifestation of coyotes’ “trickster” behavior — being able to sound like several different coyotes — almost certainly has a biological benefit for the animals, Henke said.
“It can make any rivals — other coyotes — believe there are more of them than there really are,” Henke said.
This “Beau Geste” effect, Henke said, can fool those rivals into abandoning the idea of trying to encroach on a family group’s territory.
It also fools most humans trying to figure out just how many coyote voices they are hearing. But even that trick doesn’t make hearing those calls any less a treat. The sound of several coyotes — or just one — howling is something to be treasured.