of sensibility, I looked around for my wife and thought it was strange that she was not beside me in bed. It was when I discovered the claw marks on the wall and followed them up to the ceiling fan where she was latched on like a tree frog.
This situation prompted two reactions: number one, we got a dog, a really big dog, and two; I decided to find out all I could about these Brown county wolf wannabees.
First off, the Latin name for the coyote is Canis Latrans. I don’ t know why. I don’ t I don’ t speak Latin. Latin is a dead language anyway. There appears to be about eighteen sub-species of coyotes in North America. This is no doubt due to their lax morals and promiscuous behavior. In fact the coyotes we have in Brown County are a little bigger than some of the western varieties and that is the result of interbreeding with Grey Wolves. And if and when they’ re in the mood they will even mate with your basic feral dog.
When this happens then coy-dogs result. And that particular hybrid is a coyote that has a lessened fear of humans and a little more curiosity and adaptability to human environments. Which means you should double lock your trash cans, your doors, and keep your small pets in the house at night. Coyotes are both scavengers and hunters.
Coyotes are, first and foremost, opportunists. They like to find stuff ready to eat like cat food, garbage, road kill, or other yummy offal. But they also like to dine on small rodents; mice, voles, rabbits just about anything furry up to the size of a lamb or even a small deer. You can sum up coyote food philosophy this way; if it is already dead it is dinner or if it’ s
small enough that it can be made dead, its dinner. Of course finding garbage or something that is already deceased is much more energy efficient than hunting, but hunting has its appeal— who doesn’ t like fresh food.
When I was a youngster, back in the dim, dark days of the middle of the last century, the only coyotes I knew about were in Westerns on TV. You know, like when the cowpokes would bed down at night, they would just get their saddles and bedrolls arranged and get all comfy in their blankets and that was the signal for the coyote opera to commence. That is to say, the coyote was rare but not a stranger to Indiana up until the 1970s.
The experts say the coyote population has doubled since the seventies, but I think at least fifty percent of the problem is that our human population exploded and moved into habitats that used to be the domain of our wild canine friends. I know when I first moved to the ridge there were only three dwellings in two miles and now, seventeen years later, there are seven. So, there is really only one thing to do— learn to live with them.
While I don’ t have an issue with noisy wildlife, in general, I still have a problem with all that yipping and yowling and screaming right up in my backyard. But, my big old, wonder dog keeps the coyotes down in the holler and at least a half mile away. The coyote opera sounds a little more like it does in the Westerns. However, I’ m still a little spooked when I’ m hiking on a back country trail and come across a scrap of a mailing label that says,“ Acme Products.” •
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