North Carolina Nights video shows similarity of red wolves & coyotes

This video was produced by Jeff Mittlestadt, a journalism graduate student at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. It was published yesterday on Reese News. Jeff’s thesis work focuses on red wolves, and in this video he shows wild canids active at night, and asks: Are these red wolves or coyotes? The question gets to the issue of whether coyote hunters would be able to satisfactorily distinguish between common coyotes and globally imperiled red wolves if the state allows them to shoot coyotes at night, statewide, with no bag limit and no permit required. Listen to local hunters from Hyde County, within the red wolf recovery area, discuss whether or not they shoot coyotes now and why or why not.

Do you think nighttime coyote hunting ought to be legal in North Carolina? Tell the state Wildlife Resources Commission whether you agree or disagree with their proposal to allow it. Read proposal W1 on this page, then click on the online form to submit your comments. The comment period is open until April 16 — just four more days. (If you are not a NC resident, you can still comment, just select your state in question-6, and scroll past all the NC counties for question-7 to select “out of state” at the very bottom.)

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Call off the hounds: Coyote & fox pen operations [Warning: graphic images]

This video may be hard to watch, but I encourage you to do so. The concept of “fair chase” ought to be the foundation upon which licensed hunting occurs. There is no chance for fair chase in operations where wild foxes and coyotes are trapped, then crated and sold into fox-coyote pen operations. People send their hunting dogs into these fenced enclosures to “train” them to hunt. From what I’ve seen and learned from interviewing a few folks, it’s really just a blood sport. As a nation, we have given a collective thumbs-down on dog-fighting. It’s illegal. This should be too. This video was made by TrainingNotTorture.org, with first-hand pictures they took through the fence on their neighbor’s property. This group, and Project Coyote, were key in getting the state of Florida to ban fox and coyote pen operations this past June. It is still legal in my state (North Carolina).

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Suburban Howls, by Jon Way

Suburban Howls, by Jon Way

Suburban Howls: Tracking the Eastern Coyote in Suburban Massachusetts is a documentation of research on coyotes done by Jon Way while he was at Boston College and earning a PhD. He tells anecdotes about coyotes he caught during the multi-year study of coyotes in Boston and its surrounding suburbs as well as Cape Cod; and he tells anecdotes about the frustrations of working in an urban area. While it’s fascinating to learn about the life histories of the animals he studies, it’s equally heartbreaking to learn about their deaths at the hands of hunters, drivers of cars, and in one rare case a poisoner.

Way’s writing is at times detached, in the way you might expect a wildlife biologist to discuss their animal subjects. But these moments are few and far between. The bulk of the book is emotionally charged. It’s a rare look into the inner mind and emotions of a scientist going about his research. He’s not shy at disclosing snags he hit with the Massachusetts state wildlife agency and a zoo he was initially partnering with.

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More hybrid lovin’: coywolves, wolves and coyotes…

Coywolves. (c) Jon G. Way

Is it a wolf? No.

A coyote? No.

A mixture of the two? Oh, yes.

Northeastern wild canids have been leading biologists on a wild goose chase recently, as science scrambles to catch up with just what, exactly, Mother Nature has been cooking up in Massachusetts. Reports of extra large eastern coyotes have been rolling in for decades, but a certain subset of these animals has really caught people’s attention. Dubbed “coywolves,” they appear to be a cross between wolves and coyotes. Not only do they fall in between in size, but they have retained the urban-tolerance of coyotes while adding in the social pack behavior of wolves. And yes, they have added white-tailed deer to their dinner menus, something that most coyotes are not large or strong enough to take down.

A recent paper in the Northeastern Naturalist set out to sort out the “canis soup” that’s been stewing in the northeast by using mitochondrial DNA analyses to figure out what genes coywolves carry, and how closely they are related to other known canids. {1}

Now, where this gets really confusing is how the authors define a wolf. For the most part, we tend to think of just two species of wolves in North America: red wolves of the East, Canis rufus (and only in North Carolina now), and gray wolves of the West, Canis lupus. But, there is a point of contention over “eastern wolves.” Until recently, this wolf of southeastern Quebec was classified as a sub-species of gray wolf, termed Canis lupus lycaon. But recent DNA evidence points toward it actually not being a gray wolf at all… in fact, it falls out most closely related to Canis rufus. This may seem an esoteric point, but it is hugely important, so hold on to this thought. As such, several biologists have called for reclassifying both the red wolf and the eastern wolf as Canis lycaon. The jury is still out on this, as there are a lot of politics to consider with such a move, but just hold on to the fact that eastern wolves are not gray wolves, and are evolutionarily in a different species group.

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Mesopredators gone wild

Red fox, Vuples vulpes.

Are we headed toward a world full of foxes, skunks and raccoons — but empty of lions, tigers and bears? Maybe. It’s a fact that many of the planet’s large carnivores are in dire straits. Where I live in the eastern U.S., we no longer have cougars or eastern wolves, top predators that used to range across the East several hundred years ago. Cougars are now geographically restricted to just the southern tip of Florida, where about 100 Florida panthers live in marginal habitat. And eastern red wolves are now confined to a tiny speck of land in North Carolina, where about 100 live in a managed population. Both species are listed under the federal Endangered Species Act. In their absence, entire ecosytems have changed.

Ecologists have long struggled to quantify what happens to an ecosystem when the top predators are lost.

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Coywolf encounter in Connecticut?

Eastern coyote, possible coywof, seen in a backyard in Connecticut. © 2009 Janet DeMaio, published with permission

After writing a post about coywolf research, I received an email from a citizen in Connecticut whose daughter had spotted an animal in her yard that they suspected was different than a normal run-of-the-mill coyote. I asked her to write about her encounter, and told her I’d post her story on Wild Muse. The email said her animal encounter took place “about 40 miles from the MA border, in Wallingford, CT.”  Janet also included two photos, published here.

Here is Janet DeMaio’s story:

It was the morning of Nov. 6, 2009 and we were getting ready for work and school. We live in a home that has about 2 acres of land, the backyard faces a wooded area that leads to Mt. Biesek behind our house. Since we have lived here we have seen deer daily, coyotes, wild turkeys and even a copperhead now and then. However, on Nov. 6th it was 6:30 A.M. and as my daughters were getting ready to go to the bus stop my husband noticed an animal sitting in the backyard facing the woods.

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Mesopredators gone wild

Red fox, Vuples vulpes.

Are we headed toward a world full of foxes, skunks and raccoons — but empty of lions, tigers and bears? Maybe. It’s a fact that many of the planet’s large carnivores are in dire straits. Where I live in the eastern U.S., we no longer have cougars or eastern wolves, top predators that used to range across the East several hundred years ago. Cougars are now geographically restricted to just the southern tip of Florida, where about 100 Florida panthers live in marginal habitat. And eastern wolves are now confined to a tiny speck of land in North Carolina, where about 100 live in a managed population. Both species are listed under the federal Endangered Species Act. In their absence, entire ecosytems have changed.

Ecologists have long struggled to quantify what happens to an ecosystem when the top predators are lost.

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Evolution of a coywolf, and range expansion

Evolution of a coywolf. (animalpicturesarchive.com)

Lately, “coywolves” have been making headlines and raising eyebrows. They are a wild canid that is a hybrid between a coyote and a wolf. It may sound like an urban legend, but coywolves are real.* I first learned about this quirky common name via a news article from The Star in Canada, Meet the Coywolf (by reporter Carola Vyhnak), which does a surprisingly good job of detailing the coywolf and its increasing run-ins with humans on the eastern edge of greater Toronto. And now, a new study is out offering both a coarse-scale genetic analysis of this new hybrid species, and specific trends in their skull shape.

One thing I find so interesting about this phenomenon is the plasticity of the two species that they can interbreed so successfully. Why is this?

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