Coyotes on the move
Observations reinforce notion wolves are here
By DENNIS APRILL,
Outdoors ColumnistThe coyotes are on the move now, traveling about in pairs as the mating season is in full swing. I see their signs — tracks and lemon-colored spots in the snow — throughout my woodlot as they mark off their territory.
At this time of the year, eastern coyotes are very territorial and don’t like intrusions from other canines, such as fox, dogs or other coyotes. This territorial behavior mirrors the eastern coyotes’ close relative — the red wolf — and it seems that, with each passing month, new research sheds even more light on the relationship between these two canine predators.
Last year, I reported the findings of a group of Canadian geneticists from the University of Trent in Peterborough, Ont., that linked the very endangered red wolf to the Algonquin or eastern Canadian wolf. Both are the only wolves that breed with coyotes.
In fact, at a major wolf conference at the Balsams Resort outside of Colebrook, N. H. , last October, Buddy Fazio, the U. S. Fish and Wildlife Service’s Red Wolf Recovery Project Team leader in charge of the red wolf reintroduction effort in North Carolina’s Alligator River Wildlife Refuge, told me he had serious concerns about coyotes disrupting the project.
In that 152, 000-acre refuge, 100 red wolves were reintroduced in the 1980s. The refuge was chosen because there were no coyotes there at the time of the reintroduction.
Since then, the ever-resourceful coyotes have expanded their range to the periphery of the refuge and are interbreeding with the red wolves there. As a result, the FWS has a three-year plan that includes removing hybrids and sterilizing coyotes that roam near the wolves.
The agency found that just removing the coyotes did no good because new coyotes came in and established home ranges. With the sterilized coyotes maintaining their home range, FWS hopes some pure red wolves will remain in the refuge and not create more hybrids.
To the north, in southern Ontario and Quebec, the almost identical eastern Canadian wolf, not an endangered species, interbreeds with coyotes, and our larger eastern coyotes have been found to be hybrids with varying amounts of wolf DNA and corresponding wolf-like characteristics.
While all this is unfolding, there is yet another study due out this spring that questions a lot of the research done by the Canadian geneticists.
Recently retired FWS biologist Ron Nowak, considered a red-wolf expert, is expected to pan the Canadian study because too limited a sample was used, so he considers it scientifically unreliable. Nowak believes the wolf and coyote lines separated from a common ancestor a couple of million years ago, the wolves further dividing, with one line crossing to Asia and evolving into the large gray wolf, the other remaining in North America and becoming the red wolf, a smaller animal. The coyote also evolved in North America, which is why these two canids may interbreed.
The gray wolf, which, according to Nowak’s theory, returned to North America 10-20, 000 years ago, though biologically capable of breeding with coyotes, has never been recorded as doing so in the wild.
To add to the mix, WPTZ (News Channel 5)recently showed a picture of a wolflike animal weighing in at 64 pounds that was caught by a trapper in Quebec’s eastern townships near the Maine border. From what I saw, this animal, with its size, narrow snout and reddishtinged fur, looks like the eastern Canadian (red)wolves I have seen pictured from southern Quebec.
If it is, and genetic testing is under way to find out its identity, that wolf would be one of the very few that have crossed the St. Lawrence to Quebec’s south shore in the last century. And if it was a lone wolf, and had it survived, it would have eventually mated with a coyote, the offspring of that union just adding to the canine genetic mix that exists in the northeast.
On Thursday, I received a copy of a Hamilton County News article that describes an 85-pound coyotelike animal shot near Edinburg in the southern Adirondacks. The animal measured 66 inches long.
Most eastern coyotes weigh in at 30-40 pounds. DNA tests are being done on that animal, but, even if they show it to be a wolf, there are a number of possible explanations as to how it got there.
New Year’s Day 2001, for example, a person in Schuyler Falls who had shot a wolf near his dog pen called me. The animal was wolf size and may have been a wolf, but later investigation found the animal had belonged to a person in the neighborhood who let it run at night.
Now, when I check my photo hunter, set out for coyotes, I first look to see the size of the tracks left; then, when the picture is developed, I look at fur color and the creature’s size, the latter by comparing the coyote to nearby objects.
There have been times when I combine these observations of a large coyote, its territorial behavior in February and its pack-like structure when going after deer in March, and they reinforce my belief that we already have our own version of a wolf roaming around here: in Canada, another name for the eastern coyote is the brush wolf!