Wolf, mountain lion sightings, claims continue
By DENNIS APRILL, Outdoors Columnist
It wasn’t the sound of a partridge drumming off in the distance or the woodpecker pounding some nearby tree while I walked on my woodlot last Wednesday that made me think of some of the strange things that have been reported to me recently.
It was the still unanswered questions.
First, there was a dairy farmer who called and said he thought he had two wolves near his barn. A heifer had died earlier, and couldn’t be buried because of the frozen ground, so it was moved behind a barn. The wolf-like animals immediately began feasting on it.
In late January, Emily Brown, who lives in West Plattsburgh, saw an animal she thought was a wolf behind her house.
She describes it this way: "The animal looked to be the height of an adult German shepherd dog, tan in color with a buff underbelly. The nose was long and narrow and black."
A second one, almost identical to the first, followed it into the yard.
From the photo she sent me, it looks to me like a coyote, especially with the black tip on its tail and very pointy snout. But, it does appear to have very long legs for a coyote.
That’s the problem with identifying our coyotes, actually hybrids with red wolves. Some are very big and wolf-like with large feet; others resemble smaller Western coyotes.
One-thing researchers do know is that the so-called coy-dog exists only in speech and in the mind, and not in the wild anymore. If there were wild coyotes with a good percentage of dog genes, they would breed at almost any time of the year, their young being born in times of short food supply. Whatever dog genes the coyotes once had when they first colonized northern New York in the 1930’s are now repressed or mostly bred out over time.
The name coy-dog will, however, stay with the eastern coyote for a long time.
After thinking I had the wolf sightings worked out, or at least Emily Brown’s "wolf," I got a call two weeks ago from a person who had just seen a mountain lion in the Altona area.
This sighting was not far from where I had received similar reports of lions earlier in the Chazy-Sciota area. This cat crossed in front of his car and was, the caller said, about 80 or 90 pounds, well within the average for a female mountain lion. From all I could gather, it was a very credible sighting.
This may turn out to be an ongoing story, or, at the very least, make for some interesting articles yet to come.