Owls Aren't Wise and Bats Aren't Blind (32 page)

There is one other aspect of red fox behavior—vocalization—that’s worthy of discussion. Red foxes are credited with numerous different cries, calls, and sounds. Although they don’t howl, and aren’t as vocal as their larger relatives the coyotes and wolves, foxes are by no means silent. For instance, they have a high, shrill alarm bark that is often used to warn the kits of danger once they’re old enough to leave the den.

Our own family has experienced only, at least to the best of our knowledge, one fox vocalization, and we learned about it in a most unusual way. For years my wife and I would be awakened at times by a strange, high-pitched sound. At a distance, it sounded almost like a deer snorting, although less breathy and more vocal. As it drew nearer, it sounded more vocal still; it’s a difficult sound to describe, but is a sort of high-pitched
nyaaaaa, nyaaaaa.
We puzzled over this cry many times over the years, wondering what creature could possibly be making it.

Our black Labrador, Nate, gave every indication that he regarded foxes as little dogs that he’d dearly love to play with. Whenever we saw a fox out the window and summoned Nate, he’d wag his tail gently and whine longingly, then run back and forth between window and door, hoping to be let out— precisely the behavior that he exhibited when he saw another dog. Having had no direct experience with foxes, it never dawned on him that the “little dog” might not desire his companionship.

One day, accompanied by Nate, we were returning to the barn with a pickup load of baled hay from our lower field. There were a couple of electric fence gates that had to be opened first, and as we rounded a corner to open them, we suddenly heard that familiar and mysterious
nyaaaaa,
nyaaaaa.
Looking up, we saw a gorgeous fox sitting in the middle of the farm road, perhaps forty yards away. Even as we spied the fox, we saw its mouth open and heard the unmistakable
nyaaaaa.

I looked down at Nate. His eyes bulged, and he seemed momentarily paralyzed. Here was his longed-for playmate, just waiting for him. The moment beckoned. Shaking off his momentary astonishment, Nate raced toward the fox, which calmly sat there and uttered another
nyaaaaa.
Then, when Nate was about twenty feet away, the fox leaped up, turned on its afterburners, and departed in a flash of bright color, Nate in hot pursuit. The result was fore-ordained: Nate was fast, but he was no match for the speedy, buoyant fox. Some minutes passed before a crestfallen Nate, puffing like a steam locomotive, reappeared, the desire for the chase wrung out of him by all-out exertion and blighted affection.

This isn’t the end of the story, however. That same night, and for several nights thereafter, the fox came onto our lawn just a few feet from our bedroom window and proceeded to say
nyaaaaa, nyaaaaa
a number of times before going about its business. This had never happened before and never happened again. Our conclusion was inescapable: with its keen sense of smell, the fox knew exactly who had chased him and where he lived, and he was taunting poor Nate, whom he clearly regarded as no threat at all!

Fox kits are vulnerable to a number of predators, such as hawks and owls. Adults, however, have few enemies other than man—and human predation is at a rather low level. The most serious obstacle faced by the red fox may be the spread of the coyote throughout the United States and much of Canada. Coyotes don’t like foxes and will kill them whenever they can, although most of their predation is on fox kits. The number of foxes killed by coyotes is relatively small, though; the major damage is done by coyotes usurping what was formerly red fox territory and driving the foxes out.

Various studies have confirmed that coyotes guard their territory against foxes and force them out. This by no means forecasts the elimination of the fox, because the foxes manage to find territories in the interstices between coyote territories. Rather, it signifies a shift in the balance of predators, with the foxes replaced to some degree by coyotes.

Despite the pressure from coyotes, the red fox is adaptable enough to continue thriving in many areas. In some instances they’ve moved closer to human dwellings; apparently they’ve learned that in general the wary coyotes, despite exceptions in some heavily settled areas, are less apt to locate their territories in proximity to human activities. Since it has relatively few enemies and considerable adaptability, we can look forward to seeing this especially lovely and thoroughly atypical member of the dog tribe.

Coyote

17

Wile E. Indeed: The Coyote

MYTHS

The eastern coyote is nearly as large as a wolf.

Those animals out there are coydogs.

Coyotes mainly hunt in packs.

MOST AMERICANS ARE FAMILIAR WITH ROADRUNNER CARTOONS IN WHICH THE HUNGRY COYOTE, WILE E. COYOTE BY NAME, IS FOREVER STYMIED BY THE CLEVER ROADRUNNER, AN ADVERSARY THAT IT SEEKS TO CONVERT TO THE COYOTE VERSION OF KENTUCKY FRIED CHICKEN. At every turn, the hapless coyote is battered, beaten, and outwitted, going hungry despite his best efforts.

The reality is quite the opposite, for the coyote
(Canis latrans)
is Wile E. indeed! It’s a survivor
par excellence,
able to overcome all efforts to eliminate it and to thrive where most other animals could barely exist. This clever, wary, versatile predator, once regarded as primarily a creature of the West, has not only survived all attempts to exterminate it, but has blithely expanded its range all the way to the East Coast in recent years.

The coyote’s name, incidentally, comes to us through Spanish from the Nahuatl word
coyotl.
(Nahuatl was the language of the Aztecs and certain other Indian groups.) Westerners usually pronounce its name
kai o ti,
while Easterners mostly opt for
kai ote.

Coyotes are nearly as controversial as wolves, able to polarize opinions as few other creatures can. It’s the feeding habits of coyotes that make them so controversial, bringing a deluge of both opprobrium and encomium upon their furry pates.

To many sheep growers and some human hunters, they’re the devil incarnate, wanton, depraved killers, the destroyers of valuable sheep, small game, and deer. To others they’re God’s Dog (a term originally coined by Native Americans), a nearly sainted creature that kills only the old, the weak, and the sick, thereby maintaining the genetic health of the prey species. As a result, attitudes toward the coyote range from those wanting to kill none of the coyotes all of the time, through those wanting to kill some of the coyotes some of the time, to those wanting to kill all of the coyotes all of the time— preferably with tactical nuclear weapons!

Either extreme misses the point: coyotes are remarkably resilient and adaptable predators that may be viewed as either good or bad, depending on the situation. For example, coyote predation on sheep is no laughing matter. Coyotes devour as many as a quarter of a million lambs and sheep annually, thereby costing the sheep growers many millions of dollars. Some ranchers say that they lose up to a quarter of all their lambs to coyotes, and that coyote predation can put them out of business when prices of wool and meat are low.

Then there’s the eastern coyote to consider—the newcomer on the block, so to speak. One of the most visible signs of the coyote’s remarkable resiliency and adaptability has been its steady march eastward. Over the past few decades it has spread from its historic bastion in the West all the way to the Atlantic Coast. As a recognized subspecies, it has now become well established and common throughout most of the eastern United States and parts of eastern Canada.

The most noteworthy difference between the coyote of the West and its eastern brethren is size. Although the difference between the two isn’t huge—on the order of about ten pounds—it’s significant. The eastern subspecies of the coyote is unquestionably bigger and stronger than the various coyote subspecies in the West. (There have been nineteen subspecies listed in North America, although these fine subdivisions are apt to be in a state of flux.) According to most scientists, this size increase is due to the fact that the western coyote, during its eastward migration, picked up wolf genes by interbreeding with a small subspecies of the wolf in Canada.

Despite this very real difference in size, it’s easy to exaggerate it. Consequently, eastern coyotes are often popularly regarded as “nearly as big as a wolf,” though they’re in fact nowhere near that large. True, occasional outsize specimens are found that are about as large as a small wolf. The Maine record is sixty-eight pounds, and an animal believed to be a coyote, weighing seventy-three pounds, was killed in Vermont. This specimen, however, has yet to be confirmed as a coyote by DNA analysis. In any event, very few specimens exceed fifty pounds, and most adult eastern coyotes fall into the thirty-to-forty-pound range.

Coyotes in the East are widely referred to as “coydogs,” a misnomer grounded in a smidgen of truth. As coyotes slowly worked their way eastward, state by state, the coyote pioneers in many areas were few and widely scattered. Under those conditions, they sometimes had great difficulty in finding a mate, and eventually mated with a domestic dog. Thus there actually were a few coydogs as the leading edge of the coyote immigration made its way eastward. Coyotes much prefer to mate with other coyotes when given the opportunity, however, and as coyote populations increased, coyote/dog crosses virtually vanished.

Moreover, although the pups from a coyote/dog cross are technically fertile, they might as well not be, for all practical purposes. The coyote/dog cross results in a shift in the time of breeding, so that the coydog hybrids have their young in winter rather than spring. Coupled with this, the male coydog, unlike the male coyote, takes no part in raising the pups. This “double whammy” virtually guarantees that coydog offspring won’t survive. The animals that inhabit the East are not coydogs, but are most emphatically eastern coyotes, a true-breeding subspecies of the coyote.

Eastern coyotes are also extremely controversial. For one thing, they too attack sheep, although sheep raising is far less prevalent in the East than in the West. Moreover, under some circumstances eastern coyotes can be significant predators of white-tailed deer, North America’s premier big game animal. For a long time, most wildlife biologists believed that coyote predation on deer was generally limited to the spring fawn drop, and that evidence of deer in coyote scats at other times of the year was largely due to feeding on deer carrion. Lately, however, research by Maine wildlife biologist Gerald Lavigne has altered that opinion substantially.

Given two conditions—very deep snow and inadequate mature softwood cover in deer wintering areas—Lavigne found that coyote predation on deer can be very substantial. Still more interesting and significant, he discovered that coyotes under those conditions readily killed healthy deer in their prime—not merely the weak, sick, and old, as had previously been believed. Once a deer is floundering in deep snow, it apparently doesn’t matter much whether it’s healthy or infirm; in either case, coyotes can soon exhaust the deer and bring it down.

Although coyotes under these conditions can reduce the number of deer available to humans in limited areas, there’s no evidence that they’re decimating deer populations on a wide scale in the East, as often charged. Indeed, the number of deer taken by human hunters in eastern states has risen substantially—and sometimes dramatically—during the very years when coyote populations were also growing and expanding. In many areas where coyotes are abundant, state wildlife agencies have steadily liberalized hunting regulations in order to hold deer numbers within biologically sustainable limits. Although the eastern coyote unquestionably preys on deer, it’s evident that it isn’t a limiting factor in whitetail numbers except under rather drastic winter conditions.

Undeniably, coyotes can and do cause major problems and substantial economic loss in several ways, but the equation is more complicated than that. Coyotes are great opportunists with catholic tastes. Their primary food sources aren’t such things as sheep and deer. Rather, they feed heavily on mice, voles, ground squirrels, woodchucks, rabbits, carrion, frogs, snakes, lizards, house cats, small domestic dogs, garbage, large insects, seeds, berries, fruits, and other plant materials—in short, on almost every kind of food that’s edible. Their penchant for eating fruit, incidentally, is also making the coyote
animal non grata:
in some areas where watermelons are grown commercially, coyotes have developed such an affinity for the juicy melons that growers are beginning to shoot them.

The difficulty is that it’s relatively easy to quantify coyote damage to sheep, deer, and other creatures valued by humans, but extremely difficult to assess the value of coyote control of mice, voles, rats, woodchucks, and other creatures that also cause a variety of damage. Unquestionably, coyotes do a great deal of good in this regard, but that’s small consolation to someone suffering serious coyote depredation on his or her flock of sheep.

This leads to the thorny and contentious issue of coyote control. Millions upon millions of dollars have been invested in coyote control programs, especially in the West. Coyotes are assailed in a variety of ways: by a division of the U.S. Department of Agriculture, by various state agencies, by coyote hunting contests, and by the efforts of individual ranchers. In fact, it’s estimated that approximately 400,000 coyotes are killed each year by a variety of methods.

While the biggest coyote control programs are found in the West, the East has by no means been totally lacking in such efforts. As coyotes became well established in the East, there were loud cries to “do something” about this new menace. “Doing something” was usually vague, but often took the form of calls for bounties and other incentives to kill as many coyotes as possible. This attitude of “let’s kill every one of the bastards” ignored mountains of evidence that such incentives were useless, and all too frequently led to expensive and ineffective efforts to control coyotes.

How effective have coyote control programs been, especially in the West? While they’ve temporarily reduced coyote populations in some localized areas, they’ve had little long-term effect on coyote populations. Indeed, there are those who argue that the control efforts have actually increased coyote populations because they’ve stimulated coyote reproduction. Ranchers counter that the control programs have either reduced coyote numbers in local areas or, at the very least, have prevented greater coyote numbers from causing even higher losses of sheep.

Before further exploration of the knotty problem of coyote control, let’s examine the reasons for this animal’s remarkable resilience. Why have coyotes been able to survive—and even increase their range and numbers—in the face of the most expensive and intensive animal control efforts in North America? The answer lies in three things: wariness, adaptability, and reproductive response.

Coyotes are known for their extreme wariness. One successful coyote trapper, for example, terms them the most difficult of all species to trap, even more so than the notoriously wary red fox. Likewise, coyote hunters can attest to the extreme cautiousness of the species. Although it’s possible to hunt and trap them successfully, it’s no easy matter.

Coyotes have also shown exceptional ability to adapt to new and changing habitats far different from their traditional ones. Once largely denizens of the prairies and deserts, they now inhabit densely forested areas, suburbs, and even parts of our largest cities, such as Los Angeles and New York!