Around midnight, while we lay sleeping, our coyote pack was out and about, checking and reviewing food sources for when the cold times come, and beside our house, next to the compost out front, set up such a rally. Of barks and howls and yips and whimpers and growls as I've never ever heard. A clear territorial rally. And somehow I woke hearing this and, driven by a primal response, raced out in bare feet and got within 50 feet of the ruckus and clapped my hands loudly as you would to disrupt wild teenagers, and yelled at them " Cut That Out!".
They immediately went silent, and I assume left, though it was a pitch black night.
I did see that my one neighbor across the way had their bedroom light on, and their backyard sensor light had been set off.
I fully woke up standing outside in nightgown, wondering what circumstance led to this new behavior.
Obviously, the compost, where they resort to feeding in the coldest times, was important, and their numbers are obviously far greater than in the past.
Since we moved here , I've been observing their tracks here and far down into the outwaters, identifying them by size and gait as I examine the snow.
We have a large male with a hinky right hip, who takes enormous gleeful leaps. When they are well fed, they play around as yet travel about liking fir food. When times are tough, they are careful about how they use their energy. We have a smaller solid female, reddish, who we saw one early Summer morning, not too far from the house, waiting patiently while their pup, almost their size and a beautiful silver-grey, played and hunted in the grasses of the conservation fields.
From the tracks, they usually have one surviving pup , at times two, often with a yearling remaining in the pack.
The past few years the one surviving pup , will sometimes , when approaching a year old in February, be struggling for food, and come by the compost more often than the others.
Some years it will snow in mid afternoon, and I'll go out to the car, and see that three have just casually passed through the yard between our house and our rental cottage.
In late fall if there's an early snow, you'll see that they came right up to the house in the night, looking in the earth-level kitchen windows, scenting out our cats.
Often, a pup will leave feces outside the back door, a territorial challenge to our dogs.
In fall they return from their summer camps, where food was plentiful and humans scarce, whee they safely raised their young.
But come fall , in they come to their traditional territories, which have always been here, long before the human.
Yet now, with human encroachment, with humans killing off their only predator, the wolf, with coyote moving across the US and readily mating with wolf as they come, they are now larger, have changed to have alpha female and male heading a pack, as wolf do, and as we people eat up the land, they adapt to a less natural diet, and thus each pack needs increasingly larger territories.
The lone coyote, yearlings or older weaker, either become adopted by new packs, or live their lives solitary, edging along between territories, which are often bridged by roads or streams, thus cars become their biggest predator.
As humans take more of the land, our larger New England Coyote adapt not only greater size from wolf genes, but other behaviors, like larger packs, pack organizational dominance structures, and now , add to that, pack hunts, taking down large dogs and deer. This is a new wolf-like behavior afforded by grater size and pack cohesiveness , and will become a more predominant behavior in response to human impact.
"The coyote is a very vocal animal with a varied repertoire of calls. It uses a long howl to report its location, short barks to warn of danger, yips when reuniting with pack members, growls when establishing dominance, whines and whimpers when bonding, and high-pitched barks to summon pups."
I have been watching our weather patterns and changes over the past few years, where we no longer have the freezing rains of spring, which usually limited populations of all sorts of wildlife.
Our winters have had bitterly cold spells , but have not been ,overall, terribly difficult.
We have a climate the last few years of great number of wildlife surviving. Birds, coyote, deer.
This results in fewer small rodents for raptors of all sorts- owl and hawk, and fewer for weasel, marten, raccoon, possum, and fox. The biggest predator of all of those is coyote.
It was an odd feeling, akin to protecting your newborn from anything, or your beloved from cops , that rose up in me and propelled me outside to declare this my territory right here, not theirs. I had this visceral feeling of my bond with them, my acceptance and even protectiveness, but not tolerance of their declared dominance.
And though I am a Naturalist born and bred, aligned with all living things, still it seems I have my own territorial instincts.
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