Cagney and the wolf’s cache
February 20, 2012
The snow has melted off the twenty acres to the north of the house on Young’s Hill. This afternoon our English springer spaniel Cagney discovered something buried in the grass around some young pines. She chewed, pulled up something meaty, and kept eating. Strange, that’s a large mouse if it has that many mouthfuls. She took another bite and retreated, so I prodded the newly-uncovered clump of grass and knocked out about a Mason jar-full of coarsely chopped beef. Must be a cache left by one of the bush wolves or coyotes who live on the property, buried in the snow and grass and now exposed. The meat looked fresh.
When looking from above I initially couldn’t see anything except the hole Cagney had made with her nose and paws, but there was quite a volume of food down there.
The neighbours must have drawn a dead cow out to the quarry. Erin and her mom have had a good winter if they’ve left this much food uneaten.
Canine encounters
October 3, 2010
September 10, 2010:
The young coyote visited the orchard at suppertime today, sampling the fruit of every tree, but returning to pick up fallen pears several times. I moved out on the elevated deck to try for a photo and to my surprise she co-operated, then began a game of peek-a-boo with me. She stepped behind a trunk. I moved for a better angle. She looked me in the eye and stepped behind another tree, but she kept picking up windfalls throughout the game. Coyotes really like apples, but the one I’ve named Erin seems fond of pears as well. She must have a sweet tooth.
I’ve watched Erin and her two siblings play tag and hide-and-seek quite often during the summer as they grew up in the field just below the orchard. They love to dodge around the bales of hay and climb on them.
The best episode of the summer had to be the day four turkeys decided to forage in their field. I looked out to see two adult turkeys flying and two half-grown chicks running behind, chased by a young coyote. The birds could easily outdistance their foe, but there were large windrows in the field and traffic became a bit confused. At one point the coyote got ahead of one of the young turkeys, but by the time the bizarre chase passed out of sight of my window, the bird was doing its best to catch up.
Only later did Dr. Bill Barrett explain to me that this family of coyotes have decided defend their field. “Near Forfar I had sea gulls all over the place when I was raking and baling, but the in next field the coyotes came out and wouldn’t let one land. The mice in the windrows were theirs, and they weren’t going to share them. When I moved up to the field above the barn they didn’t follow, but that big gray hawk kept me company all day.”
Construction on the garage is an ordeal for the coyotes. The nail guns must be too loud for their sensitive ears because they disappear until they are sure no more loud bangs will come from the human’s den.
October 2:
Coyotes certainly can adapt. After I devoutly claimed that the nail guns had scared the coyotes away, on Friday Erin resumed her afternoon visits to the orchard while I banged away on the roof of the garage. Bet watched her languidly select each apple, return to her temporary nest, lie down and chew it up with great enjoyment.
But today took the cake for coyote sightings. As I drove out the lane on the Ranger this morning I spotted two little heads peeking out of a bush in Laxton’s fence row, 400 feet to the north. The two heads were very close together, as though the pups had lain down shoulder-to-shoulder to enjoy the show. I shut off the UV to watch. One pair of ears tracked every sound. The other was so still I became convinced it was a bunch of leaves. Eventually the still creature stood up and walked away, leaving Mobile-ears to keep watch on the noisy human.
In the afternoon I was mowing the orchard when my peripheral vision picked up Erin, seated just out of the way, clearly impatient for me to leave so that she could have her afternoon meal. I explained to her that I needed to cut the grass and she retreated a bit, but returned.
“You want an apple? Here!” And I fired an empire I had picked off a passing tree at her. She fielded it like a shortstop and wolfed it down. Next apple, same thing. Erin seemed to like this game. Over the space of five laps of the orchard she snagged the five apples I threw her way, and also four mice she found in the grass. Then she disappeared.
This evening behind the garage I was explaining to Martin the habits of the coyote family when the large male raised his head from the foliage to the west of Laxton’s bush, yawned, and resumed his nap. He seems curious to identify new voices, but very calm in his demeanour. He looks and acts very much like a middle-aged German shepherd.
October 3:
This morning produced a canine encounter which proved much more frenetic than the coyote visits. Towards the end of her walk, Bet came around the end of the barn and spotted “two beige bullets blasting down the lane from the woods. One jumped up on me and then collapsed on the ground, wiggling in excitement.”
She rolled me out of bed to deal with the crisis. I nabbed the male, Georgy, and Bet located his sister, Gillie, who was raiding the cat’s food dish. Keen on a Ranger-ride, the west highland terriers nodded eagerly at the scenery as we drove up the hill to their home.
With a population of at least four coyotes in the neighbourhood, these little bait dogs (and four turkeys) seem to be able to share the territory without ill effects. The resident coyotes don’t behave at all like the pack of four furtive strangers I saw in the quarry last fall. They were scary, but didn’t stick around.
October 12:
My mother spent the afternoon in and around the orchard, so Erin’s schedule was off today. At suppertime I noticed a larger and furrier coyote in her usual haunts, but with Erin’s characteristic markings around the muzzle. Apparently she’s experimenting with her new body after the growth spurt, because windfall apples no longer appeal to her. Now she stands up on her hind legs to pick fresh apples off the trees, often settling down on her haunches to leap straight up to snap fruit from higher branches. She seems curious to see how high she can jump, an adolescent testing her limits.
Coyotes I Have Known
January 12, 2009
Margaret Brand’s “Coyote population still on the rise” in the January 8 edition of The Review-Mirror quotes Scott Smithers of the Ministry of Natural Resources: “People need to take the best measures to protect their property.” Unfortunately the second half of the article was lost in my edition of the paper, so I don’t know how it ends. I hope the conclusion will appear in the next issue as a correction, because a balanced approach to coyote management is very important.
My parents raised sheep on Young’s Hill for fifteen years and the only ewe they ever lost they blamed on Sally, the border collie. She had a temper. Mind you, Dad kept the sheep in the barn at night, and he was careful. During that time he shot two coyotes which looked as though they might cause trouble, but that was it.
All through my childhood my dad kept Walker foxhounds and hunted wolves and foxes for sport and furs. In later years, though, Mom admitted that he used to sneak out to watch the young foxes playing outside their den under the back barn.
A few years later I came under the spell of the resident bush wolf who owned our woodlot. She was a beautiful animal. While he reviled the old coyote near Elgin who was stealing his ducks, Dr. Bill Barrett became quite fond of the one on Young’s Hill while taking the hay off our fields. “The Coyote” seemed to enjoy the company of large machines, and would come out each day, take up a secure vantage point, and watch the show. Bill speculated, “She must have some dog in her, because she likes humans too much to be all coyote.”
She lived for six years in our woodlot, occasionally raised a pup as a single mother (strong evidence that she was a hybrid: coyotes raise their young as a couple), and defended her territory as well as she could against intruders. I watched from the back field one day as she dashed from one side of the barn to the other to peek at the strangers who had descended from a car at the house.
Logger Ken Carson and his assistant also became very fond of The Coyote as she kept their skidder company during his work in the woodlot in 2006. Then to their dismay, one night she died under their logging truck.
Always troubled by mange, she had lost a lot of hair off her right hip, and a January cold snap was too much. Her tracks led from a patch of thick cover across an open field and directly to the truck.
We missed her presence in the woodlot. During her life she eliminated groundhogs from the property and kept other rodents and deer honest, as well.
Since her passing we’ve had a series of critters try to fill her role. The most impressive was a large pup I first encountered one day when driving across a field on a lawn mower. Sound sleeper, that guy. I nearly drove over him before he abruptly sprang up in my path, staggered a few steps to one side, yawned mightily, then scuttled off to the woods and cover. When I eventually came upon his bed smack in the middle, I could see why he kept trying to return as I mowed: he had all his toys around the spot of matted grass he called his own. There was a large leg bone from a cow, a few other chunks of bone, and a plastic chew toy which could only have been purloined from some dog’s play area.
By fall he had grown huge. When our neighbour Paul Hargreaves saw him one day he exclaimed, “That’s no coyote, that’s a bush wolf. He’s plenty large enough to bring down a deer by himself. That’s why there are no deer on the property.”
Last winter while snowshoeing we came upon a large trench where he and his mate had obviously spent some time buried in a snowbank. Next circuit of the woods we saw two sets of fresh tracks heading east along the field, and that was the last we saw of him. This year in his absence a buck tore some of my prized butternut saplings limb for limb.
The current occupant of the post of top predator at the farm is definitely a coyote, and a particularly scraggly one, at that. I wrote at Thanksgiving about her antics in our orchard, so I won’t go into that here. I must emphasize, though, that I often follow her tracks around the property, and she seldom goes far without stopping to dig out a vole or two.
If there were more coyotes in the woodlot the situation would be very different, and Dad’s rifle would come off the rack. But I see only benefit in a single animal who shows restraint in her dealings with my mother’s cat and the humans on the property.
I hope nobody decides to eradicate the coyote population in the area. Well-established coyotes know the rules and contribute mightily to rodent control. Harmful individuals need to be identified and shot, but I heard a rumour last year of an underground bounty program sponsored by deer hunters, and that can’t be good.
the Walnut Diary 