Coyote Sighting

[OBIO]

On the way back from Walmart a little bit ago, my wife and I saw a Coyote cross the road ahead of us, then trot along the side of the road. I know some of you folks see Coyotes on a regular basis, but this is the first time we had seen one.....we have known that they are in Northern Ohio, but just hadn't seen one. It was a very striking dog...well fleshed, full coat, and a gait that was grace and poise in pure form.

Will give the neighbors a warning to be careful with their small pets when they are outside...well, maybe not the gal at the top of the hill...a Coyote eating her dang cats that keep tearing into our trash bags and eating the song birds would not be a bad thing....I have nothing against cats per se, but would rather see these two removed from the land of the living.

OBIO

[Lionheart]

We have alot of Coyotes here.. When at Range Rovers' secret base here, we had a visiting British engineer see one and he loved it. They call them 'desert foxes'. Never thought of them as that.

I would ride my bike to work now and then (bicycle) and one night, in the dark, quietly, there was one trotting along side me as I was riding home, lol..

Another time, doing midnight test work in the desert, waiting in the dark for a vehicle to come back, I found that a coyote had been standing about 4 feet from me. Never heard that dang dude... lol..


Crazy little guys.


Bill

[OBIO]

I know that Coyotes are a big problem in some places, and yes, the natural balance of predator and prey has been totally turned on its ear by us "superior" creatures....but I liked seeing the Coyote tonight. He was a very beautiful specimen of dog....if he were a pet, one would say that he was well taken care of....let's put it that way.

I had a bike and dog story some many years back. One foggy Saturday morning, I was riding my new 12-speed bike to my best friend's house to spend the day in the woods goofing off. About two miles from his house, just before the long steep uphill part, there was a nice long level part. I was cruising along, enjoying the sound of quiet (other than my labored breathing after cranking pedals for 5 miles at a good clip)..when suddenly this huge huge black shape jumped out of the ditch and barked a bark that sounded like one of the trumpets of the Appacolypse. Scare me so bad, I ended up missing a pedal stoke, getting my pant leg caught in the chain, trying to stop to keep from wreching and grabbing the front brake instead of the rear...went head first over the handle bars and landed with a solid thud in the road.

Luckily, I was not hurt badly...some really deep bruises and some road rash. And luckily the big black shape with the bark of doom was not a werewolf or Bigfoot...but the Brown family's super friendly and super goofy Great Dane.

OBIO

[dominique]

The coyote is a long, slim, sick and sorry-looking skeleton, with a gray wolfskin stretched over it, a tolerably bushy tail that forever sags down with a despairing expression of forsakenness and misery, a furtive and evil eye, and a long, sharp face, with slightly lifted lip and exposed teeth. He has a general slinking expression all over. The coyote is a living, breathing allegory of Want. He is always hungry. He is always poor, out of luck, and friendless. The meanest creatures despise him, and even the fleas would desert him for a velocipede. He is so spirtless and cowardly that even while his exposed teeth are pretending a threat, the rest of his face is apologizing for it. And he is so homely! -so scrawny, and ribby, and coarse-haired, and pitiful.

When he sees you he lifts his lip and lets a flash of his teeth out, and then turns a little out of the course he was pursuing, depressses his head a bit, and strikes a long, soft-footed trot through the sagebrush, glancing over his shoulder at you, from time to time, till he is about out of easy pistol range, and then he stops and takes a deliberate survey of you; he will trot fifty yards and stop again- another fifty and stop again; and finally the gray of his gliding body blends with the gray of the sagebrush, and he disappears. All this is when you make no demonstration against him; but if you do, he develops a livelier interest in his journey, and instantly electrifies his heels and puts such a deal of real estate between himself and your weapon that by the time you have raised the hammer you see that you need a Minie rifle, and by the time you have got him in line you need a rifled cannon, and by the time you have "drawn a bead" on him you see well enough that nothing but an unusually long-winded streak of lightning could reach him where he is now.

But if you start a swift-footed dog after him, you will enjoy it ever so much- especially if it is a dog that has a good opinion of himself, and has been brought up to think he knows something about speed. The coyote will go swinging gently off on that deceitful trot of his, and every little while he will smile a fraudful smile over his shoulder that will fill that dog entirely full of encouragement and worldly ambition, and make him lay his head still lower to the ground, and stretch his neck further to the front, and pant more fiercely, and stick his tail out straighter behind, and move his furious legs with a yet wilder frenzy, and leave a broader and broader, and higher and denser cloud of desert sand smoking behind him, and marking his long wake across the level plain!

And all this time the dog is only a short twenty feet behind the coyote, and to save the soul of him he cannot understand why it is that he cannot get perceptibly closer; and he begins to get aggravated, and it makes him madder and madder to see how gently the coyote glides along and never pants or sweats or ceases to smile; and he grows still more and more incensed to see how shamefully he has been taken in by an entire stranger, and what an ignoble swindle that long, calm, soft-footed trot is; and next he notices that he is getting fagged, and that the coyote actually has to slacken speed a little to keep from running away from him- and then that town dog is mad in earnest, and he begins to strain and weep and swear, and paw the sand higher than ever, and reach for the coyote with concentrated and desperate energy. This "spurt" finds him six feet behind the gliding enemy, and two miles from his friends. And then, in the instant that a wild new hope is lighting up his face, the coyote turns and smiles blandly upon him once more, and with a something about it which seems to say: "Well, I shall have to tear myself away from you, bub- business is business, and it will not do for me to be fooling along this way all day"- and forthwith there is a rushing sound, and the sudden splitting of a long crack through the atmosphere, and behold that dog is solitary and alone in the midst of a vast solitude!

It makes his head swim. He stops, and looks all around; climbs the nearest sand mound, and gazes into the distance; shakes his head reflectively, and then, without a word, he turns and jogs along back to his train, and takes up a humble position under the hindmost wagon, and feels unspeakably mean, and looks ashamed, and hangs his tail at half-mast for a week. And for as much as a year after that, whenever there is a great hue and cry after a coyote, that dog will merely glance in that direction without emotion, and apparently observe to himself, "I believe I do not wish any of that pie."

The coyote lives chiefly in the most desolate and forbidding deserts, along with the lizard, the jackass rabbit, and the raven, and gets an uncertain and precarious living, and earns it. He seems to subsist almost wholly on the carcassses of oxen, mules, and horses that have dropped out of emigrant trains and died, and upon windfalls of carrion, and occasional legacies of offal bequeathed to him by white men who have been opulent enough to have something better to butcher than condemned Army bacon.... He does not mind going a hundred miles to breakfast, and a hundred and fifty to dinner, because he is sure to have three or four days between meals, and he can just as well be traveling and looking at the scenery as lying around doing nothing and adding to the burdens of his parents.

We soon learned to recognize the sharp, vicious bark of the coyote as it came across the murky plain at night to disturb our dreams among the mail sacks; and remembering his forlorn aspect and his hard fortune, made shift to wish him the blessed novelty of a long day's good luck and a limitless larder the morrow.



Mark Twain

[Ferry_vO]

No coyotes here (Only foxes) but we do have an overpopulation of wild boars here. My house is located on the edge of a forest, and when I had to go to work early a few weeks ago, I encountered a few of those.. I walked from my apartment buiding to my car and when I was close to my car one of the lights on the parking lot turned on, and less than ten meters away I saw three boars staring at me! My car was a lot closer than the front door was, so I kept walking towards my car (And the pigs!). Fortunately this scared them away from me. They moved faster than I ever thought was possible. No way I would have gotten inside my car before they would have reached me if they wanted to..

[cheezyflier]

of all places, there is one i see regularly right here in toronto.
if someone told me beforehand, i would have thought them a liar. the first time i saw it, i actually wasn't sure of it myself.

[Cazzie]

No coyotes here (Only foxes) but we do have an overpopulation of wild boars here. My house is located on the edge of a forest, and when I had to go to work early a few weeks ago, I encountered a few of those.. I walked from my apartment buiding to my car and when I was close to my car one of the lights on the parking lot turned on, and less than ten meters away I saw three boars staring at me! My car was a lot closer than the front door was, so I kept walking towards my car (And the pigs!). Fortunately this scared them away from me. They moved faster than I ever thought was possible. No way I would have gotten inside my car before they would have reached me if they wanted to..


Then the Dutch need to do some killing.

Ferry, I don't backpack as much as I used to, but I always carried an AR-15 survivor rifle with me. Why? Wild boars. They are most dangerous animals, especially a mother sow with a litter. They can tear you asunder too. Wild boars are to be dealt with only one way, kill them. Ditto coyotes in a residential area. But I have nothing against a coyote in his habitat, he is a rather harmless, forlorn creature.

But I do not like wild boars and they are dangerous.

Caz

[Moparmike]

Yup, the coyote is an extremely adaptable little dog and it hasn't phased them much at all to co-habitate with humans even in an urban environment. An equal-opportunity predator, they don't care if they're feeding on the neighborhood kitties or rural cottontails. :)

When my then-girlfriend was out in LA for a couple years we didn't have to go too far to the outlying areas to spot coyotes.

Out here on the prairie, we've got quite a few of em and it's common to notice their presence. And yes, I do hunt them out here...both with the camera and the rifle. :)

[brad kaste]

...Maybe there's someway of getting the wild pigs and coyotes together for a donnybrook of sorts. Pen them all in,.....and let the final survivor be the winner,...........

[Cazzie]

...Maybe there's someway of getting the wild pigs and coyotes together for a donnybrook of sorts. Pen them all in,.....and let the final survivor be the winner,...........

Coyote wouldn't stand a chance in a pit fight Brad, a wild boar is one of the most dangerous animals pound for pound of any on earth.

Caz

[Ferry_vO]

Then the Dutch need to do some killing.


They are doing so, Cazzie.
The population in this area should be around 800, but has gone up to over 3,000 over the last few years. They are invading urban areas and some roads round here are just outright dangerous to drive on during the night.

[Panther_99FS]

We have alot of Coyotes here..

Crazy little guys.


Bill

Yeppers Bill
When I was stationed in Az, we had so many on base, they were like dogs running around...:icon_lol:

[brad kaste]

They are doing so, Cazzie.
The population in this area should be around 800, but has gone up to over 3,000 over the last few years. They are invading urban areas and some roads round here are just outright dangerous to drive on during the night.

Ferry,.....maybe the Dutch citizens can/should organize themselves like it was done in colonial India by the British. That is,...organize a 'pig-sticking' hunt using long poles. On foot or by horseback would be fine. Afterwords, everyone would sit down to a fine tasting meal of BBQ pork as the main entree.

[ian elliot]

While on holiday in San Francisco last year, i hired a mountain bike from one of the many outlets on Fishermans warf and took off towards the hills south of the Golden Gate Bridge, the park authorities had put up many warning signs about Coyotes which suprised me as, being a Brit and not knowing much about US wildlife, i only associated them with wilderness areas,
Not sure what would be more dangerous to meet, Coyote or boer,
but over here in the UK, there are conservation groups that are trying to re-introduce wild Boer into the UK countryside, not just into the wild areas of Scotland ect but in the south east counties around London, seeing how things are in Ferrys part of the world, im not sure thats such a great idea.
cheers ian

[Moparmike]

For the most part, a coyote will give people a wide berth...unless you've got it cornered or it has pups around. Pretty hard to get one cornered unless you're working real hard at it too. They're a lot smarter than than people when it comes to "wilderness smarts" or survival skills and they do a good job of staying out of harms way. They do have the same mix of wariness and curiosity that most domestic dogs have about strange objects (I.E. people) so yeah they'll come up and check you out but they'll have their escape route handy too if they're checking out something strange to them.

Funny and true story...
A kid I went to college with was an avid outdoors person and he did the same overnight camping/hunting trips that I enjoy. He woke up one morning and found that there was a coyote sitting about 50 feet away from him just watching and trying to figure out what the heck this kid was doing sleeping out in "his" turf. Jeff did have a camera handy but the coyote was making a pretty good retreat by the time Jeff dug his way out of the sleeping bag and grabbed the camera. He got a pretty blurry picture of the dog beating a hasty retreat. The coyote had actually bedded down from him about 100feet away for part of the night.

Now as far as having wild boar in the area...knowing domestic pigs, I'd be a lot more cautious about wanting to encounter a wild piggy. They can get downright grumpy if you're on their turf.

[OBIO]

I have not seen a wild boar...but have seen the scars they can leave on someone unlucky enough to encounter one of them in the wrong mood. I have been face to face with a Black Bear (luckily he was as afraid of me as I was afraid of him...we stood about 10 feet from one another, looking at each other...for what seemed like an hour...most likely a handful of seconds...then he gave out of horump sound and went on his merry way down the hill). If I had to choose which critter I would rather have to go hand to hand with..wild boar or black bear...I'd take the bear any day of the week. I have seen what domestic hogs can do to a person, have seen how quickly a domestic boar can tear a large dog to shreds....would not want to imagine trying to fend off a wild boar in full ownership of its tusks.

OBIO

[Ferry_vO]

Thanks OBIO, that will ease my mind a little next time I see one walking around here... Not! ;)

Last summer I saw a group searching for food right next to the road near my house. I stopped my car right next to a big male and he could care less! Hardly even looked at me. Too bad my camera was in the trunk and I didn't want to get out to get it..lol.

[MCDesigns]

Ditto coyotes in a residential area. But I have nothing against a coyote in his habitat, he is a rather harmless, forlorn creature.

And that there is the problem, we invade their habitat. The more people that keep populating the earth, the smaller the habitat for wild animals becomes.

I have seen a couple of coyotes here a few times, kinda odd seeing them running across a city street in the early morning.

When I lived in Austin, I managed a restaurant on the lake in Westlake Hills and actually saw a Mountain lion a couple of times. Had mixed feelings because he was such a beautiful creature and I knew some idiot would try to end his life, but then I thought about the possibility of him killing a human that got to close, catch 22 either way.

As I understand it, the wild boars in Europe are much more aggressive/larger than the ones here. I remember seeing a painting when I was small of a wild boar hunt in Europe and the vision of the large as a car wild boar and the numerous dogs climbing on it stuck with me.

[Ferry_vO]

As I understand it, the wild boars in Europe are much more aggressive/larger than the ones here. I remember seeing a painting when I was small of a wild boar hunt in Europe and the vision of the large as a car wild boar and the numerous dogs climbing on it stuck with me.

Don't worry, they're not that big (And I drive a small car!)
http://www.gourmetfly.com/115kgc.jpg

I guess we are lucky that the 'Sus scrofa' is the only somewhat dangerous animal around here! No bears or mountain lions for us.

:)

[stiz]

might not be that big but i sure wouldnt want one running at me! :faint:

[Cazzie]

They're faster than you think stiz, especially wild boars, they are not as fat as domestic pigs, but muscular and mean as a snake.

Speaking of which, how many of you have ever seen a snake in a hog sty? :d

Caz

[Lionheart]

We have bores here in Arizona in the deserts. I dont know if they are Havalina's, but they are mean looking. Bristly hair, huge bottom fang teeth, tall rounded spine, but not really fat, more of a rounded 'shape'.

We had a family of them on the former Chrysler test track that lived in the washes. We had some good test tracks for the off road vehicles that could drive through those washes (same ones every day), and at dawn, there they would be. We would have to drive slow till they would finally remember to go sideways and run out the top edge of the washes instead of keep running down it, lol.. (huge trenches, that your truck fit way down inside of.. ).

They were always 'angry' that you were coming. I think, if you had one of those 'universal translators' from Star Trek, they would be saying alot of 'french words'. I dont think they had a big fear of cars... More like, 'if they are tasty, I am turning around to bite it' type of mentality.

[brad kaste]

They're faster than you think stiz, especially wild boars, they are not as fat as domestic pigs, but muscular and mean as a snake.

Speaking of which, how many of you have ever seen a snake in a hog sty? :d

Caz
Cazzie,....there's a painting done by the Missouri regionalist painter Thomas Hart Benton. I don't remember the title of the painting but it shows a large hog chomping down on this hapless rattlesnake. It was in my high school history book. I stared at it dumbly wondering..."can that be true? A pig actually biting a snake in half..." Yep,...more than true.