Biology Reference
In-Depth Information
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 east-
ward. Over the past few decades it has spread from its historic bastion in the West all the way to the At-
lantic 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. Al-
though 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 sub-
species 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 re-
cord 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
