"Meet The Coywolf" Green Monadnock by Richard Popovic (Featured Column of the Week)
A few columns ago I talked about my new trail camera, specifically about my failure in capturing pictures of the resident bobcat. Luckily the bobcat came in for a close-up and I got some great shots with my point-and-shoot, but I was still anxious to see what else was out there in the woods around my house. In the trail camera’s original location, on a hillside just above my house, I managed to get a few good pictures of a red fox, but that was it, besides a lot of squirrels and wind-blown leaves. I decided to take it deeper into the woods, up an old logging road and off onto a little spur trail.
Shortly after turning onto the trail I saw a large mound of scat which contained hair, so I felt good about my choice. Through reading and personal experience I have learned that animals tend to use paths and trails, probably for the same reason humans do—it makes getting from point A to B in a forest much easier. I guess there is a universal dislike of getting whipped in the eyes by branches and tripping over roots while bushwhacking.
Finding the right spot for the camera is key to avoiding a lot of frustration later on. The tree it is strapped to has to be big enough to not sway with the wind, and having the sun predominantly behind the camera is preferable. You do not want too many small saplings with leaves in the shot, because these will quiver and shake with the slightest breeze, setting off the shutter and leaving you with pictures of nothing. And you obviously want to be aiming at a probable spot where animals will walk by.
Finally, you do not want it so deep into the woods that you either cannot find it later on or lose the motivation to check it because a four mile hike one way is not in the cards. I found a spot that met most of these criteria, set up the camera, camouflaged it a bit with some branches, and headed home.
A week later I pulled the memory card to see how lucky I got. The camera had taken over one hundred pictures. The very first shot was a nice one of the bobcat! I took that for a good omen and continued to quickly scroll through. A lot of blowing leaves, some squirrels, a few nice shots of a lone turkey, and one big gray fox. Really big--wait, that is not a fox. It looks sort of like…a German Shepherd? I showed it to my neighbor, who immediately tagged it as a coyote. In my mind’s eye coyotes are small, low to the ground, sandy-colored mutts. The word I used to describe this canine was ‘majestic’. I posted a picture of it on Facebook, and another neighbor pointed me to a recent PBS program which made things much clearer. I was not looking at a simple coyote—it was a coy wolf.
In a nutshell, after wolves had been essentially run out of the eastern United States through hunting and loss of habitat, opportunistic coyotes from the west moved in. Sometime in the early 1900’s, they mated with wolves in Canada, and over time developed into what some scientists are calling a distinct new species, the coywolf. More wolf-like in attitude, size and appearance, they are quite a bit different from their forbears in the west. The Eastern Coyote can weigh up to fifty pounds and grow to be five feet long! I had no idea these large predators were out there in our forests.
To learn more about the coywolf, check out the excellent documentary at www.pbs.org. It is a truly fascinating tale about adaptation, survival and animal intelligence.
Richard Popovic is a musician and freelance writer who lives in Nelson in an efficient little house he built in 2007 where he spends most of his time attempting to convert run-on sentences into a viable source of clean energy. To read more by Richard Popovic or other columns published in The Monadnock Shopper News go to www.shoppernews.com or flip through the copy of the MSN delivered to your door each week.