http://www.foxnews.com/us/2010/06/30/year-old-girl-attacked-coyote-backyard-nd-attack-suburban-ny-city-days/?test=latestnews

Matt Anderson sent us the link to this story, which seems to bear out the predictions of the Cornell Researchers who noted that coyotes attacking house pets is usually the precursor to their attack on children. (See the end of Part Three of the original post above.)

Also,last week I was given pictures of a 58 pound all black coyote killed in Dutchess County a few months ago. It looked pretty much like a wolf. The hunter who shot it has been hunting coyote for over 20 years and says that the size of these animals is getting larger as time goes on. He has kept skins and skulls which he will be sharing with the Albany and Cornell teams.

This is begining to have the feel of a bad dream. Somebody wake me up!

“Claims of mountain lion sightings are so persistent in Connecticut and other East Coast states that the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service last year launched a formal review of the status of the mountain lion. Biologist Mark McCollough supervised the investigation from his office in Old Town, Maine. The report, which has just been completed in draft form, confirms what scientists have been saying for years.

“We wanted to know if there is a population that has escaped detection,” McCollough said. “The answer from the scientific data is no in 21 eastern states studied. There is no evidence of a breeding population, but there is some interesting data about populations spreading eastward from the Midwest as far as Chicago, Ill.”

A few sightings — fewer than 5 percent — are attributed to big cats released from captivity with enough instinct to thrive. At least 1,000 western and southern cousins of the eastern mountain lion are held in captivity or kept as pets on the East Coast, McCollough said.

“Scat (feces) found in 1997 and a skull found in 2002 at the Quabbin Reservoir in Berkshire County, Mass. were traced to a mountain lion, but its teeth showed evidence of gnawing on a cage as if it had been captive at one point. It had been shot,” McCollough said.

Sightings reported throughout the region have lately been near the Massachusetts line.

In the Massachusetts town of Monterey, just north of Canaan, Georgiana O’Connell reported seeing a big cat in the middle of the road a couple weeks ago, around the same time a logger, Bill Riiska, said he saw one cross the road in Otis, north of Winsted.

“None of the sightings have been confirmed,” Massachusetts Department of Environmental Conservation spokesman Lisa Capone said.

In Simsbury, landscaper Bo Ottmann founded Cougars of the Valley, a loosely affiliated group with a dozen members which formed last year to document mountain lions and protect them. Ottmann has collected more than 100 sightings so far — 90 percent of them from Litchfield and Hartford counties. He claims all but a few are accurate.

“The only mammal with a black-tipped long tail is the mountain lion,” said Ottmann, who has never seen one himself. “I get a lot of reports from construction workers on job sites in the morning in the Litchfield area. A farmer in Simsbury said he watched a mountain lion chase off a bear.”

Ottmann is planning to post signs in Litchfield County offering a $50 reward for a confirmed photograph of a mountain lion in Connecticut.

Ottmann said roadkill isn’t a valid measurement. “Less than one-tenth of one percent of cougars are killed by motor vehicles in states like California where they are confirmed,” Ottmann said.

He claims DEP officials are covering up evidence they don’t want to make public because it would involve the expense of a management plan.”

This morning I received an email from Paul Rego, Wildlife Biologist, Ct. DEP indicating that the images of a Mountain Lion reported from Sharon Ct. are actually from Wyoming. See http://www.cody-wyoming-network.com/2010/01/mountain-lion-roaming-close-to-casper-mountain-homes/ for the earlier post of these images.

From the article:
” “What the research shows is that in the last 10 or 20 years, as wolves have kind of re-colonized areas where they were extirpated around the turn of the 20th century, and as people have also developed more habits of going out into national parks and wilderness areas, we’ve had more aggressive encounters,” said Mark McNay, a retired Alaskan wildlife biologist who has studied wolf attacks.”

For the complete report, see
http://www.latimes.com/news/nation-and-world/la-na-wolf-attack13-2010mar13,0,4711796.story

I understand that the growing aggression of Eastern Coyotes (Coywolves) was addressed at the Stone Ridge conference. If you attended and could send in a brief synopsis it would be welcomed.

Since you posted the link to the Columbia University Coyotes, several others have sent me private emails with similar information from other news sources.
This is more confirmation that these animals are becoming more and more adapted to living in an Urban/Suburban environment.

We have alsojust received details of the conference on Eastern Coyotes to be held at Ulster Community College in Stone Ridge NY on March 4th. Details of this talk are at http://leslieland.com/2010/02/coyote-talk-at-catskill-institute-on-march-4th/

I will be out of town on that day and will miss the talk. I hope some of you will be able to attend and comment on the talk in this space.

As Leslie said, Coyotes, who knew?

http://www.nypost.com/p/news/local/manhattan/coyotes_roaming_manhattan_yAm8a3Yl2ZdmClz3C28CPN

What a magical experience you describe, serenaded mid-swim by the family around the pond. One does wonder what it was about your swim which prompted their singing.

Was it sheer wonderment on their part, coincidence with the time of day, or some aspect of the predator-prey vocabulary? Here is a somewhat similar situation:

In October, many years ago, I watched as a large six-point buck bounded across a hay field, cleared two five-foot page-wire fences, and jumped directly into the acre sized pond at the edge of the pasture behind my house. He then swam in a straight line across the pond, emerged from the other side and resumed his path bounding across another pasture and cornfield before I lost sight of him. I thought this was very odd behavior, particularly occurring mid-day and wondered what was going on.

Moments later I saw the pack of dogs following his scent trail. They were delayed by the fences, but upon arriving at the pond gave voice, with the same type of baying that ‘coon hounds give with a treed animal. They then split up and circled the pond, some going clockwise, some counterclockwise. Within four or five minutes they had sorted it all out and resumed their chase.

In countless hours watching that pond from the windows of my house, that was the only time I ever saw anything remotely like it.

…………………………

I was also interested in your coyote-fox observation. Three genera are involved: Coyote (Canis latrans); Red Fox (Vulpes vulpe); and Gray Fox (Urocyon cinereoargenteus).

I live near Millbrook NY, center to a large hound and horse fox chase. I remember that when the coyote first arrived in these parts in the 1980′s there was quite a concern that the fox would be killed off by the coyote and the hunt compromised.

The word was that the coyote would/could kill the red fox in particular as the red usually would run across open fields. The gray fox, by contrast would den up or climb trees to escape both the coyote and hounds. ( See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fox_hunting for more on the chase)

Around here, both red and gray fox seem to have survived this coyote influx. The red are much easier to see, roadside, in field and forest. The gray is much more seclusive. In years spent outdoors I have seen them only once or twice, about as frequently as bobcats. Yet when I had a trap-line on the family farm in western Pennsylvania, it was the gray that I usually caught, and a few years ago, in our garden I set a box trap for the ‘coons which came to ravish the corn, and it was a gray fox that I caught. She came to a rolled up ball of cheese pastry which had to be completely infused with human scent. When released she ran directly to the fence gate indicating that she was a frequent visitor.

The fox tracks in the snow behind my house may well be those of the gray fox as they are small and often climb across logs and fallen trees.

As to the coyote – fox competition, I came across this which, although from the mid-continent, may also speak to the eastern coyote – fox interaction:

“Although red foxes have reason to fear coyotes, they frequently may be near coyotes without showing apparent concern, and coyotes encountering foxes may not respond aggressively. The observed communal feeding by a coyote and fox, and the reported instances of coyotes and foxes rearing pups near each other, reveal the high degree of interspecific tolerance that can occur. Nevertheless, it is advantageous for foxes to avoid encounters with coyotes because each encounter includes risk of injury or death. This mixture of coyote aggression and indifference toward red foxes may explain gradual changes in fox populations in the wake of changes in coyote populations (Sargeant, 1982) and the presence of some red foxes among coyotes for years (Sargeant et al., 1987)” http://www.npwrc.usgs.gov/resource/mammals/cfoxint/index.htm

And, as to the question of interbreeding between coyote and fox, which is sure to emerge in this discussion, the answer seems not likely, probably impossible.
“According to Gray (Mammalian Hybrids, a checklist with bibliography, 1954) all species in the genus Canis [with 78 chromosomes] have been known to hybridize in captivity…. Thus, a dog-coyote hybrid is feasible. As for the foxes, they are out at ~8% sequence divergence, and only have 34 chromosomes, so a dog-fox hybrid [and by extension a coyote-fox hybrid] probably isn’t viable.” http://www.madsci.org/posts/archives/2001-07/996640360.Ge.r.html

Thanks for your story, and I am glad you enjoyed the talk on Leccinum.