Coyote/Wolf hybrids

[James Harvey]

#3822

If this little synopsis doesn’t grab your attention, you lack imagination, or romance, or something 😀

The creation story White and his colleagues have pieced together begins during European colonization, when the Eastern wolf was hunted and poisoned out of existence in its native Northeast. A remnant population — “loyalists” is how White refers to them — migrated to Canada. At the same time, coyotes, native to the Great Plains, began pushing eastward and mated with the refugee wolves. Their descendants in turn bred with coyotes and dogs. The result has been a creature with enough strength to hunt the abundant woodland deer, which it followed into the recovering Eastern forests. Coywolves, or Eastern coyotes, as White prefers to call them, have since pushed south to Virginia and east to Newfoundland. The Eastern coyote is a study in the balancing act required to survive as a medium-size predator in a landscape full of people. It can be as much as 40 percent larger than the Western coyote, with powerful wolflike jaws; it has also inherited the wolf’s more social nature, which allows for pack hunting. (In 2009, a pack of Eastern coyotes attacked and killed a 19-year-old Canadian folk singer named Taylor Mitchell in Cape Breton, Nova Scotia.) But it shares with coyotes, some 2,000 of which live within Chicago’s city limits, a remarkable ability to thrive in humanized landscapes.

http://www.trentu.ca/newsevents/newsDetail.php?newsID=6555

[wojo14]

#23970

Interesting.

[Stephen Graf]

#23999

They are in NC too. They can appear to look like wolves and can be as big. I have seen them hunting in packs with as many as 8 members.

I thought the interbreeding was just a here and there thing, I did not know it had created a hybrid critter. Makes sense.

The red wolf reintroduction that has taken place here in NC has suffered from several setbacks. One of which is that coyote’s keep breeding with them. The researchers kill off the hybrid animals trying to keep a pure wolf strain going.

The other big problem is hunters shooting the wolfs, thinking they are coyote’s.

[paleoman]

#25562

I noticed a much larger animal in western New England back in the early 80’s. As large as a big German Shepherd and far more “wolfish” than the typical western coyote. There has to have been some doggystyle messing around in the gene pool.

[Charles Ek]

#26188

Thanks so much for the tip on this! I’ve been following the progress of the genetic studies by the featured researcher and others for several years. (If anyone wants copies of the scientific articles I have, shoot me a message.)

When I first arrived in New Hampshire in 2001 from Alaska, an animal ran across the road in front of me one evening that had me wide-eyed. I grew up in Minnesota, which has big gray wolves and small Western coyotes. I’ve also lived in Alaska, which has even bigger wolves, and now the small Western coyotes to an increasing degree.

This critter was tall and downright lanky compared to the coyotes I knew well. Since then, I’ve seen them on many occasions. There was one particular mostly black male that used to hang out on land where I hunt. He was a bold guy, and one evening I found evidence that he had been trailing my wife and her dogs. As it happened, I arrived as she was coming out of the woods. I could see in the snow as I progressed back along her route, with the wind at my back, how he had turned off to the side when he became aware of my approach.

I don’t shoot canids, a fact that saved two of these animals one day when they passed twenty yards from me while I held a shotgun and deer slugs.

[Author]

Posts