
We have a coyote problem here on my daughter’s farm. They come every night looking for easy prey, which qualifies as no surprise. They are predators, after all. And while there are squirrels and mice and chipmunks and turkeys in the woods beyond the perimeter of the farm, those creatures are wild enough to be alert. So hunting them down is hard work, costing a coyote as much in energy as the carcass would provide in calories. My daughter’s plump chickens, on the other hand, are pushovers and a fine source of protein.
We could shoot the coyotes and it would be perfectly legal. The government kills coyotes and doesn’t seem to worry about competition from the private sector. There will never be a shortage of coyotes. A government campaign that employed air power and chemical warfare in the form of carcasses baited with cyanide failed, over the years, in its initial goal of eradication. The coyote did not merely survive; its range expanded.
The coyote had once been a creature of the plains. Where nobody on the Lewis and Clark expedition had ever seen one back home, east of the Mississippi, there are now coyotes in every state of the union and this includes some urban populations. There are coyotes living in Manhattan. And Los Angeles. They must, one thinks, be desperate.
I actually woke up one night on the North Carolina coast to the sound of a coyote howling outside my window. I was less than a quarter of a mile from the Atlantic Ocean. Weird, I thought, and wondered if coyotes eat oysters.
It makes sense for them to be in Vermont, where my daughter has her farm. When she was a little girl and we lived in a small, nearby town, we would listen to the coyotes howling at night from the hillside a mile away. She loved the sound.
[Interesting Read]