The howling ended as quickly as it had begun. My husband and I stopped to listen and watched the reaction of our Olde English Bulldog, who apparently has no instincts and didn't pay attention to the ruckus at all. On a walk at Kettleson Hogsback, the sun started to set above the calm shallow lakes, and a high-pitched howl began in the distance.
forests, finding new sources of food, North Carolina's Kays' research shows.įor example, invasive coyotes have eaten their way through the population of Olympic marmots, large wood chucks that live in the high mountain forests of Washington's Olympic National Park, studies show.I still remember the first time I heard a coyote pack howl as dusk began to settle on the Iowa Great Lakes area. "In the La Brea Tar Pits, of the six most common species of prehistoric animal found, five are extinct, and coyotes are still here," Crabtree said.įor centuries, coyotes seemed to prefer open plains to forested areas, but research with game cameras shows the species has now expanded to U.S. Coyotes are a native species that date back to the prehistoric Ice Age era, he said.
"The coyote is an incredible survivor," Crabtree said. "You need to compete to eat - and not get eaten - in order to survive and reproduce," Crabtree said.Ĭoyotes, though less populous now in Yellowstone, got smarter as they became accustomed to wolves, he said. That's when coyotes and other species try to scavenge the carcass, until the wolves come back, killing about 80 percent of the coyotes who got caught on the scene. Yellowstone National Park's coyote population dropped by 50 percent for the first five years after gray wolves became established, said Bob Crabtree, chief scientist at the Yellowstone Ecological Research Center.Ī pack of wolves kill an elk, and eat as much as they can until they become "meat drunk," and leave the scene. It turns out that scavenging is an evolutionary trap, with more coyotes ending up dying from it as a result than benefiting from it." "But this research turns an old idea on its head.
"We often think, 'Oh the coyotes like to scavenge, it must be good for them,'" Kays said. With the reintroduction of gray wolves in the northern United States, coyotes are getting an extra food source from wolf-kills in their role as scavengers, the Washington research shows. "They sometimes kill a deer on their own, but they're not very good at it," Kays said.Ĭoyotes eat rodents, rabbits and even berries and insects, and in urban areas, outdoor pet food and garbage. "The wolves weren't there to keep them in their place," said Kays, who is not affiliated with the Washington research.Īs mid-sized predators, coyotes don't go after elk, moose and even bison, as wolves can. Coyotes usurped the ecological niche of top-level predators as wolves were killed off across the United States in the 1940s, said Roland Kays, a research associate professor at the Raleigh-based North Carolina State University and the North Carolina Museum of Natural Sciences.
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