and other weird wildlife
Coyotes in our neck of the woods are not ushering illegal aliens across the border.
They are gangly, destructive wild canines, and we all have to deal with them. I even saw them in the middle of the city in Raleigh years ago.
This one wandered across my front yard a couple weeks ago. I didn’t realize it wasn’t the resident fox until it was mostly out of sight. And I didn’t see anything but the direction it went.
A couple hours later, an odd and, thankfully, humorous story unfolded.
An elderly neighbor who leaves her back door open for her cat, watched a “wild dog” come in, sniff around and head down the hall.
So, she called a younger neighbor. Who took one look, closed the guest room door, and called people more qualified to deal with a coyote in the back room.
The animal was removed without incident. But I doubt it was “re-located.”
In rural South Carolina, they want us to shoot coyotes. They are a nuisance animal and can be dangerous.
When there are too many of them, they disrupt the food chain, and that disrupts a lot of things. It’s hard to think that an animal isn’t always a welcome piece of an environment, and the tree-huggers don’t like to admit it. But balance is the key, and coyotes can upset that.
When wolves were reintroducted to Yellowstone, they quickly culled the coyote population, and all sorts of other positive things started happening: small animals resurged. Raptor birds came to feed on them. The deer population changed, and the actual forest improved. Even the environmentalists were surprised by the far-reaching effects of a single animal type.
In our neighborhood, I suspect the coyotes eat a lot of things the hawks do. I like the hawks. I suppose the foxes have a similar diet also. And they are quite lovely.
Coyotes always seem to have a furtive desperate look. And no one likes something “furtive and desperate” skulking around.
I wouldn’t even begrudge a coyote, if it would eat the armadillos…
….none of them eats armadillo……