A COYOTE SIGHTING-FINALLY!

 

I know I have mentioned this before, that I found it ironic that I had far more sightings of coyotes on Cape Cod than I have had in Texas.  After all, don’t you consider Texas the backdrop for most Wiley Coyote cartoons? Well, more Arizona, New Mexico landscapes I guess, all those canyons he plummeted to the bottom of, sending up his trademark “Poof”.

 But still, raise your hand if you too would expect more coyotes in Texas than Cape Cod?  Well, it took TWO YEARS, but I finally got to see one, loping the full length of a field, mid-morning, just as we were completing our Tuesday, two-hour monitoring of a Great Blue Heron rookery.  Lovely, a true sense of; well, it’s about time! 

I have found their scats regularly, on the main trails through a prairie that makes up a big part of the Cibolo Nature Center where I volunteer.  I love taking the kids on Nature Detective hikes, but when I do these, I always say, anyone can hike the regular trails, but you are with a “trained naturalist” so lets head where the Japanese tourists don’t go.  So, we tend to hike dry creek beds, a great place to find deer bones that wash downstream in heavy rains and are left high and dry, like a high-tide line, when the creek dries up again.  Exciting finds for elementary school kids.

But the coyotes seem to stick to the main trails, after all, why crash through brush, expending energy, when there is a lovely path already there. And, I believe I have talked about this before; they want to leave their scat in prominent places as a territorial marker, often leaving it where two trails come together.

 But this is all getting away from the point I suppose.  I was just glad to see a healthy looking coyote, and it didn’t cause any ruffled feathers in the rookery and gave us a good long look before it headed back into the brush.

Now, double irony, I am visiting my daughter, the Army Captain stationed at Ft Hood, and her rented home is in one of those nondescript suburban developments where houses pop up row-on-row with only slight variation.  Small yards, few trees, yet because it is close to some open fields, there are tons of grackles and on the fields, I have seen flocks of meadowlarks and once, at sunset, the air was full of nighthawks buzzing over roofs and down these look-alike roads, in pursuit of moths or other tasty night-flying insects; it was sort of surreal.

But, this morning, as I walked the dog, I was musing over writing this blog about the coyote, when, turning back into her fenced back yard, what do I come upon but a “crime scene”!  Grackle feathers everywhere, bird bones etc., and what is next to it?  A huge coyote scat, full of fur and bones!  In her yard, here in suburbia!  Not that that is SO surprising, they don’t shy away that much from suburbia, or cities either for that matter.  It just that here I was thinking about coyotes, or the lack of them, and wham, right in her yard clear evidence of one having dinner here.  If I had been staking out the yard last night, I guess we would have even more exciting things to write about, like the take-down of a grackle.  

Of course with no witnesses, who can say what the true cause of death was. It might have been a bird that ran into a window and was stunned, and made for a easy meal, or maybe the grackle simply had it’s back turned when the coyote pounced, or maybe the coyote caught it in a nearby field where they flock under the high tension wires, and just decided to dine here.  Either way, these sort of serendipitous moments delight me.  And I suppose I can’t continue to complain about how I NEVER see any coyotes, for now I have. 

My wish for you is that your “sighting desires” also be fulfilled, and together, we will hope for more.