My first sight of a coyote (Canis latrans) was on Route 66 in Mohave County, Arizona near what may have been the tiny town of Crozier, Arizona. I was a youngster on a family trip heading to LA. Dad insisted we travel at night on this stretch of “66” to avoid the intense heat of the Mojave Desert.
In those days of rare automobile air conditioning (at least on our 1950 Plymouth) to keep cool, everyone drove with the car windows rolled down, and the little “fly window” cocked to catch the flowing air. I sat in the front passenger seat staring out the window at the night-time desert scenery. To keep the automobile engine cool in the desert cautious drivers often hung a weepy-wet canvas bag of water from the hood mascot. The bag dangled in front of the radiator grill. Water evaporating from the bag tended to cool the dry desert air, helping to moderate the temperature of the auto’s radiator water. In the dry desert air the water bag was always cool to the touch. When the car was moving the bag was even cooler. And on a hot Mojave desert day if you had an unfortunate “boil over”—after the immediate engine shut down (and passing of some time to cool the engine down) the bag held the cool water needed to replace that which was lost in the boil over.
Dad was driving and I was the only wide-awake passenger. I was a boy with unlimited curiosity. Gazing out of the opened window I watched as we zipped past the few darkened, lonely buildings that constituted the town of Crozier. Just outside town the two lane “66” made a sharp turn to the south, as Dad turned the wheel the old Plymouth’s yellowish headlight beams slowly panned across a rocky headland directly in front of us. I watched as two wide circles illuminated the rocky cliff and the sparse, prickly, desert vegetation. As they panned across the jumbled rocks, I saw a shadowy figure standing on at the edge of an outcrop. It was a thin, scraggly dog-like creature, with a pointed snout and bushy tail. It seemed be to scanning the nighttime desert landscape below the rocky headland.
“Dad,Dad,” I called out excitedly. “I think that was a coyote..right there on that cliff.”
My father was a practical man…”Coyote? I didn’t see anything.”
“On that cliff…the lights passed right over it.”
“Naw…those jumbled rocks might look like anything. Anyway what would it be doing out here in this heat and empty desert?”
But, I was certain of what it was. The image of that coyote was to remain in my memory permanently.
Many years had to pass before I would see anything of that species of canid again.
As a young university lecturer in Geology 101, I had my SUNY students out on a class field trip. There on an East End, rock rock strewn deserted beach I saw the same scraggly dog like critter, with pointed ears, sharp snout, and brushy tail fliting among piles of the glacially deposited erratic boulders my students were there to identify.
Inquiries among the locals about this sighting revealed that others had reported seeing this canid, scavaging along the beach strand line. Some claimed it had ice-rafted across the Sound from Connecticut and others that it was a coydog that belonged to a local resident. Further visits to the site revealed no tracks scat or other observations. I
In the Green Mountains of Vermont coyotes are relatively common, but rarely seen. The evidence of their secretive presence is however, much more visible: their nighttime howling calls, fur and bone filled scat, regularly left as territory markers on roads and foot trails, depredations on wildlife, and the killing of an occasional farm animal are enough to positively document their presence. In the “Greens” I often saw these evidences of coyotes on the unsurfaced road in front of my house, but had never seen the elusive animal itself.
Once, on a mid-winter snowshoe-hiking trip in northern Vermont, our group came upon a winter “deer yard” —an area of packed-down snow where deer congregated. This one was located under a huge wind fall cedar tree surrounded by deep, two-foot snow cover. The yard’s packed down snow was full of deer tracks, droppings and evidence of browsing on the fallen cedar which partly covered the “yard”. But here too, there were signs of coyotes in the snow. Their more oval or elongate dog-like tracks, and the blood stained snow, patches of hair and deer pelt, where all clear evidences of a coyote pack which found several deer “yarded up”, and attacked and killed a whitetail.
So today’s sighting of a deer scat..on the Brookhaven Rail Path, between Miller Place Road and Wedgewood Lane is for me—a cardinal date to remember. The scat, gray and dry and about 2 -2.5 cm in diameter and 3 cm long, was deposited on one side of the asphalt path. Visual observation revealed that it was comprised of animal fur, of small animals perhaps mole, deer mouse, rabbit. There were no large pieces of bone visible to the naked eye. The scat was almost certainly that of a coyote.
Shall we tie up our small pets? Feel anxiety for the many Wild Turkey poults we see so commonly these days? What about the deer herd?
Well perhaps not yet! Is this the scat of a young coyote migrating through the area or is it that of ann adult resident attempting to mark out its territory.
I’ll be on the look out for more signs of scat markings. So far there have been no additional droppings.
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