# Coywolves



## raumati01 (Nov 4, 2015)

First time I ever heard of these,http://www.stuff.co.nz/world/73716543/the-coywolf--strong-smart-elusive-and-taking-over-the-us . They sound like a tough customer.

We don't have a wild dog here in NZ , only feral dogs which don't tend to do too well in the wild and when they start chasing livestock they soon get a nickle plated lead injection.


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## Dalmatian90 (Nov 14, 2015)

Theory I've read, and I tend to agree with this starts with why we have "Timber" Wolves -- because the early settlers in the Northeastern U.S. and Canadian maritimes needed to call them something different from the "Brush" Wolves that were also around.

In other words, we always had a canine whose size was in-between that of coyotes and gray wolves, and was more solitary than pack-oriented gray wolves. Unlike the timber wolves deeper into the less populated and more wooded interior, they lived alongside the Indians who had a higher population density in this area than further north and west, until European diseases decimated the Indians. Then they lived alongside the early European settlers until we extirpated them. But before they killed them off, the wrote in the journals of a canine that behaved more like today's coy-whatevers than "Timber" wolves that everyone agrees are Gray wolves or a distinct sub-species thereof.

Either we have marginalized populations of brush wolves (rather than modern coy-whatever-crosses) who had been pushed into the depths of the Maine North Woods, Adirondacks, and northern Ontario and Quebec re-asserting themselves, and/or modern coyote hybrids once again filling an ecological niche that similar hybrids had done up until a couple centuries ago.

The last official wolf in Connecticut -- a lone she-wolf who disappear each year for a while before returning with pups, not a pack -- was killed in 1742 about five miles from where I'm typing this.

Calling them coyote hybrids instead of wolves is a public relations thing. Coyotes aren't THAT scary. Wolves, they're SCARY!

For years the state wildlife officials denied absolutely, positively that there were Mountain Lions in Connecticut.

Then one got killed on a highway in coastal Connecticut that carried 50,000 vehicles a day, and with the body laying there on the pavement the story became "There are no Mountain Lions in Connecticut, unless it escaped from someone who illegally owned one in New York." 

Then they ran that dead cougar's DNA and found out it had been captured and released in South Dakota as part of that state's wildlife studies. So now the party line is, "There are no breeding populations of Mountain Lions in Connecticut." Which might be true at the moment, but someday won't be...unless the public gets scared and demands that breeding populations not be allowed to be established. And there are plenty of people in the "better" suburbs who like nature only so far as it's not wild and have conniptions already at "Coyotes" and Black Bears. Of course there is a big overlap between those folks and folks who oppose hunting Bambi, so we have a really good food supply for "Coyotes" and Mountain Lions.


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## Michigan Escapee (Dec 25, 2015)

Have some personal experience with what I guess was a quasi-coy wolf about 8-9 years ago. Actually 1/4 coyote, 3/4 snowdog. 
http://imgur.com/a/usvbV#0
Little monster would run like you wouldn't believe, could pitch shift his voice to sound like a whole pack, and other odd things. 
Ridiculously smart, total murder on chickens, skunks, possums, and assorted wildlife. But then he got old, hooked on KFC, and
became more of a hold down the couch dog. Still will rip the hell out of skunks from time to time from what my friend says.


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## Donnarshmr (Dec 26, 2015)

We had one move in last year. At first, I thought he was a full wolf that was muddy. Talked to the Dept of Ag and they said "No, you have a coywolf problem in that area". 3 years ago, we were getting overrun with deer and groundhogs. Pretty much every day I'd have a herd of 10-12 deer graze through under our apple trees. This year, I haven't seen a single groundhog and there's only 3 deer. I went out to make sure the barn was locked one night about 3am and got into a tussle with the coywolf. He charged me, not sure if he had a kill I didn't find that he though I was going to take. I was so surprised I missed him with my first shot but rolled him over with my second, so I must have hit him. He got back up and ran off and I haven't seen him since but our prey animal population is way down still so either I didn't kill him or he had friends.


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