Virginia’s
coywolves, a hybrid between western coyotes and eastern timber wolves,
are often black in color. Also called eastern coyotes, they are 66
percent coyote, 24 percent wolf and 10 percent dog. Photo: Jon Way
A lone, gray pickup truck with its headlights off
rolls along the gravel road in the pale light of a full moon. The truck
stops along a tree line in front of a long, broad field and two
camouflaged men get out. They close the doors slowly so as to not make
any noise. The men sling their rifles over their shoulders and whisper
about where to begin. Down past the woods? Over at the neighboring farm?
A long, chilling howl erupts from the woods across the
freshly cut hay field in front of them, followed by a chorus of yips and
more howling. Mike Hummell watches and listens. He zips up his jacket
against the cold. “You want to hunt that?” he asks his hunting partner,
Marshall Koontz.
Hummell and Koontz are specialist hunters who respond to
calls from concerned residents about predators preying on their flocks
of sheep, herds of cows, etc. Working pro bono last week, they had
received a call from a farmer concerned about a top-level predator that
has recently arrived in Virginia—the coywolf. Also called the eastern
coyote, the coywolf is a hybrid of western coyotes and eastern timber
wolves, and it may represent an entirely new species.
For most of human history, wolves have
been feared and hated. They ate livestock and occasionally attacked
humans. Virginia’s first government bounty on wolves was enacted at
Jamestown in 1632. As settlers moved west, the slaughter accompanied
them across the continent and bounties continued to be paid in some
states into the early 20th century. The removal of wolves enabled the
expansion of the coyote.
For thousands of years, coyotes were restricted to the
American West in part because of competition with wolves. The larger
predators attack coyotes to protect their territories from another
canid, which competes somewhat for prey. With the wolves gone, coyotes
began to expand their range. As young, lone coyotes went in search of
new territories they sometimes encountered remnant populations of
eastern timber wolves. In small dating pools, love blossomed between two
species that would normally fight.
The hybrids are larger than western coyotes and smaller
than eastern timber wolves. A pure-blooded male western coyote tops out
at under 30 pounds. A male timber wolf averages around 67 pounds. Male
coywolves typically weigh in at around 35 pounds, especially if they
manage to live for more than two years. None of these animals is large
enough to threaten a healthy adult human.
Janis Jaquith, a long-time resident of Free Union, had her
first encounter with what she believes was a coywolf in summer 2004.
She watched her flock of eight guinea fowl walking toward her house at
dusk with a coyote following them.
“That animal didn’t care that I was there at all,” she
says. “It was just kind of sauntering maybe six feet behind the last
guinea fowl. So I went over to it and I clapped my hands together and
said, ‘Get out of here you bastard, get out of here!’ This thing didn’t
care at all. A dog would have been spooked and gone away. …It looked
over at me out of the corner of its eye like a teenager and then kind of
raised its chin and slowly sauntered off to the side into the woods.”
Within a year, nocturnal predators had wiped out most of the flock.
Scientific research into Virginia’s coywolf population
began in 2011. Dr. Marcella Kelly, professor of wildlife studies at
Virginia Tech, has been contracted by Virginia’s Department of Game and
Inland Fisheries to study the diets of coywolves. Complaints from deer
hunters of dwindling prey in Bath and Rockingham counties prompted the
agency to look into whether coywolves are responsible.
“We have the breakdown of their diet,” Dr. Kelly says.
“It’s 45 percent deer. Deer is the primary thing in their diet; voles is
the second-largest component. Believe it or not, the next two are mast
(edible parts of woody plants, such as acorns and rose hips) and
insects. Vegetation, blueberries, stuff like that. We’ve got squirrels,
rabbits, and the last one is birds. …I think you do have to worry about
pets.
They’re a predator like any other predator. They’ll take a pet if
it’s there and they are hungry. With
sheep, there is an issue. There are
problem animals. It’s not that the population as a whole does this, but
some individuals specialize in it.”
The coyote hunters have their own opinions about the
eating habits of coyotes, owing to years of observation of their
behavior and picking apart their scat.
“Oddly enough, they eat more cow pies than cows,” says
Hummell as he sets up a shoulder-high tripod during his moonlight hunt.
“Everybody thinks that coyotes eat nothing but meat. They actually are
more of a fruit-eater than anything. One of their favorite foods is
persimmons, oddly enough…granted you are gonna see them eat rabbits,
they eat small game, they love fox. It’s one of their favorite food
groups, the red fox. They don’t mess with gray fox too much because they
can’t catch them. Gray fox can climb a tree.”
To the top of the tripod Hummell fastens his rifle, a
suppressed AR-15 with a night vision scope. Koontz sets up a bolt action
Remington Model 700 on his own tripod and flips on a thermal imaging
system. Blowing a tubular caller dangling from a string around his neck,
Hummell begins producing a series of long howls. Koontz follows with a
series of yips from his own caller. The pair adds up to a convincing
facsimile of a rival pack of coyotes. Within seconds, the real coyotes
begin to respond. Closer, this time. They are on the move.
“Typically, people get a misconception,” Koontz says.
“They say, ‘I heard 10!’ But when they’re out moving back and forth, two
can sound like a dozen. …Their core area is usually gonna be in a
thick, dense spot, abundant in small game to where they don’t have to
fight for food. That’s why when you hear them barking at each other, two
different packs, it’s this pack here is trying to intimidate that
pack.”
Hummell and Koontz continue to challenge the pack that is
audibly moving toward the tripods and rifles. A light switches on in a
house about 300 yards away. Shouting is heard from inside.
People worry about coyotes: farmers with livestock, families with pets and children. But Kelly says attacks on humans are rare.
“As for humans, there have been very few attacks, but
they’ve happened,” she says. “I don’t know that anyone has ever been
killed by a coyote. In those attack situations, there’s usually
extenuating circumstances. (There is) very little risk in terms of human
attacks.”
The distinct sound of a screen door slaps
shut from the nearby house. A yelping chorus of beagles erupts. Hummell
and Koontz watch and wait to see if the dogs will deter the coywolves
from coming within range. Even as he peers through his night vision
scope with his finger hovering on the outside of the trigger guard,
Hummel advises a certain amount of tolerance for coywolves.
“If you come into an area where it’s really
quiet and you know there’s coyote activity that usually means that you
have a very big one there, the alpha,” he says. “The alpha is something
that keeps other coyotes in check. …Let’s say you have goats over here
and one goat is being eaten every month, month and a half. (If you)
shoot that alpha, he’s what’s keeping these coyotes in check because
they’re not gonna mess with him. You shoot him and these other packs no
longer have a sense of intimidation. They’re gonna come in; they’re
gonna clear your goats out. They’re gonna eat every one. It’s one of
these things where you need to pick and choose your battles. …This pack
over here isn’t allowed to come in here. That’s why you still have
goats.”
Science is bearing out some of what Hummel has observed in
the field. Kelly’s research shows that poorly planned hunting can make a
coyote problem worse. “When you take out coyotes, it leaves this big space and
more coyotes come in,” Kelly says. “Then they have a really big litter
the next year. It does not make a big difference when you take out a lot
of animals. You can try, and people are trying with bounties. The
coyotes in Bath County have about a 50 percent chance of living for six
months [due to hunting by humans], but their reproduction is really
fast. When Chicago did a big cull a few years ago, they had litter sizes
of 14 pups the next year.” The average litter size is six.
Most eastern coyotes are genetically about 66 percent
coyote, 24 percent wolf and about 10 percent of DNA originating from
domestic dogs. The genetic contribution from dogs is relatively low
because dogs may go into heat and become pregnant at any time, while
wolves and coyotes have a reproductive cycle closely timed to the annual
calendar. (Pups born in the late summer or fall will probably not
survive in the wild through winter.) A 2009 study showed that all black
wolves and coyotes in North America owe that gene to hybridization with
European dogs. Virginia’s coywolves are often black, demonstrating their
ancestry.
In the course of her research, Kelly noticed a slight
advantage to being a black coywolf. “We had one black coyote who lasted
for years [without being killed by hunters], we think because he looked
like a dog and had a [tracking]collar on.”
Hummell and Koontz listen as their unseen prey changes
direction. Previously on a trajectory headed for their guns, the coyotes
turn away as the pack of beagles does its job. As the hunters know all
too well, coywolves are not shy about approaching human settlements.
“I hear coyotes every night, their yips quickly escalating
into an unnerving crescendo and then falling silent,” writes Albemarle
County resident Lilia Fuquen in an e-mail. “Sometimes I think they must
be less than a quarter mile away; they sound like they’re closing in on
the house.” She lives nine miles outside of Charlottesville’s city
limits.
“During the summer of 2014, our flock of hens began to
dwindle, quickly,” writes Fuquen. “They were free-range hens that had
survived several years, but over the course of a week, half the flock
was taken. Foxes and coyotes had discovered them. One afternoon, I was
gardening out front when I heard one of the surviving hens squawking at
the back of the house. I tore around the house at a full sprint and saw a
tall, lanky, mangy-looking coyote lurking on the back porch, less than
four feet from the back door of the house. It stopped, looked at me and
just stood there. After a split-second, I began screaming wildly and
flailing my arms about, running toward it. It turned slowly, glanced
back at me over its shoulder, and in no hurry, sauntered down off the
porch and away into the fields beyond the house.”
“I know farmers and friends and they’ve
complained about them a little bit,” whispers Koontz as his quarry
disappears into the night. “Most of them around here you don’t hear
about them attacking the cows because they put more bulls in every lot,
which seems to keep the attacks down. …Typically coyotes don’t fool with
the cows a lot unless they’re sick or getting ready to calve.”
With their diets incorporating so much whitetail deer, it
may seem like the coywolves may be filling the ecological niche left
when wolves were exterminated from Virginia in the 1800s. But Kelly
doesn’t think it’s that simple. Unlike wolves, “coyotes are sort of
nature’s garbage collectors,” she says. “They will eat a lot of
different things. We’ve lost so many predators. They’re not necessarily
filling the wolf niche. Wolves hunted in a fundamentally different way
from coyotes and can take much larger prey.”
While coyotes are omnivores that dabble in a lot of small
game, wolves specialize in hunting animals of more than 100 pounds. In
Virginia, they likely ate a lot of elk and bison. The last Virginia
bison was killed in 1801 by Daniel Boone’s youngest son, Nathan, and elk
have only just been reintroduced to deep southwest Virginia. The
ecological context for pure-blooded wolves, a natural predator of the
coyote, to exist in the Commonwealth of Virginia has disappeared.
And it isn’t clear that coywolves are killing all of the
deer that they are eating. Kelly’s method for studying their diet
involves picking apart scat to see what types of hair and bone fragments
are in it. Virginia’s steady supply of road kill could be providing
some amount of that deer hair and bone found in the samples being
studied. One of the most surprising results of Kelly’s study has been
finding that Virginia bobcat populations had been significantly
underestimated. Many samples of scat that had been visually identified
as coming from coyotes or foxes turned out to be from bobcats.
Some of
the hypothesized new predation on deer may have come from bobcats or
other predators.
“Bears have increased dramatically in the last 10 years,”
Kelly says. “The predator community here is pretty amazing. We took scat
samples and analyzed them and 50 percent were bobcats. The number of
bobcats is pretty large. It’s a pretty interesting system with this
increase of bears, introduction of coyotes and we have a lot more
bobcats than anyone realized. “
There is no official estimate of the total population of
coyotes in Albemarle County. The mixture of habitats and available food
is different from the steep wooded mountains in the region Kelly is
studying. But the consensus among local coyote hunters is that roughly
there is a pack of coywolves ranging from a lone alpha male to up to a
dozen individual coyotes for every five square miles in Albemarle County
(726 square miles). If that is true, that would be about 145 groups of
coyotes in the county, with a total population somewhere between 500 and
1,000. Albemarle’s mixture of woods and cultivated fields offers an
ideal mix of habitat for coywolves.
The pair of coyote hunters quietly pack up their tripods, night vision gear and rifles—time to move on. They combat sub-
freezing temperatures in two more locations known to harbor problem
coyotes before giving up for the night. Repeatedly, packs of domestic
hunting dogs ran off the coywolves as the hunters were calling them in.
“Probably about 10 years ago we started
seeing [coyotes] a lot and it’s just exploded,” says Koontz. “I have
seen, deer hunting, when I’ve retrieved a deer I’ve seen the coyotes on
it instantly. They go after the weak. They don’t go after the strong,
per se—unless they’re really hungry. Each coyote is different. Some are
aggressive, some aren’t.”
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