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127
Summer 2012
Escarpment Magaz ine
They came across the snow-covered field
one cold Feb-
ruary morning just as I was finishing breakfast. I was excited when the first
coyote caught my eye, and amazed to see two more following behind.
Running with noses to the ground and tails down, they were obviously hunt-
ing, fanning out as they crossed our field into the property down the slope.
I wondered what the shy, elusive coyote was doing hunting in broad day-
light seemingly without a care near my property in Thornbury.
People in this Beaver Valley community of southern Georgian Bay have
been asking me questions about the local coyotes for some time now, and
most of the questions have a common theme. Size. “Are you sure they’re
coyotes?” people ask. “They look too big to be coyotes.”
According to ROM departmental associate Fiona Reid, author of A Field
Guide to Mammals of North America (2006), coyotes run with their tails
hanging down while wolves, which have shorter ears and larger feet, run
with their tails up or straight out. It sounds simple. These animals definitely
run with their tails down, which makes them coyotes. But the history of
wolves and coyotes in Ontario is far from simple. It’s a complex story of
species interbreeding that biologists are still trying to unravel.
When European settlers first came to North America in the late 1500s to
early 1600s, they found the coyote (Canis latrans) on the plains, grass-
lands, and deserts of the central and western parts of the continent. At that
time the species appeared to prefer open and semi-forested habitat. Early
in the 20th century, observers here in Ontario noticed that the coyote
began a dramatic expansion of their territory that continues today.
In the early 1900s, there were no coyotes in central Ontario, let alone in
southern Ontario or the Greater Toronto Area as there are today. Accord-
ing to an article published in 1937 in Rod and Gun by E. C. Cross of the
ROM’s mammal section, coyotes or brush wolves as they were then called
were at that time restricted to northwestern Ontario. Cross used bounty
and fur-trapping records to determine the changing distribution of coyotes
in Ontario. By 1956 coyotes were found as far north as the shores of Hud-
son and James bays and south to the shores of Lakes Ontario and Erie. It
had taken only 50 years to colonize the entire province of Ontario, and
then another 25 years to reach the Gaspé Peninsula, northeastern New
Brunswick, and finally Cape Breton Island in northeastern Nova Scotia,
where in 2009 a young woman visiting from Toronto was fatally attacked
by coyotes in Cape Breton Highlands National Park.
The reasons for the coyote’s rapid expansion are complex and not fully
understood, but certainly humans have contributed greatly to it. We have
cleared forests and turned them into agricultural fields, and we have pro-
vided reliable food sources in the form of domestic livestock, garbage, and
occasionally our pets. And, through habitat destruction and persecution,
we have removed the one species that would naturally have kept the coy-
ote in check, the grey wolf (Canis lupus).
*
Headlines tell us these wild canids are
in “our” territory more and more—
a ROM mammalogist explains why
BY JUDITH EGER
This article first appeared in ROM, the magazine of the Royal
Ontario Museum, Spring 2012. Reprinted with permission.
wild things