Fun Stuff > CHATTER
Blog Thread 5: A New Beginning
LeeC:
My wife has started jogging to try and get back into shape in the morning before the rest of us wake up. She was doing great until recently. People on the neighborhood app are reporting that they've seen coyotes and was posting to warn people to be careful especially with pets. This got my wife worried but she continued to jog in the morning, until this past Monday. I had a hard time sleeping Sunday night and we had the window open to let some cool air in. In the woods behind our house, maybe about 200-300 yards away I could hear them. I didn't want to wake my wife so I texted her that I heard coyotes that night. She has now suspended her morning jogs. Tonight, like literally 10 minutes ago my wife and I were on the couch, she dozed off and I was watching a youtube video and I heard the coyotes howling in a pack across the street behind the neighbors house. I woke her up and she heard them too. She's now sure she isn't going to be jogging in the morning anytime soon.
cesium133:
Coyotes aren't going to bother a human. We're too big for them to take down easily. The lab where I work has lots of coyotes on its campus, and I see one occasionally. They run away whenever a human gets near. It is interesting to hear the pack of coyotes imitating a police siren, though.
Morituri:
There's a thing to know about coytes though; they are among the most adaptable of all predators except us.
Studying coyotes in different environments is like studying different species. Give them a forest, with large prey available but where bobcats or something are competing hard for the mice and rats, and they're pack hunters. Give them open plains where there's not much to eat, and they go solitary most of the time, after the fieldmice and kangaroo rats out in the deserts. Give them horrifying climates where the temperature gets too hot in summertime days and too cold in the wintertime nights to even SURVIVE outdoors, and they will dig burrows fifteen feet deep. If bigger, badder things are hunting them - like wolves that can also dig - they go for open terrain with lots of escape directions, and take advantage of the fact that they can run faster, further, and longer than wolves. Near cities, they discover that it's easy to take raccoons if they stake out trash cans. And that while they're there, the trash cans themselves sometimes have tasty bits inside. If there aren't many raccons locally, they can become pure scavengers.
Seeing a pattern here? Whatever you got, Coyotes will figure out a way to make it work for them.
There are even regional physical differences as wide as the variations between some breeds of dogs. Like, in some places they're long-leggedy beasties that take astonishing leaps, and other places they're low to the ground and can cut tight turns when running at high speed.
Cesium133 is right that there isn't really a history of coyotes taking on humans.
But if they get hungry enough and there's enough of them around to try, I absolutely would NOT put it past them to take a shot at it.
hedgie:
IIRC, at least in California, peregrine falcons are no longer considered endangered here because they ended up becoming very effective city dwellers. I saw them rather frequently when I lived in SF, and was once lucky enough to look up at just the right moment to see one strike a songbird.
Wingy:
My city has a love affair with peregrine falcons as well. I just wish they would eat crows. The city has waged a long campaign to get the crows out of downtown so they quit turning the sidewalks into sh*t-slicks people track into buildings everywhere and destroying vehicle paint. Alas, the falcons are more adept at eating pigeons, not that pigeons don't have their own issues...
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