The coyote population is getting pretty bad out my way. The other morning, while outside with my dog, I heard a litter of coyote puppies across the field, along the edge of the woods. It really caught my dog's attention.
This will be a wake up call to a lot in the area, even in the city as they are starting to hang out there in broad daylight, in high traffic areas that you have to watch your small pets when they are outside.
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Windsor and Essex County pets snatched by coyotes
By Trevor Wilhelm, The Windsor Star July 21, 2010
WINDSOR, Ont. — Packs of coyotes are roaming into urban zones around the Windsor area in increasing numbers, venturing into yards and even hunting family pets.
The latest victim might have been a three-year-old Pomeranian named Brandy. The eight-pound dog wandered into the darkness beyond her family’s home on Malden Road Sunday night, yelped twice in pain and disappeared without a trace.
“Throughout the county, out in the most open agriculture areas, the densest woods, the marshes, downtown urban areas. They are ubiquitous,” said Paul Pratt, a naturalist at the Ojibway Nature Centre. “They even come into quite crowded urban subdivisions. And they love to hunt pets.”
He said coyotes have only been in southern Ontario about 100 years, but the ones found here are much bigger than their western counterparts. Pratt said it’s hard to know for sure how many coyotes are lurking around the county, but added the population has been steadily increasing over the last couple decades. He regularly gets calls about coyotes, which can readily reproduce in metropolitan areas.
“Often, people see them right in town,” said Pratt. “They’ve become a lot more common.”
Nancy McCabe, field operations manager with the Windsor-Essex County Humane Society, said she’s received repeated calls about coyotes as well as foxes in Little River, LaSalle and River Canard.
“Really there’s nothing we can do,” she said. “They’re highly intelligent. Their smell is so developed. I’ve never had any success trapping one. Any type of human smell, they totally stay away.”
She said she tried to do some research online about how to set traps, but it wasn’t much help.
“You have to wear gloves and boots and there shouldn’t be any human smell around,” said McCabe. “Well, that’s next to impossible. For our large dog trap, you have to actually crawl right inside the thing to bait it.”
Pratt said the coyote’s penchant for pets is well documented. He said he recently read a study out of Phoenix, Ariz., that stated 40 per cent of the average coyote’s diet there is cat.
“The eastern coyotes are a lot bigger than the western coyotes, and they’ll take bigger prey,” said Pratt. “So they’ll go after small dogs and cats.”
Debbie Meloche thinks her little dog Brandy is among the casualties.
She said her family was out on the back deck Sunday night while Brandy and her other dog, a golden lab named Whiskey, were running around about 150 feet away on their stretch of property in River Canard.
They heard Brandy yelp. Meloche called out to her. She yelped again.
“Well, the second time I was off the deck heading toward the field, telling my son go get the flashlights,” said Meloche. “We’ve got the flashlights out, looking all over the place. We can’t see her at all. That fast. I’m going, ‘What the hell?’”
They got out the tractor with its big light and started searching.
“One’s going this way, one’s going that way, we’re going into the back bush, we’re looking everywhere,” said Meloche. “Not one peep. Not one hair. Nothing. It sounded like she got hurt. Then just gone. She’s nowhere.”
If Brandy were still alive, Meloche said, she would have come home by now.
“You couldn’t go pee without the dog coming with you,” she said. “She was right at your side all the time. If you were on the couch, she was up on the couch. She wanted to be petted and hugged.”
Meloche said she rarely sees a coyote, but hears them all the time.
“You’ll get woken up by the sound of them howling,” she said. “They sound like they’re right at your back window. It’s scary. It sounds like they’re right at our back patio door where our bedroom is. It’s not cool. What if we had a bonfire that night and the kids are out back and they happen to go a little too far?”
While there are “a few records” of people being bitten by coyotes, Pratt said humans typically don’t need to worry about being attacked. He did add that you should still treat them like wild animals and keep your distance.
“The only time anybody runs into trouble with coyotes is generally if they’ve been fed,” he said. “You should never feed them, because then they lose their fear of people.”
Meloche isn’t convinced.
She was sitting on the deck again Monday night. There’s a creek that runs beside her house, overrun with trees and weeds.
“You can hear the pups, the coyote pups over their crying,” said Meloche.
“Whiskey will not be outside anymore. I won’t even let him out at dark. Forget it. You’re going on a leash.”
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Thu 22 Jul 2010, 12:37 am