Separate species but close enough to create viable offspring, the descendants of these unlikely bedfellows continued moving east, down through NY state and expanding across their current range. Animals headed east by way of migrating north over the Great Lakes encountered the desperate wolves there, one thing led to another and.yadda yadda yadda: The ‘Coywolf’ is born. Much as Lewis and Clark explored the West a century earlier, coyotes were on the move east seeking new territories and opportunities, and finding the lack of mountain lions and wolves (species that had hitherto kept them confined to the West) much to their liking.
As a result, by the early part of the last century, wolf populations in the Great Lakes area were at a low point, and were having difficulty finding other wolves to mate with. Wolves and mountain lions were extirpated (made locally extinct) in most of the northeast by the mid-1800’s, and great effort and money was expensed to do the same for all parts of the continent that ‘settlers’ spread to. Over the last few centuries, the so-called apex predators have not fared well during North American expansion by European descendants. But how did this happen? It’s a long, complicated story, but in a nutshell: One led by Stonybrook University found that of 462 animals tested, the average genetic breakdown consisted of 64% coyote, 13% gray wolf, 13% eastern wolf, and 10% domestic dog. Several studies have collected DNA from hundreds of coyotes in the region. But it was not until the recent advent of large scale DNA testing that this theory could be put to the test. Coyote, Wolf, or Dog? Well - Yes.įor decades it was suspected that the coyotes trotting through the forests, farms, and towns of the northeast were different than western coyotes. As it turns out, those theories were spot on. People started to suspect that these wild canids were bigger than their western counterparts, and theories soon spread about them having cross-bred with domestic dogs and/or wild wolves. Highly adaptable, it feels equally at home in NYC’s Central Park as it does in any National Park.
Today, the eastern coyote (one of 19 subspecies of the animal) inhabits the entire east coast stretching as far west as Ohio. The first ones were spotted in the mid-to-late 1940’s, and it took until the 1970’s for them to become widespread. There’s a New Dog in Town.Ĭoyotes are newcomers to the Northeast. And no animal has been able to respond by growing both in numbers and distribution, and to adapt to new conditions as quickly and effectively as this wily member of the canid family has.
In the interim 215 years between the Corps of Discovery’s encounter to today, few animal species have been persecuted and hunted down with as much vigor and vitriol as the coyote in the United States. Even they weren’t sure what they were seeing, and dubbed it the “prairie wolf” – a name that still persists in some parts of the country. In fact it was none other than the intrepid explorers Lewis and Clark who in 1804 were the first non-Native Americans to lay eyes on a coyote. George Washington would be lying (which history informs us he is incapable of) if he said he had.
0 kommentar(er)
