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Oct292009

Woman on hiking trail killed by coyotes

Filed under General by david brooks at 10:01 am

When I first started as a reporter, a staple of newspaper stories in the East involved sightings of coyotes, which were just beginning to return and still counted as exotic and scary. Now they’re routine, of course, having been a part of the ecosystem here for half a generation. It’s pleasantly creepy to hear them howl at night, but aside from concern about losing the occasional cat, there’s nothing to worry about from these 40- to 50-pound canines. I mean, it’s not as if they were mountain lions.

So it’s very startling to read that a woman hiking in Nova Scotia was attacked by two coyotes and died of her wounds. This story quotes a biologist who studies coyotes in that region calling it “unprecedented” and I believe it.  I’ve never heard of a coyote attack on a human unless the animal was rabid; the fact that these two coyotes were traveling together, however, makes that unlikely.

Viewing 3 Comments

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    Great! I have seen two (or the same one twice) on my walks in the last week. Beautiful, big, healthy, and totally uninterested in either me, or my dog. (And my dog was uninterested in the coyote.)

    Dave... it is time you started up your seasonl "don't feed the bears" articles, and now include coyotes in the story referencing this story as a warning. Before people think it is cute.

    It annoys the heck out of me how people boast of having bears in their back yards in October eating from their bird feeders. Talk about asking for trouble! We had a bear destroy my bee hives once, came back three days running at the same time of day until I took all the... leftovers... and put them insealed bags in the celler after the second day. The bear came back the third, nothing, and we haven't seen another one. (The electric fence did get "twanged" one night the next year... but nothing was destroyed.)

    All those missing cats? Don't forget the Fishers. Much more likely than coyotes.
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    We have them around our neighborhood but they remain quiet. We have chickens and pigmy goats and they've never bothered them. We have two dogs that sometimes wake me up in the middle of the night to go out and its not unusual to find one in our yard looking for scraps and small animals like mice and moles. One thing, they're afraid of our Chihuahua. He's chased them out of our yard a few times. I think their brain is wired to run anytime something runs at them. A charging and growling Chihuahua is a sight that will make anyone's blood run cold LOL.
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    Wow, that is surprising. I do enjoy those "pleasantly creepy" howls at night. Our neighborhood has definitely lost its share of cats though. It's sad but predictable when a new family moves in (often from MA) and within a few months the "cat missing" signs go up.

    A couple of years ago on a local hike, I got to see a pack of coyotes take down a deer. It's was an amazing wild-kingdom-like experience.

    During the struggle, one of them passed within 10-20 yards of me. Surprisingly, I wasn't the least bit afraid (ignorance is bliss) as they barely paid any attention to me and I was so in awe of what I was witnessing.

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