We have coyotes here literally all over. It’s weird because I never saw them at all as a kid. Now I see them or hear about sightings on a weekly basis.
I’m not talking in the country…I’m talking residential areas, and even dense parts of Toronto. Pretty crazy. The thing is, we don’t just have the skinny little fuckers like they do in most of North America. Our coyotes are actually a hybrid of a coyote and a wolf, the Algonquin Park wolf specifically. In fact that’s where these hybrids have come from, Algonquin. Wolf packs mated with coyotes and produced these ‘coywolfs’.
Anyway, here’s a few local photos I thought were interesting. No, they don’t just eat mice. They’re big! They hunt deer, dogs, just about anything they can get their mouths on. When there’s half a dozen of them, they’re pretty effective. They don’t actually kill the deer…they just grab on, drag him down, and eat him while he’s still alive. At my golf club last summer, a deer went bolting past 2 friends as they stood on a tee waiting to tee off. They noticed his stomach had a fairly massive hole in it and he was covered in blood. Then a second or two later, a large coyote sprinted after the deer at full speed. Pretty wild.
This was 15 minutes from Toronto, at a golf course in a dense reisdential neighbourhood, with a river valley running through it.
Here’s a video I took a few weeks ago of a coywolf about 10 minutes from my house. There were 2 of them. This one was bigger than my labrador retriever.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E-4rWWa_VHs
This one attacked a little girl in the town I live in. She was doing a snow angel and I guess the coywolf thought she was hurt and flailing so he thought she’d make an easy meal.
http://www.citynews.ca/files/2012/01/7f441b234074a95b759a22babc4e-473x315.jpg
this one was not far from my house at a local school
http://blu.stb.s-msn.com/i/86/E9349D42373FB67033548FD7C927AA.jpg
Here’s the remains of a large male deer that 3 coywolf hybrids ate and then left on a rural property not far away (this has happened on a couple of local golf courses in front of golfers…apparently tough to watch)
http://storage.canoe.ca/v1/blogs-prod-photos/7/5/d/5/3/75d539c78e3354e48906862aa1168c3d.jpg
here’s one in ‘the beach’ a neighbourhood in the city of Toronto. Very wolf like.