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Location: Approximately 50 miles from Missoula MT/38 yrs full time after 4 yrs part time
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Have had some unusual encounters over the years.......none ever occurred in a city environment
, usually in a rural and/or 'foothills' type area.
Where I have lived for 40 yrs, I have encountered a black bear on the front porch when I opened the door to go out and start the car on a late October morning.......bear was about 7 feet away......I screamed---- he 'huffed' and leaped off the porch.
Had a bull moose come out 'of now where' about 20 feet away In a wooded portion of my property when I was putting out some hay for my horse at dusk on a winters evening.
Many years ago back in Colorado, I was slowly and quietly riding horseback through a high elevation mountain park at about 8000 feet through a thick area of "Oak brush", during elk season,....... and a very large adult mountain lion burst out of a particularly thick area of brush not more than 10 feet right in front of my horse........yeah, I got thrown off and it took me about 10 minutes to be able to slowing approach my horse and grab a rein that was dragging on the ground (he was stepping on the other one).....a prime example of why to NEVER tie the two reins together so that they could get hung up on the saddle horn if you get thrown off.........you may end up tracking down your horse for a couple of miles if they weren't dragging on the ground.
I’ve encountered coyotes and other predators many times, usually in rural areas but occasionally in suburb or city limits. In all cases, they clearly wanted to steer clear of me. That is normal behavior.
I myself would not bother with even a stick, but since you appear to be very fearful, bring one with you.
Your bigger worry should be aggressive, untrained DOMESTIC DOGS.
I live in a huge urban wildlife interface area in Colorado; at the foot of Pikes Peak & National Forest & we have a lot of animals. Despite being the 2nd largest metro area in Colorado, there is one of the largest mountain lion "turfs" here that extends right into the heart of the city along a ridge of bluffs & a water way.
Deer hooves make this faint "click click" sound on sidewalks & they will peep in your windows. Had a black bear cross my path just 15 ft in front of me, he could have cared less that I was there. I'm pretty sure that he was the same hairy guy that came into an apartment building at dinner time & slowly walked down the halls sniffing at everybody's door.
Had a big fat momma raccoon who always had 3-4 babies following behind her living under the shed out back & she was MEAN! She hissed at me one night just because I had seen her before she saw me; I was standing on my porch & she came right out of the garage like she owned the place. Every year she got bigger, fatter & meaner. Raccoons sound really strange when they fight; they make this snapping sound with their teeth that really gets the point across.
But the coyotes have been a total pain. The Waldo Canyon Fire in 2012 displaced every creature in our part of the front range into city limits & there were several packs in our neighborhood that were very hungry & became sick. They attacked a 2 yr old girl in a nearby park despite being right in front of her parents & took a small dog; leash & all, right out of it's owners hands during a walk.
I'm personally begining to wonder if the advice from experts about keeping dogs leashed is acurate. I know when I take my dog to the dog park that she will be timid & submissive to the already unleashed dogs but that her behavior (and theirs) will change once her leash is off. Collars are a no-brainer: It's like giving a predator a handle with which to take your pet straight to the ground. I've seen it happen with cats; a cat will "hold" another cats collar with it's front paws, flip them on their side, pin them with their back legs & start biting the face & neck.
But what do you do? If you're in city limits you have to have leashed dogs with tags.
Coyotes didn't used to approach humans unless they were sick but that has changed because they are losing their natural instincts to be afraid of us. Our position at the top of the food chain is now being challenged because we don't defend ourselves anymore. Coyotes have always been problematic for ranchers & farmers & in the past, if you saw one you shot it. My BIL & SIL (early 70's) remember their mom walking them to school every morning with a loaded shotgun in rural Kansas due to Coyotes.
It's also thought that suburban sprawl has actually served to attract coyotes because our lawns & landscaping on what used to be dry prarie offers a more rich location for bunnies & rodents to live & the coyotes are just following the food source.
In our area, about the only animal that did not like having to adapt to city life was a local Bighorn herd; they were seen in neighborhoods only briefly after the fire & have mostly returned to the mountains a bit south of where they had been. The burn scar area is rebounding but the blackened & bare pine trees don't offer much food nor protection. The fire actually turned into a "firestorm" due to a weather event on the day we evacuated & burned so hot it turned the dirt into glass so the animals are adapting to the city & seem to be making themselves at home.
More accurately; humans made themselves at home in their home first; so what should we expect?
Coyotes are pack animals & if you see one there will be more close by. My neighbor took a video with her cell phone that made the news when she was walking with her 2 rat terriers behind our houses: You can't actually see the coyotes due to the long grass but as she walked you can see 5 or 6 moving "shadows" in the grass just feet away from the trail. They were circling her, in constant motion; as she walked they stayed right with her but moving in a clockwise circle around her & her two small dogs. It was a pretty creepy sight.
Here, it's against the law to discharge a firearm within city limits but Bear Spray works to deter them as well. I just heard about a product that won't cause injury to humans & it sounds kind of interesting; it's a spray can that doesn't spray any substance but the nozzle is designed mimic the hiss of a certain snake which is a natural predator of the coyote.
I was actually going to look for that today. We had an "urban bunny" explosion in our neighborhood about 6 weeks ago & sure enough; we've had coyotes in our yard every night for the last few weeks as well.
Nice read.....
thank you
I saw a story once on TV, "I shouldn't be alive". Where early morning, or late evening, can't remember which, it was dark and his car wouldn't start. He was walking down a dirt road, and he heard rumbling noises all around him....then a coyote attacked him....he could hear their young pups whining, he was meant to be their food. He went on to describe the attack, and I don't remember what saved him, but he lived to tell about the whole ordeal, thank God.
Wild life is nothing to shake a stick at....there was a video of a coyote and a dog, playing...I warned those watching, b/c they stated that they were playing. Coyotes will send out a lone member of the pack to bring down the pray, or lure it back to the pack. People are so naieve, in this day and age, under educated about wild life, and bring misery to both people and the animals...b/c as you say, the quickly associate people with food, be it sharks, coyotes, wolves, etc....
Deer, antelope, wild turkey, rattler.... But the "funniest" was a skunk.
I used to walk 50-70 miles per week, usually on specific routes around town that I'd measured to be 5, 7.5 and 10 miles in length, and almost always at night. Most of it was on sidewalks, but there was one stretch, about 2 blocks long, that was just an expanded animal trail through tall native grass, no lighting other than from the moon. That's where I met the skunk -- dark night, tall grass, right at my feet.
The thing is, shortly before that I'd had surgery for a large brain tumor which involved a craniotomy that, unfortunately, left me with no sense of smell. Zero. So here I am, 3-4 miles from home, and I don't know if I've been sprayed or not. I know that when I get home my wife will already be in bed, and I know my dog will be ON the bed. I just don't know if either of them will allow me to enter the bedroom!
Turns out I wasn't sprayed, but I was doing a lot of wondering before I got home.
If this wasn't a thread about TOWN meetings I'd tell my story about meeting a grizzly on a narrow trail.
yes do share . I have a close friend who at one time lived in Africa and she said one night she was outside and she decided to walk a few feet away from her home at the time . She ended up walking back to her house because she got an eerie feeling that she was being watched . Well one of her house people that cleaned and did her housework told her to come outside for a minute . The older man showed her lion paw prints very near to where she had been walking the previous night and he told her in no uncertain terms should she not be walking alone at night and no fire arm . She stayed there a year for an internship and left and she said she had never felt anything like that and it truly shook her . She now lives in the rural area of Wyoming and she loves it .
Coyotes will usually leave humans alone. They're ambush predators and don't normally attack prey larger than themselves unless it's otherwise impaired (a deer stuck in a snow drift for example).
Carry a walking stick.
If you're out in the woods then it's a bit different where you are, what with (four legged) cougars.
Coyote will regularly go after deer. They are pack hunters, and probably the number one predator of deer in the country. Yes, they will pick on the small, and week first, but regularly take down large, healthy deer.
When I lived in the Denver burbs I regularly saw Coyote in the neighborhood. We had a Moose once, and Proghorns too.
Deer, antelope, wild turkey, rattler.... But the "funniest" was a skunk.
I used to walk 50-70 miles per week, usually on specific routes around town that I'd measured to be 5, 7.5 and 10 miles in length, and almost always at night. Most of it was on sidewalks, but there was one stretch, about 2 blocks long, that was just an expanded animal trail through tall native grass, no lighting other than from the moon. That's where I met the skunk -- dark night, tall grass, right at my feet.
The thing is, shortly before that I'd had surgery for a large brain tumor which involved a craniotomy that, unfortunately, left me with no sense of smell. Zero. So here I am, 3-4 miles from home, and I don't know if I've been sprayed or not. I know that when I get home my wife will already be in bed, and I know my dog will be ON the bed. I just don't know if either of them will allow me to enter the bedroom!
Turns out I wasn't sprayed, but I was doing a lot of wondering before I got home.
If this wasn't a thread about TOWN meetings I'd tell my story about meeting a grizzly on a narrow trail.
I was fishing at a dam on the Ohio River late one night. There are no lights on the walk back to the parking lot when it was time to leave. It was a little after midnight (catfish bite better at night in the summer) and, while I was fishing, I could hear the coyotes howling all over the place between me and the car. Walking back to the car through the very very dark brush, I could hear them running around on both sides of me. My car never looked so good when I got there. It was one of those times where, like an old man I used to work with has said, you couldn't have driven a toothpick up a certain body opening with a sledge hammer!
Coyote will regularly go after deer. They are pack hunters, and probably the number one predator of deer in the country. Yes, they will pick on the small, and week first, but regularly take down large, healthy deer.
When I lived in the Denver burbs I regularly saw Coyote in the neighborhood. We had a Moose once, and Proghorns too.
This must be in the Northeast, where coyotes are forming packs. Normally they are solitary hunters. The scuttle-but is that they have cross-bred with wolves on their decades-long journey east, by way of a northern route through Canada, to fill the ecological niche left behind by the wolf's extirpation from the East.
No way. Coyotes are well-known as being very crafty pack hunters.
At our ranch in Wyoming now for 20 years, I've had to aggressively deal with them because we have free-ranging sheep (and previously, goats) which can be an attractive prey food source for the coyotes.
Especially in the spring each year when the litters of pups arrive, the coyotes return to our pastures from the creek bottom area where they den nearby. They learn to hunt in packs and two (or more) will generally try to nip at the underbelly/hindquarters of a sheep while the other nips away at the throat of the prey. Once one of them gets a solid bite in the wool coat, the other can really rip the prey animal apart at the other end and bring it down. They will attack full grown cows on the pastures, too … and it's not all that uncommon to see a surviving but badly injured cow with her hindquarters torn up from a coyote attack. Usually, spotting an injured cow in this condition means you've got to put the cow down.
We frequently hear the coyotes singing to each other as they organize their pursuit and attacks upon the livestock in early AM and at dusk. That's multiple animals singing back and forth, not solitary hunters.
When they bring down an animal, they will sing all the more to let their partners know where to come for the meal.
They are aggressive enough hunters that we've had more than a few times where we brought home livestock from the sale barn and had nothing but a skeletal carcass laying in the corral a hundred feet from our house the next morning. When you bring home a new ram ($$$) for a breeding season and new genetics into your flock and he's gone inside of 12 hours, it's especially heartbreaking.
We have a statewide coyote removal program funded by fees on our brand inspections (which are required for proof of ownership and transport of the livestock here), but our coyote problem here in SE Wyoming is nominal compared to other areas of the state. So we don't get much help from the program we're paying for.
My alternative has been to use LGD's, and we have settled on a breed that tends to be loyal and diligent in their job. They either chase off or can kill a coyote in a fight, but they cannot be everywhere all the time. Our livestock losses are much less with the LGD's, but we still lose some each year to coyotes. We've even been alerted to a coyote-LGD fight where the coyote was getting the worst of it and was down but not giving up or dead. I've then dispatched the coyote to save the wear & tear & potential injury to my LGD. It's pretty amazing how tough those coyotes can be … I had one I put 5 .22 rounds into it's head and when I went to put it into my loader bucket some minutes later, it still had enough fight left in it to snap at me. Fortunately, I'd prodded it with a pitchfork and not my hand to load it into the bucket. It was some minutes later before it died on the way to the dead animal pit.
Some years, the coyotes are extremely bold at roaming around here in the daylight. I have had numerous times when I'm out haying, especially when I'm baling or retrieving bales and I'll spot a coyote or two napping on a haybale. It's been a frequent enough occurrence that I now carry when I'm out in the fields. Having spotted a coyote when I was making a pass on a row, on my next pass I'll stop the tractor at a location where I would likely have a good shot if the coyote was still there. Sure enough, I've gotten out of the tractor and used a tire as a steady rest for my shot … and bagged several coyotes this way. A few times, I got two coyotes within 20 minutes of each other, not 250 yards away from each other. IMO, that's pretty bold behavior for the 2nd coyote to have not bolted to safety upon seeing me or hearing the gunshot. I used to think a .22 LR properly placed would be sufficient to kill one of these, but experience taught me otherwise. So now it's a 30-30 150 grain that I carry for this purpose … and even so, I prefer to get two solid hits and drop them rather than 1 shot and a wounded coyote that may yet recover.
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