Whenever I go camping I always wake up around 3:00 A.M from the howling of a wolf or coyote. I remember I was camping up in New York State and I woke up around then everynight to hearing those Wolfs or coyotes whichever...I didnt think much of it. But then later i was camping closer to where I live and I heard them again around 3. And There arent alot of wolves or coyotes in Maryland...anyway I realized something is up. Then I started to experment. I went into my yard one night etc I fell asleep. I woke up again at 3:00 A.M NOW! Why am I being stalked by wolves or coyotes? I am 99% sure that there are no wolves or coyotes in Westminster Maryland.
I would suggest that perhaps at 3am you have a little bit of an overactive imagination, in fact judging by your posts so far it seems to be a very active imagination. Admittedly I wouldn't know much about Wolves or Coyote's where I am, however sometimes dogs howl if they are leashed up or in someones back yard for the night until someone lets them in, which might be mistaken to be a call of the wild. I wouldn't draw a direct conclusion that you are being stalked by wolves, otherwise you might find your imagination getting the better of you which might not be such a good idea.
They are either coyotes or domestic hounds. Wolves don't have as wide a range as coyotes. I wouldn't think there are any wolves on the east coast. The pilgrims probably thought wolves were evil and therefore killed them, paving the way for coyotes. North American wolves are more of a Canadian animal now.
In native american mythology, the coyote is considered a trickster spirit. Not an evil trickster as in Loki, but a good teacher. Teaching through tricks. I can't recall any stories right now, but there are several examples of man being taught integral lessons through the trickery of the coyote. The kind of lessons where you think you're being punished or something else until the end when you go "Whoah." Have you seen the insanity pepper episode of the simpsons? The coyote sends Homer on a quest for his soul mate implying that Marge is not his soul mate. Turns out that she is but Homer just needed to realize that and not take her for granted. That's the way the coyote works. But, this is, of course, off-topic. Unless you believe that coyotes really are trickster spirits. And in that case perhaps they're trying to teach you something. Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image!
Wrong about that. There was a big story in the Washington Post recently about the migration of coyotes into this area. They've been spotted in the D.C. suburbs in both Maryland and Virginia. Big suckers, too. Not those little thirty-pound guys we have back in California, these weigh fifty pounds and are not to be trifled with. Wolves and coyotes have historically almost never occupied the same region. In fact, wolves are the coyotes' only natural predator. However, Homo sapiens has done such a splendid job of eliminating wolves from almost everywhere east of the Rockies, that the coyotes are naturally moving in to fill the void. They're better "camp followers" than wolves anyway, since they have more of a natural predilection to augment their hunting kills by scavenging garbage dumps than wolves do. It won't be long before the coyotes in the East learn the same trick that their smaller western cousins already know: carry their tails upright like dogs instead of down between their legs, so if they travel in ones and twos people just think they're stray dogs. You'll be seeing coyotes strolling down the median of your main boulevard in broad daylight just like we see in the Los Angeles suburbs. Keep your pets indoors or get a livestock guard dog like our 100-lb Anatolian Guardian. Coyotes are brazen. One jumped the fence into our neighbor's yard while the whole family was there having a picnic, snatched their dog right from under their feet, and jumped back out with it. In the long run you'll be glad to have coyotes around. Many eastern cities have become utterly overrun with deer, who have no more natural predators except automobiles. In some cities you simply can't grow a garden because the deer graze it down to the roots; in others they license bow hunters to take them out, which is both a little inefficient and way scary. The coyotes will happily keep their population in check. As happens with many species, coyotes and wolves learned to coexist on the fringes of human settlements. (Any animal brave and curious enough to tolerate the proximity of humans will also not mind the presence of other scavengers and may even take an interest in inter-species dating.) The "red wolf" of the northeastern U.S. is thought to be a coyote-wolf hybrid. DNA testing will tell us for sure if it hasn't already. Whatever it is, that could be what you heard howling. Large dogs that are allowed to run loose also interbreed with wolves, and occasionally with coyotes. Sometimes it's a female who comes back home to give birth and introduce a little coyote or wolf DNA into the domestic gene pool. It might also have been one of them that you heard. But dogs do howl -- after all, recent DNA analysis has proven that dogs and wolves are really one species. (The documentation for that has been posted elsewhere on SciForums.) Even our Lhasa Apsos howl.
Sidethought: The smell of Coyotes is actually quite pleasing. Anyhow, the good ol' Coyotes are nocturnal (probably same for wolves). I was camping in hills of Santa Barabara CA and had to take a dump in the middle of the night. Sure enough, about a bazillion coyotes were trottin' all around me as I did my business. They didn't seem interested in considering me 'prey' as they were more freaked about about what I was and what I was doing.
Most predatory species that have the constitution to also be scavengers easily adapt to a diurnal life when humans come along and change the ecosystem. I've seen raccoons in state parks trotting around at high noon being real cute and begging for marshmallows. The foxes near our home raid the compost pile and eat the seeds that the wild birds drop from their feeder in broad daylight. Coyotes have become extremely diurnal in L.A. That's when people aren't home so it's the safest time to raid their garbage cans. There are also more small pets outside in the daytime, since people expect the predators to be out at night. As I said, one jumped the fence into our neighbor's yard at about 2pm and ran off with their dog. Wolves aren't quite so adaptable because, being larger and having more of a pack instinct, they much prefer hunting to scavenging. But wolves are smart -- as smart as coyotes and smarter than dogs, so they'll figure it out if they have to. (Even though wolves and dogs are a single species, the wolf subspecies has a larger brain because their carnivorous diet brings in more protein than the omnivorous diet that dogs have been eating for ten thousand years. It takes a lot of protein to keep a brain in good working order.) You're lucky, I'd say. Coyotes in the city travel in ones and twos and wouldn't attack prey as large as a human. But in the wild, as you noticed, they hang out in packs like wolves. Ranchers have plenty of problems with coyotes bringing down cattle, which are quite a bit larger than you. I wouldn't advise trusting your luck a second time. Perhaps they had just eaten.
Its not unlikely at all that you hear coyotes when you go camping. They are the domiant carnivore in North America and the entire contenent is their range. There just arn't large swaths of North America that are coyote free. I hear them all the time too, but I live between a huge state park and an indian reservation. There sure is something eerie about hearing a whole pack of them howling at eachother.
Sounds like a word for "hybrid coyotes." All species of genus Canis (jackals, coyotes, wolves including dogs and probably dingos) are highly social, pack hunters. The more adventurous ones -- which are the ones most likely to hang around human settlements -- occasionally try inter-species dating.
Hyote- a cross between a hyena and a coyote. There's been a few sightings of them in Maryland, pictures, and recordings. However, the pictures and recordings are fuzzy, and is hard to see the picture. It's pretty ugly, but how did this coyote mate with a hyena? Are hyenas allowed to be kept as exotic pets in the US, or Maryland?
That is absolute drenn. The definition of a genus, in biology, is a set of species that have enough similarity in their DNA that they can interbreed. The classification of genera has undergoing some profound changes since we've been able to actually look at that DNA, and until things settle down that rule has many exceptions. But there is no exception to the fact (not a rule but a fact) that species of two different families are not genetically similar enough to be able to cross-breed. Coyotes are the species Canis latrans, within the family Canidae: dog-like animals. Hyenas come in a wide variety of species and genera, but they are all members of the family Hyenidae. Canines, felines, hyenas, bears, weasels, and a couple of other families are all members of the order Carnivora. They all share a common ancestor if you go back several hundred million years. But in the intervening epochs, their DNA has drifted too far apart. So even though they have very similar dentition, digestion, musculature, and intelligence -- which makes them all hunters or at least scavengers of already-dead prey -- they are not closely related enough to interbreed. Someone is either trying to fool you, or else they have done some remarkably bad science and reached a conclusion so invalid that it is ridiculous. Maryland is undergoing an invasion of coyotes, which were never native to this part of the country while wolves still thrived. The coyotes that are arriving here (I'm working in D.C. even though I live in California) are much larger than the ones we're used to out West. Our coyotes weigh about thirty pounds. The urbanized ones travel in ones and twos so they don't attract a lot of attention. They can eat cats and poodles. But if they want to dine on mutton or beef they have to work as a pack, which they can only do out on the open range. In the West, many gentleman ranchers post a few llamas out among their livestock. Llamas are as tough as their cousins in the Old World, the camels. They can and do stomp coyotes into jelly. The animals they're calling hyotes have obviously cross-bred with some related canines along their migration path. Probably just really big dogs that they couldn't kill and eat. Imagine a coyote with a little St. Bernard, Rottweiler, or Irish wolfhound blood to boost his size. Frightening. As a result, the new breed of coyotes on the East Coast weigh about fifty pounds, almost double. A pair of these suckers can bring down a sheep or a goat, and even a llama. They could probably even take down an average human. Fortunately like all predators that settle into a life on the edge of human civilization, they are cowards who always go for the easy kill or just dine at the local dumpster. Why bother getting your ass kicked by a billy goat or a llama stud, even if you would eventually prevail, when there are half-eaten Big Macs in the trash just around the corner, with apple turnovers for dessert? But if these guys ever overbreed and start getting too hungry, they'll do what the cougars in the same situation have started doing in California: lying in wait for small people traveling alone, and pouncing on them. In California there has already been one documented, verified case of a female jogger being killed and eaten by a starving cougar. Our coyotes are too small to mess with us. But yours aren't. Be forewarned. No, hyenas may not be legally kept as pets by private individuals without a lot of special licenses like Siegfried and Roy have for their tiger-breeding facility. But that doesn't mean nobody does it. This is America after all. Orphaned hyena cubs raised by humans are reported to make very good pets. They have a stronger instinct for scavenging than most canines and felines, so if they are fed pet food all their lives they wouldn't think of wasting their time learning to hunt. Like all social mammals, in captivity they easily adapt to a multiple-species pack and love their human roommates. Each species of hyena can, by definition, cross-breed with other species within his own genus. Whether he wants to is a different question, but it's at least biologically possible. But no hyena of any species can cross-breed with any member of the dog, cat, bear, or weasel families.
