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Our buddy Kirk Mona AKA The Twin Cities Naturalist delivers a truly compelling time lapse video of a Common Raven stripping fur from a dead coyote. Kirk even explains with his characteristic perspicacity what the corpse-robbing corvid is up to. Learn something cool today and check out this post!
Every child who has ever seen a cartoon featuring Wile E Coyote and Road Runner has to have wondered if poor Wile E ever had a fair shot at catching the Road Runner. Coyote chasing it, a Greater Roadrunner can reach speeds of 20 MPH (32 KPH) while a Coyote can reach speeds of up to 43 MPH (69 KPH). Shocking, no? … a.
Recent studies highlighted by the American Bird Conservancy show that cats make up a significant portion of the diet of Coyotes. Want your cat to survive? Keep it indoors! In related news, Universal Orlando’s Loews Hotel should be lauded for deciding to take action to remove a feral cat colony from the hotel’s grounds.
I am accustomed to seeing a Coyote or two on each visit I make to the park in the early morning before bikers, dog-walkers, joggers, and humanity in general get out and about. As I made my way into the park I spotted first one Coyote and then another and then another. But the Coyote count didn’t stop at three.
Even the coyote can’t make him change his ways. Road Runner, the coyote’s after you. Road Runner, the coyote’s after you. That coyote is really a crazy clown, When will he learn that he never can mow him down? Road Runner, Road Runner runs down the road all day.
Dogs are similarly dispersed across size ranges, with Foxes, Coyotes, and Wolves taking prey across different parts of the size range. among the Mustilids, and Coyotes and to a lesser extent Foxes. Plus, Coyotes eat Cats. So, in areas where Coyotes are becoming re-established, the Cat problem kinda goes away by itself.
It is really worth clicking through to this excellent blog post by Ron Dudley in which a coyote pays a price for catching a vole. The photos are amazing as is the commentary. Watching animals closely can lead to all sorts of discoveries! Hat-tip to Suzie Gilbert.
When we first ran this post in March 2009, we received links from David Ringer , Danny Germer , Nick Sly , Coyote Mercury , and Shelly. Have you written about a species of grackle or captured a photo that does this dashing dastard justice? If so, show us your grackles! Do you want to add to the list?
We’ve got coyotes in Chicago and its suburbs, but I’ve never bumped into one in the field. The tours out to the Stillwater Refuge and Carson Lake, though, offered good looks at two coyotes. Nothing, however, prepared me for the fauna that awaited last weekend at the Spring Wings festival in Fallon, Nevada.
They get hit by cars, suffer from parasites, predated upon by coyotes, and die from disease. And while I am sick of the cat colonies I am even more sick of the deluded people who believe that by feeding feral cats they are somehow helping them. Outdoor cats live short, ugly, violent lives.
Foxes, coons, coyotes, possums and hawks all get a free meal that lasts for days on some of the larger shoots.”. It was written by Bob Aronsohn, who, in December 2013, killed his 150,000th crow. The hunters who do not eat their crows) “are providing a smorgasbord for other wildlife!”
Also, a turkey fight and display will attract the attention of predators, I’m sure many a turkey lek gets ambushed by coyotes causing birds to flee in utter panic. With all that chasing and focus on hen heads, they may not notice the cars when they’re flying away.
Mallard s are a good example, a hearty and endurable bird that can survive sub zero temperatures so long as they found ample supplies of food like corn and some open water to roost on and be protected from coyotes and foxes.
Eastern flyway breeding populations appear to be maxing out their available habitat, and are subject to abundant natural limitations such as ground predation by coyotes, foxes, raccoons and opossums. Quick: what’s this? The handful of pairs that are attempting to nest in Ohio appear to winter in Tennessee. What if they’re shot?
Rabbits scamper into the underbrush, only to encounter a coyote nobody saw standing there. Carefully rehabbed seals are released, only to find an orca waiting silently beneath the water a hundred feet away.
In addition to killing birds of prey, brodifacoum has also killed coyotes, grey foxes, red foxes, kit foxes, mountain lions, bobcats, black bears, Pacific fishers, and other animals, including domestic dogs and cats. Syngenta warns that “Talon” is “hazardous to dogs, cats, pigs, poultry and other wildlife.”
The flip-side to this is that nesting in an urban area versus a rural area provides the owls with more protection from natural predators like coyotes and bobcats. But whatever the reasons, the school kids certainly don’t mind being entertained year-round by their charismatic little school mates.
One wouldn’t tether a rabbit out to get a shot of a fox or a coyote, or is that somehow different? I am well aware of the debate that this is no different than photographing birds at a feeder, but for me it feels different.
Groups across the country, including Project Coyote in California, are fighting similar battles. I have friends who hunt, and every one of them is disgusted by events like “Crow Down” and consider them bad publicity for true hunters.
Coyote bombs with sizzling wicks, so even at my sleepiest one glance at her chart would snap me into “en garde.” I took in a Warrior Queen Red-tailed Hawk hit by car (WQ RTHA HBC) who awed me with her strength and ferocity, but irritated me with her habit of trying to kill me every time I opened her crate.
In addition to these aerial predators, their eggs and young are often taken by squirrels, gray foxes, house cats, coyotes, gopher snakes, rattlesnakes, raccoons, American Crows and Western Scrub-Jays. Let us also not forget the two-legged predator with a shotgun.
Golden Gate Park was next and it delivered with a family of Great Horned Owls , nesting Cooper’s Hawks and Red-shouldered Hawks , coyotes, an annual American Bittern , Belted Kingfishers , Brown Creepers , and a host of small songbirds that I’m still getting to know. Hopefully I can share that story with you in a future post.
Here are some ads: This is from Advanced Telemetry Systems and it advertises how you can tag wildlife like coyotes and then check on your animals from anywhere…even from your beach vacation…and the magical wireless internet that is available there for your laptop.
Male Costa’s at Playa Coyote. Last summer, such a plant bloomed near Playa Coyote, near the Cerralvo Channel of the Sea of Cortez. Now, don’t get me wrong, the Costa’s is a truly beautiful bird. The easily identifiable purple gorget, when seen in the right light, is stunning.
Even worse, one of their self defense mechanisms when being attacked by a predator is to jump upwards, which might help them avoid a coyote but won’t help them get away from a car. Well, they were foraging in the grass when they weren’t running out in the road, which is an unfortunate habit that they have.
There was also a young and profoundly confused snowshoe hare who fled something unseen in the brush up onto the porch and under my chair, to say nothing of the songs of coyotes in the distance and an abundance of butterflies of all kinds.
No coyotes in sight right now, the Great Horned Owls are off in the cottonwoods closer to the river. If we get close enough we might see a pink maw and slivers of white teeth, ready to take a prairie dog by the throat and choke the life out but also rather perversely adorable. Maybe this is the one.
Result, families spending long dark seasons cooped up with each other, one-room schoolhouses as late as the 1950s, and a culture enamoured with self-sufficiency even to the point of self-destructiveness* (despite their willingness to graze their cows on BLM land and call on the ADC for coyote-shooting.)
As I have mentioned, the bird life there is relatively diverse and if you are lucky you can have an up close encounter with coyotes. Back in December when I was in Orange County, California, I enjoyed my early morning walks to and through Carbon Canyon Regional Park.
These ground birds have been clocked going 20 mph, though their coyote predators can go more than twice that. Of course, only thirty minutes later I saw my second roadrunner, this time standing on a lawn adjacent to a busy street! However, in real life Greater Roadrunners are quite different. Not so much, as the above photo demonstrates.
Likely he’d sacrificed those feathers escaping an attack; Sage Grouse have numerous predators on the high plains, including coyotes, badgers, and Prairie Falcons. In profile, he looked like a gigantic Western Meadowlark. The rest of his plumage seemed fine.
He was caught after a yearlong investigation by Virginia game officials that included the undercover purchases of 54 red foxes and 47 coyotes from Blevins. Hunters would then pay to hunt in the pens. The animals were transported in the closed bed of a pickup truck, sometimes with two dozen or more animals crowded together.
Coyotes took carrion from young Condors and then killed the weakest ones. Osborn gives story after story of having to “haze” young condors away from admiring crowds and off cliff sites accessible to coyotes (it seems that running and yelling at the top of your lungs is a job requirement).
adding wolves, who displace coyotes) can dramatically change the ecology and directly affect species diversity and abundance. If cats displace ferrets, then that probably means that birds are getting hit harder than rodents, and among birds, adult birds are getting hit harder than eggs or hatchlings.
This area, with its year round water supply, supports a huge amount of life, with coyotes, fox, bobcat and many different rodents, like this Mexican Ground Squirrel. There is also a kitchen dining room building across the courtyard. The is no refridgeration, so if you do visit, be sure too include a cooler with ice.
We also saw Prairie Dogs , Bison , Mule Deer , Abert’s Squirrel and Coyote. Although careful preparation, sophisticated intel from real ornithologists and a lot of planning had been derailed by half a meter of snow, we ended up scoring 63 species over the weekend. I ticked off 9 lifers. All bird and animal pictures are Brad’s.
Mauricio and Melba picked me up and if it weren’t for the Coyote we saw on the way it would have taken us 5 minutes to reach Chipinque Parque Ecologico. Late autumn 2022, I decided flying in a day early to do some weekend birding. I was joined by my colleague Mauricio, his wife Melba, and my friend David. It was David’s first time birding.
Coyote as it stayed just out of acceptable camera-range in Irvine Regional Park. He had a lot to choose from with displaying Clark’s Grebes , hordes of western hummingbirds, breeding plumaged American Avocets and all the other goodies that can be found in the diverse habitats of SoCal. How about you?
While Sitting in Church, a Videopoem – James Brush, Coyote Mercury. Turkey Vulture Wing Tagging – Charlotte Wasylik, Prairie Birder. Turkey Vultures Galore – Charlotte Wasylik, Prairie Birder. Kings of the Sky – Karen, The Greenbelt. Return of the Kings - Karen, The Greenbelt.
Coyote for keeping this great bird as popular as it is! So, be honest, how many of you saw this story, or series of photos, and somewhere in the back of your head, just had a little “Beep-beep” sneak out? Thank you ACME and Wiley E.
A camera with a motion-sensitive shutter had to be used to prove that there are coyotes living in at least one closed landfill. (I really don’t bird Northern New Jersey as often as I should.) Mammal life has been harder to find and photograph. There are, at least 2 species, thank goodness.
of Wildlife Services , which is involved in mainly predator control programs (coyotes are a big target). Environmental groups have called on Obama to get rid of the USDA's Dept. Ranchers oppose the move.
This section gives brief descriptions of the birds painted in the Portfolio section, sometimes elaborating on the behavior portrayed in the portrait (the advantages of flying at night for White-crowned Sparrow), sometimes giving additional facts of interest with a small dollop of humor (Greater Roadrunners are not in a perpetual war with coyotes).
Horned Screamer Michael McDonald is a lot like Wile E Coyote and would like to see a Rufous-vented Ground-cuckoo ! Plus, I mean, it’s a giant chicken-looking thing that’s actually related to ducks… with that kind of identity crisis going on, what’s not to love? My most-desired Brazilian bird?
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