Inspiried by this thread–
Coyotes are 120 pound rats. Vermin. Furry pigeons.
In rare circumstances, groups are rumored to attack humans.
Are the attack rumors true?
How common is it?
Numbers of coyotes typically involved?
And, have they adapted to city life enough to swipe the victim’s wallet & credit card? 
120lb coyotes!
A coyote attacks small prey for food,or.working in pairs,can bring down a larger victim--------but a 120 pound coyote?
Where’ja ever see one?
EZ
OK, so I lose the “Guess The Animal’s Weight” contest at the County Fair.
How about some info?
Well the coyotes in these parts are bigger than the ones out west, but still only 20-45 pounds.
It seems that most coyote attacks are on younger children. We have coyotes harrassing people a couple of times a year near my house on the American River Parkway in Sacramento. Usually, the victims have younger children, elderly, or have pets with them. Also, often they report that the coyotes don’t look healthy or are acting abnormally.
While searching for a news article I came across this link of reported coyote attacks:
http://tchester.org/sgm/lists/coyote_attacks.html
I won’t make the obvious dingo joke.
Oops, looks like I did.
Just about! Because they are usually solitary, and they’re relatively small, they make perfect suburban/ubran opportunist. Kind of like slightly larger racoons. Of course, it doesn’t hurt that they’re REALLY smart, too.
Only in the OP
No reports of coyote attacks on humans here in Virgina yet, and we see coyotes several times per week in our suburban area.
Coyotes have a different reputation in my area. Horse farmers consider them a valuable addition to the food chain. When coyotes are present there are fewer rabbits, groundhogs, and skunks to dig holes that might break a horse’s leg, fewer rotting corpses of said vermin on the roads, and fewer rats in the hay and feed. Coyotes seem to have taken the place of the gray wolf (extinct in the south for many years now, thanks to extermination by farmers) and are providing a valuable service by keeping the rodent and small mammal population in check, though I imagine coyotes in more urban environment might cause concern to parents with small children.
A smallish predator at the top of the food chain has been accepted for the most part by local landowners and farmers, though any coyote (or fox, or raccoon) found to be harmful or acting strangely can be shot if it is deemed necessary.
My dog has tangled with a small coyote a couple times in the past week and the coyote appears to be about 35 pounds at the most- about the size of a malnourished German Shepard or a very large fox. When I have stepped out to intervene and bring my dog indoors, the coyote immediately runs away.
I can hear quite a few yelping at night (very distinctive barking), and they do travel through my yard, but keep moving. As yet, none have raided the trash cans or harmed my pets, and seem to be making a good living hunting rodents in the fields and woods around here.
About a year ago, I was out walking my dog at night (I live in the foothills north of Pasadena, CA) and saw a pair of nearly identical canines, looking about 50-60 pounds apiece to my unschooled eye, running up the street, presumably back toward Angeles National Forest. They stopped short and shied away from my dog (a 45 pound dalmatian/pitbull/boston terrier mix), and I got a very good look at them. Kind of light coloration, but otherwise very coyote-ish – big ears, bushy tail, a little furrier than looks right on a dog that shape, etc.
They didn’t look particularly small to me, though, and now I’m wondering whether they were, in fact, coyotes. I assumed they were, at the time, because we have lots of coyotes around.
I’m pretty sure these weren’t any kind of domestic dog. Are feral dogs a possibility?
And fast. I’ve seen a few running on open range land.
From the link - “Coyotes normally run as fast as 25 to 30 miles an hour, but they can run 35 to 40mph”
Seen it, I was really stunned. I’ve got border collie mixes that are very fast, but this was something. I saw one from about 1/2 mile away, he crossed in front of me. He was gone in seconds.
We occasionally camp on some property that we have in mountain range land. They make a real earie yip/yap sort of howling noise when they are running in a pack.
I would bet those were coyotes, Scupper.The coloration that I have seen is reddish in summer, and light brown to gray in winter. I have seen them nearly as big as a German Shepard, and as small as a gray fox. Big ears and bushy tail sounds right. Coyotes here travel both individually and in groups.
Spotting on in a modern locale is not quite as romantic as it seemed in the old black and white cowboy movies, is it?
Vancouver has plenty of urban coyotes, and they occupy much the same niche as rats and raccoons, although lucky/agressive coyotes will go after the small rodents, and small pets. It was kinda neat-- when rabies went through town, the racoon population dropped down tremendously, as did the coyotes, but the rat population soared. Within two years the coyote population was estimated to be double what it had been before the rabies epidemic, while it took the racoons much longer to re-establish themselves.
Having run into quite a few while walking through the woods, I can tell you that coyotes are pretty tall dogs with very long bushy tails, and they always look like they’re starving to death. They’re greyhound-thin.
And that’s what eventually leads to coyotes getting aggressive. People see these dog-like creatures, assume they’re starving, and start feeding them cheeseburgers and chicken wings. Once they get familiar with people, and recognize them as a source of food and not something to be scared of, they start hanging around like feral dogs. Once in a blue moon they’ll go after a baby, but in every case I looked at, the parents were being pretty damn inattentive. Like ‘our kid is napping on the blanket so let’s play frisbee and smoke a doobie’ inattentive.
In 6 years of covering stories (ending in 2003) the worst injury to a person was a couple of stitches to an infant. But the coyote took one nip, the kid screamed, and the coyote tore out of there like a bat out of hell. Animal officers shot what they thought was the responsible beast, and found it had half a hamburger and a bunch of fries in its belly.
There was only one report of a ‘pack’ of coyotes. What probably happened is that a mother was prowling around with her pup, so the two canines were running around together in a park, saw the tidbit-sized creature, grabbed it and ran off.
And if you have a missing cat in Vancouver, it got eaten by a coyote.
In San Diego, we have several parks that serve as “wildlife corridors”. They extend for miles along canyon bottoms that run parallel to the freeways. One evening I was trail running and came across 5 coyotes, obviously out foraging for their dinner. They weren’t aggressive, but they gave me a good look, and stood their ground. I gave them a wide berth–and didn’t go running in that area for awhile.
(I can’t tell you how many “lost cat/have you seen my little dog” flyers I see posted in the vicinity of these parks.)
It is breathtakingly ignorant after all of the publicity about feeding wild animals that people still do it. As I wrote inthis post when they expect to get food from people they begin to demand it.
Just for fun, here’s Varmint Al’s Coyote Attacks on Children.
Interesting - sounds like the Urban Coyote is the US equivalent of the UK Urban Fox. There are estimated to be 10,000 or so foxes living in London alone- I have encountered several foraging late at night around slap-bang in the middle of the city (the equivalent of a block or two from Wall Street, to use a US analogy).
They are basically harmless to anything other than very small pets. Coming in through cat-flaps and stealing food is about as bad as they get. However, like any large enough statistical sample there will be anomalies. Baby bitten by fox in bedroom - experts go “WTF??” in unison.
Still, it’s nice to encounter a bit of wild-life in the city. And it allowed my friends housemate Filipe to acquire the nickname of “Fox-Puncher Fil”, which can’t be bad.
Great Article on the Coyote’s of D.C., MD and NoVa. It touches on the Urban legend that Insurance Companies and state DNR’s are in a conspiracy to bring back Coyotes to bring down deer collisions – silly and not true.
However, what is true is that there is a impact on migratory geese and a number of other animals including the fox. I have seen quite a few more daylight fox over the past few years and thought that was cool. Not so, Coyotes are now the top dog (harhar ) nocturnal predator and the fox is responding by becoming more diurnal.