There are coydogs, and plenty of them.
Some coydogs with mange were thought to be a chupacabra.
Interesting you brought up ravens. I think the Starling may have played apart in their population boom. They will tend a startling rookery almost like farmers. Even protecting it from cats and other birds of prey including ravens.
(Johnny Carson voice or Ed-) I did not know that.
Interesting.
We have a lot of Ravens and crows around here now. We don’t have Starlings. I think the Ravens and crows are showing up for the same reason as the coyotes. More vermin in the city means more food for predators.
As for Coyote hybrids, the Eastern Coyote is now significantly larger than the Western Coyote. Western Coyotes are the size of Border Collies - 25-35 lbs. Eastern Coyotes are closer to German Shepherd sized - 45-55 lbs. Probably because of cross-breeding.
Recently sighted a coyote trotting along at night (facing traffic like an experienced pedestrian) a highway ramp in the I 294/I55 corridor of Chicago. Mean fricking streets for animals but there is the canal and river that runs through there so habitat I guess. My daughter has heard rumor of coy/wolves in the great cemeteries in the city.
Probably not.
Coydogs are not quite cryptids, but they’re something that people think they’ve seen far more than actually exist. Coyotes are more or less exclusively monogamous (in areas of food abundance they just have much larger litters rather than seeking out multiple partners), dogs (and coydogs) don’t tend litters and are therefore selected against by coyote females, and also unlike dogs coyotes are highly seasonal breeders; male coyotes are more or less infertile outside of that narrow window.
Back in the 80s an Ohio survey of 414 skulls found 2% to be hybrids (Weeks, J.L et al., “Coyote in Ohio”); a 90s survey in Kentucky estimated hybridization at up to 11% but found only 1 out of 28 samples to actually be coydogs (John Cox, “Detection of Hybridization Events Between the Coyote and the Domestic Dog”). A 2008 scat analysis, like Weeks focused in Ohio, concluded 2/57 samples were from hybrids.
The largest study that I’m aware of, analyzing SNPs between “coyotes,” “wolves”* and dogs concludes that a small percentage of the coyote genome is derived from domestic dogs, but:
We found no evidence for ongoing coyote-dog hybridization; the homogeneity and low proportion of the dog component in our large sample of wild eastern coyotes suggest that coyote-dog hybridization is infrequent, although the wild population is so abundant that coyote-dog F1 hybrids may appear at a frequency below the detection power of our sample.
— Monzón J, Kays R, and Dykhuizen DE. (2014) “Assessment of coyote-wolf-dog admixture using ancestry-informative diagnostic SNPs.” Molecular Ecology vol. 23 issue 1.
“Coydogs” are something that has fascinated American pop culture since at least the early 20th century, around the nature-fakers period, where they’re often depicted as unusually sly and crafty, but also imbued with an innate hatred of man and civilization for some reason.
But they’re not actually very common, and the evidence for them tends to be “I saw a coyote that I thought was too big” or “I saw a coyote with weird coloration.” The same way scat analysis indicates housepets to be a vanishingly small percent of coyote diet—on the order of low single digits for urban coyotes—and the evidence for the contrary tends to be “well, everyone knows” or “well it happened to my neighbor.”
* “Coyotes” and North American “wolves” are the same species—literally all coyotes have some wolf DNA and vice-versa—with an extremely recent common ancestor, derived from a population that crossed over the Bering land bridge and already had some degree of domestic dog in them. We can infer this because North American wolves are often black—up to 75% of some populations—and melanism is a trait that comes from domestic dogs.
My mother hated starlings, because apparently they pooped on everything. Probably they got her outdoor laundry drying lines more than once, although I don’t know how she knew it was starling poop. Or else it was family lore that she was repeating.
I don’t know if she had an opinion about ravens or crows. We didn’t have any of those around that I remember.
We have massive numbers of geese on and around our lake (they left about a week or two ago for warmer climes), so Raven poop doesn’t really bother me. It’s probably buried under the goose poop anyway.
According to wiki, Coyotes are Canis Latrans and Wolves are Canis Lupus, but yeah, their offspring are often fertile, so…
also according to wiki- Some 15% of 10,000 coyotes taken annually in Illinois for their coats during the early 1980s may have been coydogs based on cranial measurements.
But I didnt mean that coydogs are super common, it is just that they are not in any way mythical.
And like your cite said “although the wild population is so abundant that coyote-dog F1 hybrids may appear at a frequency below the detection power of our sample.”
So coyotes are super duper common, and some small % may be coydogs, but that small % still means quite a few.
Personally have seen hundreds of coyotes. Only one that appeared distinctively different. Size and color. It obviously was part coyote.
I hear them every night.
I know they will/would kill pets and livestock if given half a chance.
The only one that’s ever been close enough to my house to really worry about was coming to the dog kennel at certain times. He had figured out when the auto feeders shot out the feed for the beagles. He could tell time, in a way.
There were always the bits that were thrown outside the wire.
He came like clockwork. Ate his bits and moved on.
He couldn’t get in the kennel.
We noticed he had started digging where the kennel wire met the communal dog house. He would have eventually got in there. Beagles wouldn’t have stood a chance.
I had to shoot him. I really hated to do it. He was obviously smart among his kin.
I had small pets, chickens and kids running around. It was a necessary thing. I didn’t like to do it, tho’.
They’re all over Tucson. One used to sit its furry little butt in the driveway at work and watch the road - for roadkill, I presume. I would literally have to inch up to it until my bumper was almost touching it and honk before it would move.
I had an angry guest tell me to go make a group shut up so he could sleep. Yeah, I’ll just channel Doctor Dolittle and do that…
One of the interesting facts I read in Coyote America is that, while coyotes do kill pet dogs and cats, they don’t make up much of the urban coyote diet. The theory is that they kill them to eliminate competition from other predators in their territory.
They eat them when they are starving. The prefer things that dont fight back, like rodents, lizards, dead things etc.