The Star‘s urban affairs reporter Carola Vyhnak did a pretty good turn as an outdoors and science writer over the weekend with an “”Urban Animals” story on the oversized coyotes, or undersized wolves, or coywolves if you prefer that are being spotted near towns east of Toronto and near the north side of Lake Ontario. Pretty good pic, too. Look at that narrow coyote snout, and the broad face and suggestions of muscularity that cry wolf. She calls it an apparent, emerging species. The Tracker is unsure if that’s what it is in formal systematics, but a university geneticist she interviewed says it is evolution in action.

    The basic story of interbreeding between the two species – western coyotes and eastern wolves - and the spread into the mid and north Atlantic states and provinces of North America by resultant oversized coyotes is not new. But this account gives it immediacy. Behaviorally, she reports, they have a blended personality. Livestock ranchers are not thrilled; some say the 80-pound canids are able to take down grown cattle. Others say that’s hard to imagine. But the story does provide a close-up refresher on the notable, relatively recent appearance on the scene by this mashup of a predator that many simply call the eastern coyote.

See Also:

•  North Country Public Radio (Upstate NY) – Brian Mann (June 15): Coy dogs, coy wolves: what are those things out there? ; Link goes to an audio option. He talks with an authority in Ontario. It’s definitely part wolf, not dog, the man says. It’s a vivid report including an eyewitness account of three of the animals taking down a deer on a frozen Adirondack lake.
• Plattsburgh Press Republican – Dennis Aprill (Jun 13): Wolf or coyote? Genetics tell complicated tale / difficult to label this North Country predator ;  Has more info on the hybrid’s wolf side – the smallish eastern Canadian wolf looks likely, and that in turn is a close relative of the near-extinct red wolf. And, it says here, the Great Lakes region has a three-way hybrid: Timberwolf (or western gray), eastern wolf, and coyote. Also, that eastern wolves themselves may be a hybrid wolf-coyote with a bloodline going back to the end of the Pleistocene glaciations. It also gets into why great big wolves still hold sway farther north in Canada. One answer: moose. This story is a-gallop with facts and reasonable guesses.

-CP

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