Father of geese

The trilling chirps of greylag goslings fill the morning air. The dew is heavy and cool against the late spring grass. The sun casts down upon the verdant land, and it shines against the greenery that magical shade of green that it turns when it is just starting to approach its summer fullness.

Konrad Lorenz comes to the goslings in the morning dew, and they race to meet his shoes. They know him as their doting parent, for when they first hatched, he was the first thing they saw. Goose instinct says follow that first thing you see when you hatch. That is your parent.

Konrad knows they will come wherever he goes. He was one of the first people to describe the phenomenon by which precocial birds attach themselves to the first moving object they encounter upon leaving the egg. They know him as their father, nothing more and nothing less.

When he lies before them in the cool grass, they gently peck at his goatee.  A beaming smile crosses his face. He is smitten with his charges.

Such a gentle man, so tender with these wee ones.

Yet behind the man lies a hidden darkness.

Raised in parochial Austria and educated at Columbia, he studied medicine at the University of Vienna, then got a doctorate in zoology. But in the 30s, the nation of Austria had turned inward and darker. The Catholic Church held sway. It was stifling a curious mind of science.

In the 30s, he studied the greylags closely. He kept wild ones and the tame varieties and crossed them, and he believed that the tame ones were degenerates. Their blood tainted the wild ones when they were crossed, and his ideas got swept up in the Zeitgeist of racial hygiene.

When the Anschluss came, he joined Hitler’s party and became Nazi scientist. In 1940, he found a job as a professor the University of Koenigsberg, but the war was not far off. He was drafted into the Werhmacht, where he worked on a project that studied the so-called Mischlinge– people who were half-German and half-Polish.

It is the same sort of science he performed on greylags that he now performed on his fellow man.

The Soviet Union beat the Nazis at Stalingrad, and the war was all but lost. The Germans sent as many men as they could to that far eastern front, and Lorenz was sent to defend the Fatherland from the great red Slavic horde. He found himself a prisoner of war, where he worked as a medic for the hated Bolsheviks. He kept a pet starling and wrote on a little manuscript. And he survived.

One day, he would say that he saw much of himself in those Soviet doctors. They were committed to an ideology, an ideology imposed by the state, and in that he saw his own folly through those years of the 30s and the war.

He returned to Vienna, where he loved his wife and dogs and his children. He kept a menagerie of all sorts of animals. He worked at the Max Planck Institutes in Westphalia and Bavaria, and he wrote books on animals and their behavior.

And he tried to forget that he had once allowed himself to become caught up in the madness the wrecked his nation. He won the Nobel Prize for Medicine, sharing it with Karl von Frisch, a fellow Austrian who was deemed a mischling (why different spelling?) and forced into retirement for the crime of “practicing Jewish science,” and Niko Tinbergen, who fought to defend his native Netherlands against the Nazis and was held as prisoner of war.

Lorenz would spend the rest of his life with this stigma of having joined in that great madness. He first denied his membership to that party, but the records were soon revealed to the public.

And all knew that he had partaken in the blood and fury, not as a fanatic but as a man of science.

So he would spend the rest of his days trying to find absolution for that great sin, trying to make amends to his friend Niko.

And on nice late spring days, he would run with his goslings and lead them along the green paths and let them eat the forbs and grass, and then would lead them on to his beloved Danube, where he would enter the water like a great crocodile and the goslings would take to their aquatic existence as true waterfowl.

A true romantic lover of the wildness of Central Europe, Lorenz would work to create the Green Party and fight to preserve nature.

But none of that can atone for the madness that reason excused and acquiesced and rationalized.

So on this day, he leads the goslings onward through the greenery. Onward along the lovely green paths of Altenberg, the merry band goes.

A gosling has never heard the word “National Socialist,” nor even processes the understanding of its horrors. It knows only to follow that which it thinks is its parent.

A gentle soul trying to escape his past horror. Once a young monster, now leading on his chirping charges into the sunshine.

 

 

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Why are pronghorns so fast?

Our brains like simple answers. We love to see the cause and then the effect, and we constantly look for them in nature.  At one time, we believed that the appearance of comets in the sky would be harbingers of great doom. And even in the past century in my home state, it has long been claimed that the appearance of Mothman in the area around Pt. Pleasant corresponded with the Silver Bridge collapse.

Correlation does not equal causation. Chanticleer, that old rooster of English Medieval lore, believed that his crowing at dawn made the sun rise.  When two variables occur at the same time but don’t have any causal relationship, they are called stochastic. Stochastic is one of my favorite words from graduate school, and even today when someone posits a bogus relationship between two variables, I say “Those are stochastic variables.”  I get some odd looks, but that was the point.

In trying to understand the complex phenomena that comprise evolution, we are constantly looking for these relationships. Some of them make some good sense and are well-supported with the data. We know that predators are the driving force behind making the prey swift and nimble, and we also know that plant-eating animals are the driving force behind the development of thorns and toxic plants.

But sometimes, our desire to see patterns leads us astray.  One example of what may be an erroneous positing of stochastic variables involves one of North America’s most unusual animals.

If one were to go to Wyoming on a hunting trip, there is a good chance that the outfitter will tell you to buy “antelope tags.”  Tags, of course, are licenses that give permission to the hunter to take a particular species, and in Wyoming, there is great interest in the pursuit of antelope.

But the little secret is there are no antelope in Wyoming. Indeed, the only true antelope in the United States are gemsbok that have been introduced to specific part of New Mexico, and Texas game ranches are full of various species of Old World antelope.

But no true antelope is native to the Americas. The animal we call an “antelope” should be more appropriately called “the pronghorn.”  It is not an antelope at all, but it is the last survivor of a lineage of creatures that are much more closely related to the various giraffe species and the okapi.  The pronghorn and its extinct kin are placed in a superfamily of Artiodactyla called Giraffoidea. These animals have bony processes that stick off their heads. In the giraffe and okapi, these are called ossicones and are covered in hair. In the pronghorn, a sheath of keratin grows over the bone. This sheath is shed every year, which leads to the claim that the pronghorn is the only animal that loses its horns every year.

The animal we call a pronghorn is superficially quite similar to what we would call an antelope or gazelle in the Old World.  But these similarities arose through parallel evolution. Both gazelles and pronghorns evolved in the open land where all sorts of cursorial predators hunted them. Predation forced these animals into swiftness and nimbleness.

That part is not much up for debate.

The problem comes with a specific claim about pronghorns.  One odd feature of this species is its speed. The top speed of an adult pronghorn is 55 mph (88.5 km/h). This speed far exceeds any of its predators that were around in historical times. A pronghorn can smoke a pack of wolves or coyotes and can easily outrun a cougar or a bear.

This high speed has vexed science for quite some time, but there has been an attempt to explain how it could evolved using predation as the driving force.

The hypothesis even points to a specific predator.

At one time the cougar lineage was much more diverse than it is now.  Right now, only three cats still exist in this lineage:  the cougar/mountain lion/puma/catamount/painter/panther (all names for one species), the jaguarundi, and the cheetah of Africa and Iran.

But during the Pleistocene, there were long-limbed cats that superficially resembled the cheetahs of the Old World. They were called “American cheetahs,” but analysis of mitochondrial DNA extracted from their fossils revealed they were much more closely related to cougars. Indeed, they were more closely related to cougars than cougars are to jaguarundi, which complicates the whole move to place jaguarundis in the same genus as the cougar. The two extinct American cheetahs are currently classified in the genus Miracinonyx, while the cougar is in Puma and the jaguarundi is in Herpailurus. Because these two American “cheetahs” are closer to the cougar, placing the jaguarundi in Puma creates a paraphyletic genus. This problem could all be solved if we just placed the two American “cheetahs” into Puma, but not everyone agrees with the mitochondrial DNA assessment of their phylogeny.

Let’s just say that the current pronghorn species lived at the same time as these lithe cougars, and it has been suggested that these cheetahs are the driving force behind the evolution of the extreme speed. The person who came up with this suggestion was a pronghorn expert named John Byers. Byers does not claim that these “cheetahs” were the sole force behind the development of speed in pronghorns. Instead, he lists them among a whole guild of running predators that could have placed selection pressures on pronghorns to force them into the evolution of speed.

The claim that these “cheetahs” were the driving force behind pronghorn speed has been picked up on the popular press though. Wildlife writer Dan Flores even made this claim recently on the Joe Rogan Podcast, and one can find countless pieces on the internet (including this blog when I was a lot more naive) that the extinct North American cheetahs are the “but for” cause of the pronghorn’s fleetness.

The problem with this claim is that it leaves out the nuance of the original hypothesis, and what we’re left with is a sort of cartoon version of evolution.

On the blog Laelaps, a great amount of skepticism is leveled at this hypothesis, largely because the popular understanding of how North American cheetahs might have affected pronghorn evolution.

One problem is that no one really knows how the two species of North America cheetah lived:

We don’t know very much about the natural history of either Miracinonyx species. Their skeletons are cheetah-ish, but that’s not nearly enough to pin these carnivores as the inspiration for artiodactyl agility. In fact, the ecological context of Miracinonyx bones hints that these cats were not simply speedy specialists who prowled open grasslands.

In their 1990 study, Van Valkenburgh and collaborators noted that later Miracinonyx bones have been found from Nebraska to Pennsylvania and Florida in deposits which accumulated under varying conditions. These cats were apparently just as at home among coastal savannahs as mountain stream valleys. More recently, at the 2010 Society of Vertebrate Paleontology meeting, John-Paul Hodnett and coauthors presented a poster about Miracinonyx that frequented caves in prehistoric Grand Canyon, Arizona. There was a distinct lack of fast-running, open-savannah prey animals during the same time period – the researchers noted that the extinct mountain goat Oreamos harringtoni was the most common possibly prey animal in the area. Rather than speeding over the grasslands, Hodnett and colleagues reported, the Grand Canyon Miracinonyx may have lived like snow leopards, bounding down sheer rock faces in pursuit of mountain goats.

This isn’t to say that Miracinonyx never bolted after equally-swift prey. It’s only to point out that we don’t know much about the cat’s ecology, feeding habits, or hunting strategy. There are a few ways we could find out a bit more, though.

Coprolites attributable to Miracinonyx might contain identifiable bone fragments of the cat’s prey. And while such a find is a longshot, perhaps a trackway made by a Miracinonyx running or launching itself into pursuit could tell us about how these cats actually moved. Both lines of evidence suffer from the complexities of accurately attributing a particular trace fossil to a trace-maker, though. Another route may be to compare the isotopic clues in the teeth of Miracinonyx to those of their potential prey, as was recently done for two sabercats and a bear dog found in Spain. By ascertaining where herbivores were feeding, and how geochemical signatures of prey became locked in carnivore teeth, paleontologists could narrow down the preferred habitats and prey of Miracinonyx. Furthermore, a poster presented by Natalia Kennedy and coauthors at the 2012 SVP meeting outlined a new attempt to compare the spine of the modern cheetah to that of Miracinonyx and other extinct cats to see how skeletal anatomy influenced flexibility and lifestyle.

Miracinonyx might have been the reason for the swiftness of pronghorn. False cheetahs and archaic pronghorn overlapped in time, if not habitat, for as much as three million years. But saying Miracinonyx was certainly a speed demon that gave pronghorn a reason to run is only supported by the barest amount of evidence. If we’re going to understand the evolution and natural history of these animals, we must first untangle their histories and the specific details of their ecology. The Just-So story of how the pronghorn got its speed has yet to be tested by the evidence which resides in the fossil record.

So we really don’t know enough about the extinct North American “cheetahs” at all, and we certainly don’t know enough to make claims that they were the driving force behind the evolution of speed in pronghorns.

Further, if one reads Byers’s text on these predators, he does say that these cheetahs were “the principal agents of selection” behind the pronghorn’s speed, but the author does point out that things like dholes, wolves, and various species of Borophaginae could have been part of the mix as well.

Pronghorn don’t just have speed. They have endurance.  Endurance is one way that Old World antelope elude the speed of cheetahs, but the main way they elude them is through agile running maneuvers. Pronghorn are fast, but they don’t have the quick turns of a Thomson’s or dorcas gazelle.

If these North American “cheetahs” ran down their prey in the same way the Old World true cheetahs do, then one would expect the pronghorn to have evolved some of these tricks.

Instead, pronghorn are running machines. They can take off and go and go and go. An animal that evolved to do such a thing likely didn’t evolve to outpace a sprinting cheetah. It likely evolved to outrun endurance runners.

Dholes are known in North America’s fossil record largely from Beringia, but we do have remains of dholes from Mexico. So their distribution in North America was probably more extensive than we might have assumed, but their fossil record is still quite spotty. Dholes run down their prey in long endurance chases, and dhole predation could have been a pretty strong selection pressure on pronghorns to make them fast endurance runners.

But another species could have also provided this pressure, and its presence in North America is well-established. What’s more, it lived in roughly the same areas where pronghorn were common.

This animal was North America’s only hyena, Chasmaporthetes ossifragus. These hyenas were far less like the modern bone-crushing species of hyena. Indeed, they were quite dog-like and are part of a grouping of hyenas that were called “dog-like hyenas.” The only dog-like hyena still in existence is the aardwolf,  which eats almost nothing but termites.  Its extinct relatives, though, were pretty adept predators of ungulates. They are thought to have run down their prey in much the same way dholes and African wild dogs do today.

So it seems that the pronghorn’s speed and endurance are much more likely to have evolved in response to predation from these long-distance running predators.

Further, we really don’t know how early North American wolves hunted their quarry.  Edward’s wolf and Armbruster’s wolf were both pretty common in North America until 300,000 years ago. They may have also hunted in much the same way dholes and African wild dogs do.  We don’t know enough about their natural history either, so we can only speculate.

The truth is we really don’t know why pronghorns are so fast.  It is possible that the North American “cheetahs” were the principal driving force behind the pronghorn’s speed. It is possible, but the evidence still is wanting. Further, there are more likely candidates that should be explored as having some influence on evolution pronghorn predation avoidance behavior.

So it is possible, but right now, it looks like we have two stochastic variables. We need much more evidence for a causal relationship.

And like everything else in evolution, we need to be careful about looking for patterns where they might not exist.

 

 

 

 

 

 

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Not a jaguarundi

A few days ago, I came across a story about a jaguarundi sighting in New Mexico, and I have to say I was pretty excited. I have been following accounts jaguarundis north of Mexico, and I have had great hopes that they will finally have a breeding population in the United States again soon.

Jaguarundis historically ranged into Arizona, New Mexico, and Texas, but we have no breeding population. A few years ago, there was talk of them being restored to South Texas, but I’ve heard nothing new about that project. My guess is it fell apart as the new austerity regime took over.

Jaguarundis have been known in the fossil record from Florida, and of course, there are countless sightings of jaguarundis in Florida and in Alabama as well.  None have been confirmed, of course, and if they were discovered in that part of the country, they would be the first ones known in historical times. And they definitely would have descended from “released captive animals.  But the current thinking is that most of these Southeastern jaguarundi are misidentified domestic cats, bobcats, and even otters.

After hearing that story about the possible jaguarundi in New Mexico, I went on a Google safari for potential sightings in the US.

Most of them were quite weak sauce, and I have to say that people really do need to look carefully at photos before posting them

One of the most egregious is this one by a blogger called “Texas Cryptid Hunter,”  who claims that the below trail camera photo is of a jaguarundi in Missouri or Mississippi.

That animal sure does look like some kind feline, right?

Well, it’s not feline at all.

It’s a gray fox. There are two big identifying features that say this is a gray fox in a subtropical summer coat.  The masking is very unjaguarundi-like, but it is very much like a gray fox. But that alone isn’t enough to scream gray fox at me.

Check out the tail. There is a black stripe running down the tail. No other carnivoran on this continent has that feature, and jaguarundis certainly don’t.

Gray foxes and their cousins, the island foxes of the Channel Islands of California, have this feature.

Further, notice that the deer and the creature seem to be eating the same thing. My guess is that the trail camera was set out near a deer feeder, which shoots out corn. This is a common practice where it’s legal, especially in late summer. It allows the deer hunter to figure out which bucks are developing the best antlers.

A little known fact about gray foxes is they are quite omnivorous, and they particularly like to eat corn from deer feeders.

My guess is the deer and fox were eating corn on the ground, and because the fox is in summer pelt and is holding its ears close to its head, it looks a lot like some kind of cat.

It’s an easy mistake to make. I initially thought the first gray fox I saw running in the broad daylight towards me was a cougar!

Cougars and jaguarundis are close relatives, and compelling molecular data suggest that we ought to classify them in the same genus, which I tend to do. So I can see where someone might see a gray fox and think it’s a jaguarundi.

I am friendly with the cryptozoology community, but I do know there is a tendency among people who “believe” in “cryptids” to be hold fast to bad pieces of evidence. I don’t think there is compelling evidence for bigfoot or long-necked dinosaurs in the Congo, but I’ve run into people who absolutely know these creatures exist.

So it is really hard to have a conversation with people who have decided that a piece of evidence is “the truth.”

I also know there are some sportsman types who will tell me there is no way that can be a fox.  If you can find me a photo of a jaguarundi with a black tail stripe like the animal in the photo, I will stand corrected.

You won’t find it.

I still think that jaguarundis belong in the US, but if that asshole orangutan who thinks he runs this place gets his way, we will have big ol’ wall that keeps them stuck down in Mexico.

And we won’t have a chance at restoring jaguarundis to our southern border country.

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The last of them

The name of the killer has been lost to the annals of history.  All we know is that he killed, and then there were none.

The whole story has been nothing more than a footnote in one forgotten chapter of wildlife in America. What follows is my conjecture about what happened:

The year was 1825. The bison cow and calf wandered down along wide valley.  They were wary beasts, for their kind had been slaughtered relentlessly in these mountains for 50 years.  For the past two decades, the only ones that remained were those that lived in these high mountains and knew how to hide their massive forms in steep hollows when the scent of man crossed their noses.

The pair had been the last survivors of herd that was massacred two weeks before. Buffle hides were demand, and there were mountain men who would oblige the market.

It is easy to blame the hunters for their rapacity, but the resource seemed inexhaustible. In the early days, every one that was shot was soon replaced by another three that came filtering in from west.

And it was that way until these early decades of the republic, when all that remained were these cagey mountain bison that watched every step they took and hid themselves in the deepest redoubts of the Alleghenies.

Two weeks before, a trio of hide hunters stumbled onto the herd in the deep mountains south of where Elkins, West Virginia, now stands.

They wandered the rugged valley that is carved by the Tygart Valley River during the gentle months of spring, when the green grass grew beautiful and sweet.

But that day, the hide hunters came up from the Shenandoah Valley. The older two had trapped beaver the great land of Kentucky before running back to the settled country in the east. They traded in fur and hides, but upon hearing rumors of the last herds of bison in these mountains, they packed up and headed into the Alleghenies, bringing along one of their sons who had been yearning for a bit of adventure.

The hunters spent ten days tracking the herd, and one morning, the son just happened to bump a bull and two cows off a mineral lick. The bison ran deep into a mountain hollow, and when the son tried followed them, he could hear the hoofbeats of many bison deep down in the hollow.

He raced back to tell his father and his father’s partner about the find, and the men loaded up with balls and gun powder and began their approach into the back side of the hollow, where the hillside was steep and the bison would be helpless down below.

There were seven bison down in the hollow. Three cows, two young calves, a subadult bull, and mature bull were nibbling on some forest browse.

The partner was a better shot than the others, so he positioned himself where his shots would fire across the mouth of the hollow. That way, he could shoot sling lead at any bison that tried to leave. The father and son positioned themselves where they could open fire on the whole herd below.

The balls sailed through the air, and in those days before breech-loading rifles, it took many shots to drop five bison.

They fell bloody and dead. The men set to work cutting the hides and then loading their mules for the long trudge back to Staunton and the Great Valley.

A cow and calf ran long out of the hollow and ran and ran until they could no longer hear the gun shots and shouts of men.

For two weeks they roamed is renegades in the mountains, but hunger and the sweet scent of spring grass brought the pair down into the little head of the Tygart’s Valley.

And it was there that an unnamed hunter, perhaps in need of a little meat or yearning for a bit of brass from the buffle hide, slipped down along the laurel that grew thick along the headwaters.  It took six shots to drop the cow, and the cow was down in two.

This hunter had no idea what he had just done. He’d killed a bison or two before in his life, and he knew their numbers were getting scarcer and scarcer in the mountains. But he knew if he waited a few years, another herd or two would mosey back in, and the hide hunting could continue.

But he was wrong.

What no one knew at the time was that this hunter had killed the last two bison in the Original 13 Colonies. And when those two fell, no more herds filtered in from the west. No more hidden bison herds were revealed in some remote hollow or valley.

This animal had carved much of the early infrastructure of what became West Virginia. The bison originally grazed the High Alleghenies in summer then marched west out of the high country when the snows came.  They would travel so far west as to hit the Ohio River, where the winters were milder. They would mosey east every spring to eat the good mountain grasses, and over the years, bovine inertia would carve vast trails coming out of the mountains towards the Ohio.

The indigenous people of these mountains would use these trails as their roads, and European settlers used them too. They would later use big gangs of slaves to clear the trails and turn them into roads that could take a horse or oxcart, and thus, the land was opened for settlement.

Fur trappers took the bison hides and ate the meat.  The homesteaders shot them because they gored horses and torn down split-rail fences.

And soon the bison numbers began to dwindle.

It was the bison the licked the salt from licks in the Kanawha Valley. Hide and market hunters followed them to these big licks, and soon discovered massive deposits of brine. In the years before the Civil War, large numbers of slaves worked the salt works, and these salt works became the basis for the massive chemical industry.

Near the confluence of the Kanawha River and Campbell’s Creek was a massive mineral lick, called the Great Buffalo Lick. It was there that hunters knew to wait for the great beasts and blast them away, and others knew that they could come down collect some salt for the homesteads.

The death of these two bison meant the end for a beast that helped forge so much of what became West Virginia.

No one really talks of bringing back bison, though there are few people who keep them for the novelty meat market.  Large bovines are hard to live with. They are aggressive and dangerous. They spread diseases to cattle, and they gore horses, tear down fences, and run off with brood cows.

They will never roam as wild animals here, and even if they were returned, they would be put on some state management land and then be micromanaged as if they were nothing more than free range cattle.

The bison will never roam this land as wild animals again. They are gone.  And we killed them.

It was a sin made in ignorance, but it was a sin nonetheless.

I sometimes stand in the secondary growth forests that have taken over much of West Virginia when the scores of farm families gave up the land for life in the industrial cities of the Midwest. The forests are thick and thorny. The trails that cut through the hills are carved by white-tailed deer moving through the countryside.  They are narrow trails, where even a short person like myself gets caught on the overhanging limbs and branches.

But I know when the bison were here, the forests were more open. They browsed up high. Their trails were like roads going through the woodland. They also kept big swaths of the land open through their constant grazing.

Land now is kept open only by the mowing machine and the odd stockman who keeps a few head of cows or sheep on some played out pasture.

The forest has all gone to thicket and thorn. It is not the same as it was those centuries before.

It is a land without its big beast, and if you listen carefully, you can hear it mourning.

Yes, it is mourning the passage of the great buffle and the inertia of its hoofbeats and browsing maw.

And so goes the story of the last wild bovine in the Alleghenies, barely a footnote in the annals of history.

But it was so much more.

 

 

 

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George Bird Evans and his Old Hemlock setters

George Bird Evans was the most famous gundog writer West Virginia ever produced. He raised a strain of close-working English setter at his eighteenth century home in Preston County.

The home was named “Old Hemlock,” and his setter strain started with a dog bred George Ryman. The Ryman strain was heavy in Laverack blood, so the dogs look more like what an international audience would think an English setter would look like. They also point with their tails horizon and not erect (“showing off the license plate,” as my Grandpa called it).

This film is colorized from the 1950s, and you can see how good the grouse hunting was in parts of the Alleghenies, including some amazing footage of Canaan Valley, the Blackwater River, and Dolly Sods– “the Canadian Zone” of West Virginia.

These dogs are beautiful but still quite useful. The strain exists today, but it is maintained with more scrutiny and quality control than any gun dog breed that isn’t a German HPR.

The commentary on these dogs and the birds is quite good. I particularly like the discussion of a gray phase ruffed grouse being taken– the only one ever shot in these mountains. Virtually every ruffed grouse in West Virginia is a red phase. The red phase is the minority color for the species, but it isn’t here. Red ruffed grouse are an Appalachian specialty.

I enjoyed this footage of the grouse days long passed, especially those “Canaan days.”

 

 

 

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No black panthers here

I don’t believe in them, though if you travel up the roads in most of West Virginia and ask around, you will find people who believe. More than believe, they know.

The truth of the matter is that I don’t think there are any wild felines in the whole state but bobcats. I don’t think there are any cougars lurking about. Cougars were here, and one might wander in from the West.

But I don’t think there are any native “Eastern cougars” left.

And now, I don’t need to say that I don’t believe in black panthers roam the forests of the Appalachians.

But if you did a poll in West Virginia, I am dead certain that you’d get a majority believing they exist here.

It’s an odd thing, for the only large cat that routinely comes in black in the Americas is the jaguar. North American jaguars are very, very rarely black, and although one can talk of the old stories of wandering jaguars popping up well into the United States, the truth of the matter is the species has a very limited range in this country. The ones that live in this country all are male, and all live along the border with Mexico.

Black leopards might have been turned out here, but no one has found a breeding population of these cats. Black leopards come almost entirely from the tropical subspecies, and although there are jaguars that live in coldness of Korea and the Russia Far East, those subspecies have no melanistic individuals and are not well-represented in the captive leopard population.

If one were to poll people in West Virginia about the existence of bigfoot, only a tiny percentage of people would say they exist. Bigfoot is a ridiculous idea.

But black panthers are not.

I don’t know why the belief in these beasts is so persistent, but it may have something to do with the mystery of blackness.  Blackness on cats has a strong connotation for people of Northwestern European heritage.  Depending upon the region:  Black cats are good luck. Black cats are bad luck. Black cats accompany witches.

So adding a black pelt to a massive cat gives it some sort of mysterious power.

Mystery is good. Romance is better.

And I’ve found once people believe something for those two reasons, good luck dissuading them of the moonshine (and I mean this under both definitions of the word!)

West Virginia is full of coonhounds, bobcat hounds, and bear dogs.  One would think that if there were a population of big cats in this state, they would have been treed by now.

It hasn’t happened, but I know that one day, maybe not soon, but someday, a cougar from the West will wander into this state. It will be known, either from the trail camera photos or from a hound treeing, and half the state will lose its mind.

The DNR will say that cougars are protected species, and the guns will rage against the felines. Feral cats will be shot, and everyone who can will fill a few bobcat tags a year.

That’s because the cougar will be real, and in its reality, it will bring up that old-fashioned hatred of anything predatory in the woods.

But the black panther doesn’t bring that same feeling, and the reason why is that most people know somewhere back in their minds that they don’t exist in these forests.

They might not admit it in an argument at the barber shop. But they know.

Belief in the romance is what it keeps the black panther slinking along forest paths, slipping along until it crosses into the thick cover. It roars up in the imagination, wild and mysterious and untouched by encroachment.

It won’t be molested by the gun or the baying hound. It will slink on into the gray mists of winter, where it will roam as it always has in the magic and mystery of human reverie.

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Caught between the warring camps

“There is no room for a bear and me in these woods,” my Grandpa Westfall always said. He always said that he’d shoot the first bear he came across, and he said that he would defend himself if he got caught with a little quip.

“If that judge asks if I shot that bear in self-defense, I will just say, ‘No, I shot him in the ass and he jumped de fence!'”

He once scoped out an errant emu in his pasture, dead certain that a black bear had foolishly popped its head out of the woods. He was just getting ready to commit a big game law violation, when the shaggy form raised its head and revealed itself as dinosaur and not the great fell beast of the mountains.

My grandpa was not an ignorant man. He was curious about nature and loved almost every animal. He was a hunter, a self-styled conservationist, who kept pet groundhogs and squirrels as a boy.

But he had a blind spot about bears.  He would always point out that some place called Bear Hollow was the place where the last bear in the county was killed. It probably wasn’t true, because there were always a few bears holding out as renegades in the deep woods. Occasionally, they would wander into more civilized areas, and all the papers would make hay about these wanderers.

Today, the bear population is growing steadily. They don’t make so much news now. The bear season is pretty liberal, and I’ve purchased the bear tag on my hunting license. For a West Virginia resident, it’s only $10, but I’ve never been in a good place to hunt bears.  Some day, I hope to be in the right place, and I’ll take a bear.

But I won’t be taking a bear with the same mens rea as my grandpa might have had if the emu had turned out to be truly ursine on that summer day. I would be taking a bear, but not because I think bears don’t belong in the forests. Bears belong in the forest. Absolutely.

But in taking a bear, I’m getting meat. It is the same meat that sustained my ancestor, Jehu Summers, who became a regionally famous frontier bear hunter in central West Virginia.

To them bears were simple things:  Bear hides for coats. Bear meat for sustenance. Bear grease for ersatz butter and cooking oil.

Both native and white used the bears in this way, and the natives likely did so for 13,000 years.before the Europeans arrived.  Hunting was the relationship between our species and theirs, and it made the bear what it is today:  a shy and retiring beast of the thick woods.

If I take a bear, I will be connecting back to my ancestor, communing with him as the flesh crosses my palate and down the maw.

The bears belong here because they sustained us long ago, and we owe to them to find a place where they can roam.

We hunt the bears to re-enact that ancient bond between bruin and hunter, adversaries in the war of existence who grapple across the same mortal plain.

The Alleghenies need their bears, just as they need people to hunt them. Without either, the landscape rings hollow and bland.

And to live next to large predators, it is of utmost importance that these animals know that nothing good can ever come from the hand of man. The black bear bolts for the brush when you wander into him in the forest, but would he think twice if some fool had been letting him eat garbage out of the backyard? If the bullets and arrows didn’t fly at the black hides, would the bears be bolder and more willing to test the gormless bipeds?

I think answer is yes, so in order to have black bears, there must be hunting. Their fear of man makes them manageable.

***

As a result of recent elections, New Jersey has slipped away from that Beachmaster Governor to one a little more rational. At least that’s how this Democrat sees it.

But about one thing this new governor seems to have been lost. I doubt he could have made it through the Democratic Primary had he possessed different views, but the new man in charge in the Garden State has promised to put an end to the bear hunt.

Bears in New Jersey have it pretty easy compared to those in West Virginia. The hunt is much more strictly regulated. An established quota is set. Once that many bears are killed, the hunt is called off that year.

In West Virginia, that $10 tag is sold to anyone who has the main hunting and fishing license.  If it gets filled or not, it is immaterial. That license can be bought next year, and if you’re really bear hungry, the state will even put you in a drawing to get a special tag to hunt your quarry in higher bear density areas that get special seasons.

But in New Jersey, bear hunting is controversial. Every year, protesters show up at hunting areas, cut some monkey shine, and get hauled off to the pokey.

New Jersey’s bear hunt has had some positive results.  Nuisance bear calls are down.  The bear population has been stablized.

With the bear hunt axed, though, it’s likely that the bears are going once again start hanging out near people. Wildlife managers with the state of New Jersey estimate that the bear population could double in four years if the bear hunt is abolished.

In the world of suburbs, the bears will do fine, but they will destroy property.  Some might decide that people are good food, and for those who might be confused, it is not entirely out of the question for a black bear to learn to hunt people. It is not species-typical behavior, but it does happen.

Bears that have learned humans hunt them, though, are going to relate to humanity with utter fear.

It is fear that keeps the peace.

And it is that peace that makes room for bears in the world of man.

It is a lesson that New Jersey is going to have to learn again. Ideology says that bears are like dogs, just bigger and tailless. Ideology ignores their cannibalism, their savagery, and the simple fact that they aren’t dogs at all but wild creatures. Yes, they eat mostly vegetable matter, but they won’t pass up a fawn lying the brush.  They won’t think twice about eating alive a deer mortally wounded by a car.  They don’t think as we do about being humane and kind and sportsmanlike.

They think about living as omnivores. Our world provides them many opportunities, and without the fear of man, they will get in trouble.

The government agencies will try to transplant the problem bears, but they often don’t learn anything. They know we’re overloaded with goodies, and they can’t resist.

And for some bears, the only solution is to die at the hands of a government employee, one whose salary and insurance are paid for by the taxpayer.

Wouldn’t a better solution be to have a regulated hunt and use hunting as way to teach the bears about our own essential savagery?  Then, the bears would know not to come into subdivisions and schoolyards and eat garbage and birdseed. And you wouldn’t have to hire a someone to shoot the incorrigibles.  The hunters would pay license fees, and the state conservation agency could pay more biologists to study bears and protect habitat for other species.

That is how West Virginia has dealt with bears. We now have more 10,000 of them wandering our hills and mountains.

Hunting is part of our management strategy for them. It works well, and it seems that having a hunt worked well for New Jersey.

But we will see what the future holds.

***

Yesterday, I went out with ICOtech predator call.  I go out on the woods with this device in hopes that I might call in a coyote or gray fox and capture it with a camera.

Yes, I am out with a hunting device, but I am hunting only with my camera.

But I have nothing against people who hunt coyotes. I just am not among their number.

Hunting doesn’t really reduce coyote numbers significantly. We’ve been hunting them with the hope of causing extinction for 150 years or so, and all we’ve done is make them increase their range to almost all of North America.

I have a certain amount of admiration of the species. They are survivors, and they are closest thing to wolves we have in this part of the country.

I don’t see them as domestic dogs, but I don’t see them as demons either. I see them as phantoms that lurk in the gray woods and let loose cackling yips and mournful howls in the deadness of night.

They don’t reveal themselves easily. They appear only when they damned well want to.

It’s this challenge that drives me to go into the woods with the call.

I started out with gray squirrel distress for 5 minutes. Nothing responded, so I went to my two gray fox distress calls for 10 minutes. No little gray dog appeared for my camera, which isn’t that much of a surprise. They are much harder to call than coyotes, at least around here.

So I switched to my coyote howls. I have several different iterations that sound like a single one howling, a pair howling, a single one howling with a different pitch, a group cacophony of howling yips, and one that sounds like three coyotes howling a beautiful opera chorus in a language that isn’t Italian or even remotely human.

I switched among these different howl types, and then I would wait five minutes to see if I got a response. I faintly heard what I think may have been a female coyote’s estrus chirp in the woods, but it was a distant chirp nontheless.  This single note of what I thought was an estrus chirp made me stick to my spot, and run through the howls again.

I had gone through five or six different howl sequences, when I heard a gravelly human voice shout from the distant ridge.  This ridge was so thickly forested that I couldn’t see a person there, and what’s more, it was perhaps a quarter mile from where I was sitting.

“You’re gonna get shot!” was what the voice shouted.

I ignored it at first, but then the stupid bastard began mocking my howls.

The land where I was sitting wasn’t his anyway, and I’ve long been allowed to hunt there. The real owners don’t care.

I shouted back at the voice “Shut the fuck up!”

“I’m on my property. I’ll do as I please.”

I shouted several expletives at the voice, which you don’t need to hear, but I flipped the hillside the bird while playing a jay in distress sound at him.

I was so incensed at this man that I went to a different location where the hollow would carry the howls right to his position. I turned it on full blast.

When I told my dad what had happened, he told me to go back out there that you cannot be bullied from doing what you have a right to do.

I didn’t quite feel like going back out there, but my dad took my call and went to woods where I had been calling. He cranked it up full blast for a half hour. No one shouted back at him.

I was so livid at this man for harassing me and ruining my coyote calling session.

But this morning it finally dawned on me why this man had been such an ass:

I scared him.

Rural people in West Virginia are told all sorts of stories about coyotes:

They kill all the deer, even though the deer are still very plentiful, and the poor hunting season in this set of ridges had more to do with a good mast year. Good mast years mean that the does stay up in the most isolated groves oak and beech, and the bucks stay with those does and never once come out into pastures or to big corn piles or feeders.  The only way to get a deer is to use your feet and figure out where they going and where they go when the guns start to crack.

But it’s easy to blame coyotes for the lack of deer at the corn piles. It’s much harder to learn the ways of the deer and get some exercise doing so.

People are also told that coyotes are a mortal threat to humanity– and that they howl just before they attack. I suppose the loudmouth on the hill had heard that story. And that’s why he acted such a fool.

I don’t know who shouted at me, and I honestly don’t care. But as angry at him as I was, I suddenly am returned to my grandpa and his hatred of bears. My grandpa never really knew the full story of black bears, and he didn’t really want to know it.

But he was still the curious naturalist of a hillside turkey hunter that I knew and loved. It’s just he had a black bear-sized blind spot that he didn’t want to fix.

Maybe that loudmouth is the same way, just his is a coyote-sized hole, and one that will cause even more aggravation. Coyotes howl. They announce their presence. Black bears don’t make themselves known at all until you lay eyes upon one.

They are much more mysterious and harder to scapegoat and revile.

But I will not accept his prejudices or let him bully me. I will call coyotes and take photos and you will see them here.

That’s my duty.

***

My views on wildlife put me in an odd position. I am a progressive Democrat, but I think animal rights ideology is woefully misguided.  I am a hunter, but I am more of an Aldo Leopold sort of hunter than a Ted Nugent.

I see coyotes in the way Leopold came to see wolves in his famous essay “Thinking Like a Mountain.” Leopold describes his sudden sorrow at killing a female Mexican wolf, which he watches die before his very eyes. Years later, he came to realize that wolves truly had a place in nature:

Since then I have lived to see state after state extirpate its wolves. I have watched the face of many a newly wolfless mountain, and seen the south-facing slopes wrinkle with a maze of new deer trails. I have seen every edible bush and seedling browsed, first to anaemic desuetude, and then to death. I have seen every edible tree defoliated to the height of a saddlehorn. Such a mountain looks as if someone had given God a new pruning shears, and forbidden Him all other exercise. In the end the starved bones of the hoped-for deer herd, dead of its own too-much, bleach with the bones of the dead sage, or molder under the high-lined junipers.

I now suspect that just as a deer herd lives in mortal fear of its wolves, so does a mountain live in mortal fear of its deer. And perhaps with better cause, for while a buck pulled down by wolves can be replaced in two or three years, a range pulled down by too many deer may fail of replacement in as many decades. So also with cows. The cowman who cleans his range of wolves does not realize that he is taking over the wolf’s job of trimming the herd to fit the range. He has not learned to think like a mountain. Hence we have dustbowls, and rivers washing the future into the sea.

We all strive for safety, prosperity, comfort, long life, and dullness. The deer strives with his supple legs, the cowman with trap and poison, the statesman with pen, the most of us with machines, votes, and dollars, but it all comes to the same thing: peace in our time. A measure of success in this is all well enough, and perhaps is a requisite to objective thinking, but too much safety seems to yield only danger in the long run. Perhaps this is behind Thoreau’s dictum: In wildness is the salvation of the world. Perhaps this is the hidden meaning in the howl of the wolf, long known among mountains, but seldom perceived among men.

We’ve gone over a century without true wolves in West Virginia. The only wolves we have are coyotes, and their smaller size makes them almost a poor facsimile. True, they lift fawns and sometimes pack up and run down adult deer, but they are just as at home hunting mice and rabbits as they are grappling with larger prey with flailing hard hooves and strong legs.

But they do take a few deer, and those removed from the population don’t browse the forests down. Human hunters, though, think those deer belong solely for their crosshairs, and don’t want to share.

The “peace” that Leopold derided in that essay is the false peace that sets humanity at the top of all things and demands that all things bow to his whims and petty desires.  If a twelve-point buck doesn’t walk to the corn pile every deer season then it must surely be that coyotes are eating all the deer.

This is the peace I’m sure that the hilltop shouter wants every year. I bet he spent a lot of time hunting deer in the 90s, when the herds festooned every hillside and a hunter might see dozens of whitetails in a single day’s hunt. State wildlife managers tried to fix that problem by liberalizing doe harvest limits, and after a few decades of sound wildlife management, the deer numbers are somewhat lower than they were in those days of deer plagues.

The 90s deer hunter had it easy, and now the numbers are lower. He must put more effort into the hunt.

And this has come at roughly the same time that coyotes have become fully established and quite numerous as well.

These variables are probably stochastic, but to the hunter who goes home without filled tags, they must be linked. In some places, he would be right, but in the deer’s paradise that is West Virginia, he is most likely wrong.

The culprit isn’t coyotes. It’s the state realizing how bad it is to have a deer overpopulation problem.

My view is controversial among the hunting fraternity, but it really isn’t with most  professional wildlife managers.

But as controversial as that idea is, it is nothing compared to how animal rights people view all hunters as scumbags.

The fact that I hunt animals surely must mean that I am a Trump-loving redneck who hates Mexicans, carries and thumps a Bible, and drives a pickup truck with Confederate flag emblem on my vanity plate.

None of those things fit me. I just find myself– at least in this section of much-debated ideas–in an odd little crevice of nuance.

I see a place in this world for predators, both human and four-legged, and this contention is out of place.  You either want to see all non-human predators killed off, or you want to see all humans stop hunting.

Neither of these really fits an ecological view of the world. Humans are a hunting species. We have been hunting since we evolved in Africa. Following herds brought us into Eurasia and then North America.

But now we live in a world in which ideology is driving real wedges between us. In my country, people are at each other’s throats over a whole host of issues. We’ve become warring tribes

To have a more ecological view as it relates to animal issues is to court controversy, because you ultimately be both a bunny-hugger or an NRA-nutjob.

And it’s not fun to debate both sides.

In the end, I want something like the peace that is made between humans and black bears when they are hunted.  It is a peace that recognizes the importance of human hunters in maintaining wildlife on the land that exists now. It is a peace that doesn’t shun hunting because of ideology. Instead, it sees hunting as part of the puzzle that allows us to have human civilization and large numbers of black living in relative proximity to each other.

It is this kind of peace that acknowledges that humans are the peak of creation but also recognizes that human issues matter.

To stand for both human and animal predators in this era is a risky move, but after looking at all the evidence and spending so much time in woods on my own, I have come to believe that it is the correct position.

But I know I’m not alone.

 

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Death of Three Cows

What is about cattle that makes take this risk? When the storm clouds appear on the horizon on hot summer days, so many of them will high-tail it to the shade of the trees in their pastures. And then, with luck, the lightning bolts don’t come dropping down on the great wooden rods and electrocute some free standing beef. It doesn’t always happen. It doesn’t happen most of the time, but it does happen often enough.

On this hillside farm in rural West Virginia, two crossbred black Angus cattle and their black baldie associate played the wrong game. On this sultry July evening, the thunder bolts filled the sky and rumbled and roared, and all the beef cattle on the pasture came racing for the great red oaks that stand tall and wiry against wind.

For thirty minutes they stood under the trees, nervous a bit of the great roaring but feeling secure in the shade.

Then suddenly it was all lightness and burning.  A bolt had descended near enough the tree to catch its branches, and three cattle were instantly electrocuted there in the oak lot.

The storm had come on a Friday, and it just so happened that the farmer who tends these cattle was at hand. He lives many miles away, working in that part of West Virginia that abuts both the Blue Ridge and the Washington, D.C., Beltway.  He comes back to tend his late father’s holdings in the rugged land of the Allegheny Plateau, visiting the herds once a month or so, usually less often in warmer months of summer.

When he arrived upon the macabre scene, his heart sank. Three dead beef cattle, all “black Angus” in ancestry, all valuable animals, all cows in calf. Thousands of dollars were wiped away in a single thunderbolt.

He didn’t know what to do next. The warm night and rapidly heating morning had made their carcasses fully putrid, and the only thing he could do is find some way to get rid of them.

The best he could was to go out with the tractor and drag their bodies out of the pasture. He knew he had to get on with the job quickly, for it wouldn’t be long before their  paunches began to fill with gas of decay and then exploded green nastiness all over.  He had to move them quickly and gently, a tough task for man dragging great gassy beasts over rocky ground with a rickety old John Deere.

He dragged them to the far end of the pasture, then down a logging road that followed the course of the ridge-line until it dropped off into a steep hollow. It was near that drop-off that the absentee farmer unhitched the deceased and cast them down with a few hard heaves of his shoulders to get them started.

The first cow rolled down the steep wall of the hollow and came to a crashing stop about a hundred feet below. The trunks of two old tulip trees caught her back and sides, and she was left hanging beneath them, paunch sticking up towards the sky. She had not had an explosion of the death gases, but she would continue to rot away and stink until she  did.

The second and third cows made their final descents in much the same manner. The second got caught at the base of a stately beech, and the third, the black baldie, landed in the same stand of tulip trees where the first had fallen. It got caught in much the same way, except that one of the catching trees held up her head at an odd angle. Her final repose was to have her head perched up and facing the hollow, where the gentle breezes from the creek-bed below would come wafting up after a summer rain. If she had been alive, she would have felt these cool breezes, and they would have pushed off the biting flies that would have festooned eyes almost as much with her alive as they did now as she soured in death’s decay.

The farmer wiped the sweat from his head. He’d done a good job this morning. His dad would be proud of him. His hands smelled of putrid death.  In the sky above him, a big flow of turkey vultures coursed the sky. They would be eating well for a few weeks.

If this farmer had been a little more experienced, a little bit more savvy about the natural history of his land, he wouldn’t have cast these carcasses off so near to where he let his brood cows graze.

His father would have easily gotten away with dumping some cattle off that logging road into the hollow, for when his father farmed this land, the only scavengers were turkey vultures, crows, ravens, and red foxes. Crows rob the corn, but they can be shot. And the neighbors ran the red fox with hounds every night in winter, and they feared man above all else. It was very rare for them to raid hen houses. The crack of guns fired from bedroom windows was that terrifying for them.

But now the land had been left alone, and the forest came to fill in the pastures of all the neighbors. Big bands of white-tailed deer came moseying in during the dusk and dawn hours to graze the cattle’s grass. And big flocks of wild turkey would come in and peck at the winter silage.

The farmer hunted all these animals, but his father barely knew them. Both wild turkeys and deer were rare when he ran cattle and sheep on this land, and it was only in his later years that he ever got enough mastery of the deer to be considered a proficient hunter.

His son, by contrast, had dropped many big bucks on this land.  And he was starting to the turkey hunting bug.

Indeed, he wasn’t so much a farmer, but a hunter with a private estate that happened to manage with a small herd of beef cattle. The cattle kept the pastures open, as did their hayfield, and the deer and turkeys relished the open grasslands for their forage.

But in those years in which the turkey and deer numbers grew, something else had happened.

The red foxes rarely whistle-barked on the ridge pastures these days, and it had become rare to see one.

What replaced the whistle-barks was cry of banshees, the barking cacophony of coyote howls.

The coyotes had come into the land and set up shop in the forest. They drove out all the red foxes as poaching interlopers, and those that didn’t get the message often wound up dead.

The coyotes were reviled by every hunter and herdsman from one side of the Alleghenies to the other.

But the farmer never saw them on his land. He didn’t have a coyote problem. He never heard them howl either. He’d heard tales of coyotes around, and he promised that if he’d ever see one during deer season, he’d blast it away. But he’d never seen or heard one. They didn’t exist. If he heard a howl in the evening’s last light, he’d justify it as a yapping dog or an ambulance siren screaming down the distance highway.

Of course, the neighbors up the road had a pear and apple orchard, and already, they had seen packs of coyotes come through and eat the fallen fruit. Early season apples were a delicacy. One afternoon just before the thunderstorm, the neighbor had counted eleven coyotes in his orchard, all munching away at the fallen fruit. He’d wanted to get a gun, but he was so impressed by their multitude that he left them alone.

By mid-July, the packs had settled into their denning sites. Of those eleven in the orchard,  only five laid claim to the lands that included the stinking bovines in the hollow.

One was a pack of three: a big buff-colored dog with a nick out of his left ear, a veteran of many fights with interlopers and even stupid-ass dogs; a black female, his mate; and a dark gray daughter from last year’s litter.

The mother of the dark gray had been taken by a foothold trap left at the edge of a big meadow where voles were thick, dumb, and juicy.  She’d come sniffing along a hole dug in the hillside along main game trail leading out of the meadow, and when she went to inspect it, she was caught.  She tried to free herself, but the whole band moved on. In the night came the running quad-bike, and a rifle shot rang out over the meadow.

The buff male needed a new mate, and when he came across the little black bitch during the winter, he was pleased as punch to have her. His daughter, the dark gray, became her subordinate, and this spring, she had been her nurse-maid to four yelping pups. Three were black like their mother, and the other was reddish brown like his father.

In the July heat, they had pups to feed. The buff male and the black bitch had lifted many fawns from their coverts all through the late spring, but now the fawns were sprightly, and the does were now much more attuned to their game.

This was a time of hunger, of needing meat to sate the little ones, and simply not having any that could be easily procured.

As night fell upon the hollow, the black bitch and the bluff male followed their noses to the stinking beefs on the hillside. The turkey vultures, the crows, and the ravens had torn big holes in the hides. The anus was ripped out of one of the black Anguses, and the black baldie’s stomach had ruptured.

The scent of man was upon the carcasses, and they approached with deliberate caution. A man could be sitting up on that ridge somewhere, pushing forward the safety on his .243 and peering down with a thermal scope to blast them into that great coyote beyond, where all sensible men or, rather, men who believe themselves to be sensible, are certain all coyotes rightly belong.

The buff male came in downwind. He wanted to be sure that no man was nearby. The scent troubled him, troubled him deeply. He didn’t know why.  His kind had come east through the slinging of lead, the setting of traps, and the poisoning of bait. Poison had selected away all the coyotes that didn’t feel tense or nervous as the scent of man on a carcass. It was just one of those things. Man bred the dog to be tame and loyal and docile and to take to his commands and edicts. Man bred the coyote to be paranoid.

The buff male circled the dead cows. Each circle got closer and closer until he finally got himself enough to courage to lick at the open bit of rumen. Within 30 minutes, both the buff male and the black bitch were tucking into the meat.

And there was plenty of meat. So much meat that 30- and 45- pound coyotes can’t eat it all, but they try their best. They filled their stomachs with offal and bits of putrid meat, and then trotted back to the den, where the gray female and the four yelping juveniles dived upon them. The two adults vomited up some fine food for the babies and their babysitter, then they rushed back to the cattle carcasses to fill their bellies again.

And by dawn, they were at the den-site, all full and fat and stupid and lazy, like big dogs lounging the backyard on a fine autumn morning.

The pack slept through the day, and as the night fell, the black bitch and the buff male decided to begin their long mosey over to the carcasses for another gluttonous feed.

But this time, another scent wafted down from the tulip trees: the scent of interloping coyotes.

It was a pair of dark gray ones, the more typical phase for this part of the Appalachians. They were mates. One was a big, husky female whose mate and she had fought many a battles in oak woods and along wild creek-beds over both territory and deer offal. Her right ear was torn and bent at the tip. Her face was scarred with canine tooth tears. She was a war bitch.

Her mate was younger and stupider. He’d was 25 pounds of slight coyote, and if he hadn’t somehow hooked up with that war bitch, he probably wouldn’t have lasted long.

He’d left his parents’ territory in search of a mate. He found her on a dreary December evening. Her original mate had been dead for just a few weeks. An unlucky doe hunter had seen the coyote pair slip beneath his tree stand, and blaming the coyotes for his misfortune, slung some lead in their direction. Four shots rang out, and one made contact.

The war bitch became a widow,  but the little 25-pounder came slinking along to nibble a deer gut pile that the scarred face dog had claimed for herself. When she scented the little fool trying to nibble at her gut pile, she came flying at him with a nasty growl.

He ran from her but stopped to look back at her.  Something about this little stranger appealed to her. Perhaps it was his slightness and gauntness. Perhaps it was her instinct to have a mate.

But she whined and wagged her tail at him.  He came tentatively and with apprehension, but he ate from the gut pile.

And he became her mate.

The pair produced a litter that spring– only three pups. The slight male tried his best to feed his mate at the den, but his hunting skills were still being honed. On many days, the meat never arrived at den site. The gaunt male’s stomach was empty, nothing regurgitated for his family.

It was going to be a tough summer for the family, but the litter met an ignoble end:

When the war bitch slipped down to drink from a little stream, a copperhead slid into the den and envenomated all the pups. It ate one of them and went on its way.

And the whole litter died.

No litter meant that the war bitch and her little man could run the hills together.  They didn’t have much of a pack, but they had each other.

And she would teach him to be a real mate.

For two days, the pair had scented the stinking cattle carcasses, but the war bitch was so wary of the scent of man.

But the buff male and black bitch had broken the ice. Their scent was stronger than the scent of man now, and the war bitch knew the carcasses were safe.

So she dragged her little man along for a good feast of fetid beef.

The buff male stopped hard. He let loose a single coyote bark. Then he allowed a stern growl to rise from his throat.

The war bitch rose from the rib cage she had been eating on. Her face was so bloody that it made her scarred face take on a demonic countenance. She stood over the carcass, tail tuck down between her legs, teeth showing in a coyote gape threat.

The buff male approached the carcass tail down and in a matching gape threat as well. The black bitch did the same.

The war bitch held her ground as the enemy approached.  The buff male and the black bitch circled the carcass. The war bitch stared down with the contempt of a thousand hells.

She had fought enough battles to know that if she just stood her ground, she could win without a scuffle. Most coyotes don’t want a big fight, even if they could potentially win in growling melee. Those kinds of fights run the risk of injury, so they can be bluffed.

She knew the buff male would fight, but his new mate was inexperienced. She wasn’t a total lightweight like the gaunt male, but she wasn’t ready to charge into a fight.

The gaunt male saw what was coming, and he took off. He raced up the hill above the carcasses and stood behind a pin oak, quivering in fear but not wanting to leave his mate, who was also his mentor and main protector.

The war bitch stood in her gape threat, and the two opponents continued their circling. And then, the black bitch in her anger and impudence broke her circling and charged the rib cage.

She decided to take on the war bitch from behind, but the old fighter swirled around to meet her adversary. And the two coyotes became a fighting and snarling blur that soon descended from the exposed rib cage.

The buff male charged the blur, and soon he was upon them. Two minutes of growling, snarling, and whining, and a gray streak shot out from the melee.

The war bitch knew she was over-matched, and now her own blood poured from her right hip and from both shoulders.  She was beaten, and she knew it.

She raced toward her mate behind the pin oak, and both the buff male and black bitch were racing behind her. They stopped after she began her ascent up the steep hill, and stood staring hard to make sure she had truly left the scene.

The buff male and black bitch had defended their carcass, and they licked each other’s wounds and whined in elation. They were a team now.

And in their joy, they lifted their heads to join in a good coyote howling session.

Afterward, they trotted back to the carcasses and ate their meat in big gulps.

***

The black bitch and buff male ate from the carcasses every night for three days. When they came back to the den digest their meat, the gray female would leave her post to wander up on her own to eat some meat for herself.

They could eat the rotting meat until it was gone.

And it was going fast.

During the day, the ravens and crows and vultures flew down to peck around at the bounty. Once, two dogs came into enjoy a bit of meat. One was an English shepherd. The other a bluetick coonhound. The two dogs belonged to a little self-styled homesteader who let them roam over the country.

They were country dogs through and through.  Rugged runners who had ticks and fleas, they weren’t above the proper manners of a dog in civilized society. They were wandering fawn lifters and manure rollers. They were owned and named, but they were still given liberty to be wildish things.

The coyotes all had sense to avoid them. Dogs are the traitors. They are for all intents and purposes the same people as the coyote, but they live in a confederacy with man.

And dogs can mean the end for coyotes. All it takes is one little scrap with a dog to alert man of the existence of coyotes, and they can be wiped out

The dogs were just transients in the world of the wild. They came to roll in the stink and to nibble at the putrid, but they soon were on their way.

The dogs were banal visitors, but the arrival of a bald eagle on the third day was something to behold. Every crow within a two mile radius came to mob the eagle.

So the eagle came and pecked at some meat. The trees around the carcass were now full of turkey vultures. A couple of ravens croaked away, as mob of six black vultures devoured what they could, as the great eagle dined.

These cows in calf were meant to feed the multitudes of men, but now they were feeding the multitudes of beasts.

The carrion beetles were working their way through underside of the cattle. Thousands of them were eating away at the flesh from below.

And opossums were getting their fill too, and several had taken up residence inside the black baldie. They woke from inside the body cavity to chew away at the meat and offal all around them.

And the coyotes came every night.

But on that fourth night, the buff male and black female made their way to the carcasses, a new scent wafted down towards them. It was the pungent aroma of a black bear.

This time they knew they would have to wait their turn, for a bear of any size could easily claim the cattle carcasses.

And this was not a bear of any size. It was a hulking 400-pound boar, who had finally come out off his summer courting, for a little bit of a beef dinner.

He was hulking blackness, full of muscle and power. He ripped through the carcasses. His claws tore them apart. His teeth tore at the flesh.

The coyotes were unable to stop him.

And after that one night of devouring, he soon came every night.

The coyotes were able to eat only when the bear’s ravening was sated, which usually happened when the morning sun began to filter through the darkness.

Coyotes in this part of the world had long learned to stay hidden during the daylight hours. Man’s guns are always out when the sun shines.

Their eating hours were greatly truncated, hemmed in by the bear’s appetite and the sunshine, and so they stopped relying upon the carcasses to feed their growing family.  They returned to long nights of mousing and running rabbits.

After a week of boar’s visit, a sow with three young cubs also made her way to the carcass. The cubs nibbled at scant remains, playing with the bones and ripping up what was left of the hides.

By two weeks, the carcasses were reduced to yellow bones. All that meat and all that money had been carried away into the sky, into the bellies of furred beats, and in the abdomens of carrion beetles.

Profit was lost from the death of those three cattle.  The lightning bolt robbed the farmer and gave to nature– a sort of cosmic Robin Hood that temporarily took man from his vaunted status and dispersed his possession to the lowly and the savage.

300 years ago, the death of a few bison by lightning strike would have yield a similar bounty, and because bison weigh so much more than domestic cattle, the bounty would have gone longer.  The only people robbed would be the hide and meat hunters who sought the bison, and there were plenty of those beasts roaming the hills. Another herd would be just beyond the next ridge.

The ersatz-bison, the debased aurochs that we call cattle, are owned. They don’t roam freely, live freely, or die freely. Their hides and the meat and bones don’t return to the soil without the interference of man.

But sometimes, the lightning strikes, and their elements go to nourish nature once again.

Three dead beef cows in calf got to do this nourishing once again.

It’s a drop in the bucket to be sure, a sort of re-enactment of the drama that once was but never will be again.

 

 

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Winter wren*

Source

If one color predominates West Virginia in early winter it would be gray. The tree trunks, now denuded of all leaves, stand row after row, creating smudgy mass of grayness that covers the land. Out of this smudgy mass, deer and squirrels materialize like apparitions, shifting into existence, then fading back into the gray.

I’ve come deep into the woods for a bit of winter squirrel hunting. Hunting squirrels in winter, when the autumn mast has mostly fallen and been buried by nimble paws, is a bit of a challenge.  The bare trees leave them exposed to hawk eyes, so they spend as little time exposed on the ground or in the canopy as possible.

I spot a squirrel flicking its tail as it runs up a tree trunk in the hollow below me. I sneak down to the tree, knowing fully well the squirrel will be aware of my approach. But I also notice that this tree has few limbs sticking out towards other trees. If the squirrel slips onto the other side of the trunk to hide, I know that it will not be able to leave the tree without exposing itself for a few seconds on the ground.

I sit and sit. No squirrel moves upon the tree trunk. I think he’s given me the slip somehow.  But I’m still not convinced that he has escape.

I sit in the gloom that surrounds me. A pair of turkey vultures cast around in the sky above me. Ravens croak from the distant ridge. A diminutive downy woodpecker hammers away at a dead oak.

Over my right shoulder, a bit of movement catches my eye. I turn my head to look in that direction, and my eye notices a russet form on the bark of a little beech tree some 10 feet behind me.

It is the size of a mouse but bird shaped.  At first, I tell myself that it is nothing but a fallen leaf that has somehow become stuck on the tree. But that little delusion is soon cast aside as the form begins to move.

I recognize it as a Carolina wren. The rusty brown color gives it away from all other wren-like birds in this area, and the elegant white stripe above its eye give it almost aristocratic countenance.

But as moved as I am by its beauty, I know what it coming. Carolina wrens are little tattlers. If they spot a human sitting in the forest, they instantly start buzzing out little churring alarms, and if one wren spots you, it won’t be long before other ones in the area will show up and starting buzzing you as well.

I suppose it took this one about two minutes to realize I was human, but when it did, it started its alarm routine.

And then the trees around me came alive with churrs. This one wren had been traveling in a little flock of five or six birds, which is not unusual during the winter months, and when this one spotted me, its flock joined in the mobbing.

So my squirrel stalk ended. My location was being broadcast every bushy-tailed tree dweller in the hollow, and I backed out of the woods and headed off for a different stand.

A piece of me wanted to curse the birds, but a larger part of me marveled at them.  These same wrens nest in my mother’s hanging baskets every summer. They don’t mind the human presence at all then. Only when she takes the basket down to water the flowers does the mother wren go flying out. She makes no alarm calls, and when the basket is restored, she returns to her nest as if nothing happened.

The wrens know that nesting in hanging baskets protects their eggs and chicks from virtually all predators, so they are willing to tolerate the bumbling of humanity all around them.

But in the dead of winter, the mere sight of a human will launch them into mobbing alarm displays.

No one hunts wrens. They are protected by federal law, so they would have no real reason to fear a human wandering the woods.

I suppose they are just so sensitive to predators in those days when the leaves no longer block the sun and occlude the hawk’s vision that they will announce the presence of anything that even remotely looks threatening.

Their tolerance of humanity in summer doesn’t extend to encountering us during their winter foraging.

And I, like any predator busted from his stalking, slink away to try again somewhere else.

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*A winter wren is a distinct species of wren that is not the same as the Carolina wren. I am merely being poetic here.

 

 

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The Reign of the Little Wolf

Coyotes and anything that is called a wolf in North America are as genetically close to each other as we humans are to each other.

This is the most radical thing I’ve ever learned from a scientific paper.

The paper is about whether red wolves and Eastern wolves are hybrids, which is a controversial topic. They probably are hybrids, but what are they hybrids between?

Are they crosses between two really distinct species or are they hybrids between two lineages of what one might rather radically and boldly declare subspecies?

The really radical discovery of these genome-wide studies on wolves and coyotes in North America isn’t that red wolves and Eastern wolves are hybrids.  The really radical discovery is that wolves and coyotes are much closer to each other than we assumed. The initial calculation suggested a divergence that happened only around 50,000 years ago.

Wolves in Yellowstone and Alaska have coyote genes, and coyotes in the Eastern US have wolf genes. That’s not a hybrid zone, which is what you get with bobcats and Canada lynx and with kit and swift foxes, where only a narrow hybrid zone has been identified.

Coyote and wolf genes have traveled across this continent, entering into what we have classically thought of as two distinct species but really aren’t.

My take is that coyote are nothing more than a diminutive wolf. Its ancestor was an archaic form of Eurasian Canis lupus, the Holarctic wolf.  It wandered across the Bering Land Bridge during a warming period that happened roughly 50,000 years ago. It came into a continent that was already dominated by dire wolves, dholes, and archaic jackal-like canids, as well as a whole suite of large cats, including jaguars, American lions, sabertooths, and dirk-toothed cats.

The way to survive was not to be a large pack-hunter. That niche was already occupied by dire wolves and dholes, so they became convergently-evolved jackals.

A jackal evolved out of the wolf-lineage is a pretty durable animal, and it played second fiddle to the modern Holarctic wolves that invaded some 20,000 years ago. The wolves that came across were large wolves that were adapted to hunting larger prey, and as the dire wolf became extinct, the larger Holarctic wolf replaced the endemic North American wolf.

The behaviors of coyotes and wolves generally keeps them from interbreeding. Coyotes are much more strictly monogamous, a trait that would be of great importance for an animal that had to live on smaller prey species and carrion for survival.

Wolves are far less monogamous, and if prey populations are high, it is not impossible for wolf packs to have several females produce litters. These extra litters come from the female wolves that have not yet left their mother’s packs but have bred with wandering males that slip around at the edges of the established pack territories. These matings happen all the time in wolf societies, but generally, these females don’t get to raise their pups. They die of exposure or are killed by the main breeding female.

Western and Northern wolf packs kill interlopers. A coyote is nothing more than interloper and gets killed. The two animals could mate and produce fertile offspring, but they usually don’t.

But the wolves that colonized the Eastern forests developed differently.  These Eastern forests had far more deer per square mile than the West, and greater social tolerance may have been a trait of these wolves, even when they were driven to near extinction. There is evidence that these wolves have mated with coyotes before European contact, but after European contact, they mated with the coyotes that came east.

The coyotes that came into the East were descendants of those little wolves that scrapped around the big predators of old. They could pack up as wolves to hunt deer, or they could remain in mated pairs to hunt only mice and rabbits. They could scavenge at the edges of human civilization, and they could thrive.

Most of North America is now under the reign of the little wolf, a remarkable feat of evolution.

Dr. Ian Malcolm’s most famous line from Jurassic Park is that “Life finds a way.” The context of the line is that he was rejecting the claim that the genetically engineered dinosaurs would never reproduce simply because they had chosen to engineer these creatures as solely female.

In our context, I would argue that “Wolves find a way.” Right now, the most successful wolf lineage in the world is the one that includes domestic dogs and dingoes. They are found on every continent, except Antarctica, and were found there until very recently. This lineage does well because it has become part of humanity. Populations go feral or go stray. Others become so humanized that they almost cease to be an entity separate from our species. It has largely given up hunting big game for survival and thrives on the fat of human civilization.

In North America, the second most successful wolf lineage is this coyote lineage.  It thrives because it can much more easily exploit life in the civilized world than the larger, more specialized wolves. They can scavenge. They can mouse and rabbit. They can run deer. They can eat apples and pears in orchards. But they do not depend upon the large ungulates for survival.

It is a wolf that cane become a jackal, then a fox, and then, should the deer numbers be high enough, return to a more lupine existence as a pack hunter.

Yes, my concept of the coyote and the North American wolf means rejecting some fossils. There are fossils that have been described as “coyotes” that date to 1 million years before present.

But the full-genome comparisons are so compelling that I have to reject these fossils. The full genome comparisons are exactly like the ones that have been used to compare humans to chimps, humans to gorillas, and domestic cats to tigers (and cats). 

The findings of these studies aren’t as controversial as the wolf and coyote genome comparisons have been, but that’s because they haven’t found that certain endangered species are likely hybrids.

The red wolf and Eastern wolf exponents can debate as to whether these animals are hybrids or not, but the real problem is the discovery of recent divergence between the wolf and coyote.

This recent divergence allows for a hybrid origin for the red wolf and Eastern wolf, but it also shows that this hybrid origin is most a debate of semantics. They might be hybrids, but they are hybrids between two different forms of the same species. And the resulting hybrids are much better adapted to living in the new North America.

That’s the best case red wolves and Eastern wolves have in light of the genetic data.

Paleontology is often the study of bones and teeth and comparing bones and teeth. Except for instances in which ancient DNA has been extracted and compared, most of these studies will miss very important parts of an organism’s natural history. Because of recombination, DNA studies can also be flawed, but they are a much more complete record of an organism’s evolution than we might get from measuring bones.

And we know now that canids are particularly prone to parallel evolution. The golden jackal species as classically defined has had to be split into two. African golden jackals are much more closely related to Eurasian wolves, while Eurasian golden jackals are much more distinct lineage. Their similarities are the result of parallel evolution, which was also at work in producing the jackal-like coyote out of the wolf lineage.

Had their bones been found in some ancient layer of sediment, paleontologists using comparative morphology methods would have declared them all one species, an error that is likely been repeated thousands of times with any number of specimens from a variety of lineages.

I like paleontology, but every time I read a paper from that discipline, I wonder if this is the full story.

And pretty sure virtually every paleontologist does too.

If the full-genome comparisons are correct– and I have little reason to think they are wrong–then we are living in the reign of the little wolves. They press on deeper into Alaska and Canada. They push east until they hit every state. They pushed deep into Central America, now running the right at the edge of the Darien Gap. Once they cross that great swamp, they will arrive in Colombia and will be the first wild Canis species to cross into South America since the dire wolf.

It’s just a matter of time. They will make it.

And South America’s guild of unique canid species are in for some disruption.

I hope they can handle our little renegade, for the reign of the little wolf could also displace the fruit-eating wolf with a mane and the short-legged convergent dhole.

Those problems are a way off, but they are worth thinking about, as the coyote completes its conquest of one continent and reaches for another.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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