Defenders Magazine

The Trickster Heads East

As coyotes move into habitats and communities in the Northeast, they bring a host of questions

by Madeline Bodin

© Jim Brennan/bciusa.com

Dan Harrison examined the coyote in the shade of the birches, maples, spruces and firs of an eastern Maine forest. The coyote's fur was almost black, and coarse, different than the buff and gray colored coyotes he had seen while attending college in Wyoming. Its head looked stockier and its snout broader than the coyotes of the West, too. Weighed in as part of Harrison's master's thesis project at the University of Maine, the coyote was 45 pounds, about twice as much as a typical western coyote.

That was nearly 30 years ago, but Harrison remembers being struck by the coyote's resemblance to red wolves and eastern Canadian wolves. He had no doubt that the creature he had measured and radio-collared was a coyote, but still, it had a certain family resemblance to wolves.

A few miles away, Harrison trapped another coyote. This one was smaller and had the classic, delicate features of a western coyote, but its fur was strawberry blond. All through that summer and in the years to come, Harrison put radio collars on dozens of coyotes in Maine, racking up examples of the diversity in size, shape and even color.

That these coyotes came in different forms would come as no surprise to early Native Americans of the Southwest and Great Plains, where the coyote played an important role in their mythology as "a trickster" and mischief-maker. But it turns out that in the Northeast, where coyotes did not start appearing until last century, their role, along with an explanation for their varied appearances, is proving harder to explain.

Matthew Gompper, an associate professor in the Department of Fisheries and Wildlife Sciences at the University of Missouri and an expert in carnivore ecology says coyote sightings in the northeastern United States were rare until the 1940s. But starting in the 1970s the coyote population in the Northeast exploded, saturating the region by 2000. Today they are found in suburban backyards and urban parks as well as in forests and farm fields, even in Manhattan's Central Park.

 "The arrival of coyotes in the Northeast was a function of two things, the removal of wolves and the removal of eastern deciduous forests," says Gompper. In the West, coyotes avoid wolves, which often kill them. As forests in the Northeast were cut down and converted into farm fields, the landscape of the Northeast came to more closely resemble the coyotes' native prairie. "Which was more important?" asks Gompper, "There are conflicting opinions, but both were important."

From early on, people noticed the northeastern coyote was different from its western counterpart. It was bigger. Was it some kind of hybrid? Or was a different diet—the prey of the coyote is larger here—allowing it to grow bigger?

At first, the tools available to answer these questions were limited to closely examining the bodies of the animals. Northeastern coyotes are, on average, slightly larger than the coyotes of the Southwest. It's a rare coyote, like the nearly black one Dan Harrison trapped, that is twice as heavy. The average difference is 10 pounds or less, or, about a third larger than western coyotes.

Some early questions about northeastern coyotes were answered with simple, if messy, methods. As part of his graduate research, Harrison analyzed 2,000 coyote scats, which showed that northeastern coyotes eat adult deer, particularly in winter. Coyotes everywhere eat deer fawns, which are important food for the growing pups, says Harrison, now a professor of wildlife ecology at the University of Maine. But this doesn't mean northeastern coyotes hunt in packs, bringing down healthy adult deer the way a wolf pack might bring down an elk. "That hasn't been documented in the northeastern United States," says Harrison. "Coyotes don't cooperatively forage in packs as much as people like to think they do." Instead, pairs or families of coyotes eat deer weakened by winter or killed on the road.

Research into the northeastern coyote was kicked into high gear by two wolf reintroduction programs in the 1980s and 1990s. At about the time the successful reintroduction of gray wolves to Yellowstone National Park was fueling hopes for other, similar reintroductions, research by Harrison and other scientists found there were areas in Maine and New York's Adirondack region that could sustain wolf populations. In the southeastern United States, however, the reintroduction of the red wolf was being hampered by interbreeding with coyotes.

Was the big, northeastern coyote a wolf-coyote hybrid? Would the presence of coyotes in the Northeast sink any wolf reintroduction plans? In the 1990s, these questions were suddenly urgent.

By this time DNA analysis techniques had developed to the point where they could be used to help answer some of these questions. However, domestic dogs, wolves and coyotes are so closely related that telling them apart through their DNA is an exacting task. Finding evidence of interbreeding, let alone decoding that evidence to create information useful to wildlife managers would involve all the uncertainty that comes with cutting edge science.

There were about six different genetic studies of northeastern wolves done in the 1990s. These studies all showed that while the wolves appeared to have some coyote genes, the coyotes of the region did not appear to have any wolf genes. As far as the wolves went, the studies seemed to raise more questions about their genetics than they answered.

While it had never been cut and dry, in the 1990s the scientific community generally believed the wolf found in the northeastern part of the continent, the eastern timber wolf, was a subspecies of gray wolf. But at least one account from colonial times describes two types of wolves living in the region, one being more slender and preying on deer, and the other being more robust and preying on moose.

In 2000, Paul Wilson, a specialist in DNA profiling at Trent University in Ontario, Canada, brought back the idea of two northeastern wolf species, this time with genetic markers unique to the smaller, deer-eating wolf species. Wilson also suggested this proposed species of eastern wolf—perhaps because it was smaller but more likely because it was more closely related—readily hybridized with coyotes, where gray wolves generally did not.

Walter Jakubas, who supervises the mammal program for the Maine Department of Inland Fisheries and Wildlife, was intrigued by Wilson's findings. He knew previous genetic studies had shown no wolf genes in northeastern coyotes, but he wondered if Wilson's hypothesis would cast a new light on the subject. It did. Jakubas collected DNA samples from 100 coyotes in Maine. Wilson analyzed them and found about a quarter of the animals had at least 5 percent eastern wolf ancestry.

Why did this study find wolf ancestry in northeastern coyotes when many other studies had shown no evidence? "When we did the work we had a third wolf species in the mix," explains Wilson. He says he found eastern wolf genes, and only eastern wolf genes, not gray wolf and not dog, mixed with eastern coyote genes in the animals in the study. Jakubas points out that the animal with the highest percentage of wolf ancestry in the study—89 percent—was a small female that looked like an average coyote. He says the genetic markers used in the study don't necessarily affect the appearance or behavior of the animal.

Wilson and Jakubas believe that northeastern coyotes came from the Midwest into Ontario and Quebec, where they bred with remnant populations of eastern wolves. Their offspring then moved into New York and New England. Their findings are controversial. Robert Wayne, an expert in canid—or dog family—genetics at the University of California–Los Angeles, believes that coyotes may hybridize with gray wolves and that eastern wolves may not be a separate species, but the result of hybridization. Roland Kays, curator of mammals at the New York State Museum, says Wilson's study hasn't convinced him that northeastern coyotes hybridize with wolves.

Kays and Wayne have teamed up for their own study of northeastern coyote genetics. Kays has collected DNA samples from about 1,000 coyotes from all over the northeastern United States. Wayne is in the process of analyzing the DNA, and the pair expects to have the results later this year.

Kays says he expects the findings from this study to show whether there is a single genetic profile for all the coyotes in the region, if there is a gradient, or if there are perhaps pockets of genetic variation. He hopes to piece together an evolutionary history that will explain the genetic findings, and, depending on those findings, perhaps compare the genetic differences across the region with coyotes' behavioral differences across the region to see if the two overlap.

Even more controversial than Wilson's genetic findings are some of the conclusions his Trent University colleague Bradley White has drawn from them. White believes the appearance of the coyote in northeastern North America has unleashed an evolutionary process and that coyotes will out-compete or interbreed with introduced wolves in most habitats in the northeastern United States. He sees wolf populations becoming established only in the rare habitats most suited to them.

Harrison sees the situation differently. "The controversy is whether coyotes fill the niche of whatever wolves used to be here. It's a complicated story. There are parts of that story that coyotes do fill." But even the largest northeastern coyote is no match for a moose. "There are 30,000 plus moose in Maine that coyotes don't touch, unless as carrion," says Harrison. He points out that historically, Maine was home to moose and caribou, with white-tailed deer being a recent arrival. Today the moose are back, and in such numbers that they are a hazard on Maine's roads.

Wolves and moose were once found together across the Northern Hemisphere, from Alaska to Newfoundland, from Norway to Mongolia to Siberia. Harrison says he finds it difficult to believe the northeastern United States should be the one place on Earth with a growing moose population and no wolves to prey on them.

"This used to be a moose-caribou-elk ecosystem," says Nina Fascione, vice president of field conservation for Defenders of Wildlife. "We didn't have a little 50-pound animal running around taking those big animals down." Fascione says while the genetic studies are fascinating, the goal is a healthy ecosystem. "It doesn't matter what they see under the microscope," she says. "We need an animal up there that can take down moose and that won't interbreed with the existing canid, the coyote."

The federal government has shown no interest in restoring wolves to the Northeast in the past eight years, so the urgent questions about the northeastern coyote are no longer about its relationship to wolves but about its relationship to human beings. Are coyotes competing with human hunters for deer? Can coyotes and humans live together peacefully in the suburbs?

Some of the current research into northeastern coyotes addresses those concerns. The New York Suburban Coyote Study, a joint project between Cornell University and the New York State Department of Environmental Conservation, is using telephone surveys to explore human behavior toward coyotes and a tracking study to investigate coyote behavior. The hope is to provide information that can be used to keep people safe and to create sound wildlife policies, says Heather Wieczorek Hudenko, a graduate research assistant at Cornell.

When will we know all the northeastern coyote's secrets? The suburban coyote study will answer some questions. Kays' and Wayne's genetics study should answer others. But Kays and Hudenko both say when they find the answer to one question about the northeastern coyote, it often just raises another.

This should come as no surprise—given the coyote's ancient reputation as a trickster and shape-shifter.

Madeline Bodin writes from Vermont and specializes in natural sciences.