By DENNIS APRILL
(Editors Note: The following article, first published on the Outdoors Page on Aug., 26, 2002, is a perfect accompaniment to the main article on coyotes. Past articles dating back to 2001 can be found on our Web site www.pressrepublican.com/0105_outdoor_perspective. Scroll to the bottom of the page and click on "Archives".)
At 2 a.m. Wednesday, Aug. 15, it started as a burst of high-pitched yelps, yaps and screeching intermixed with barks and growls and, on the rare occasion, a sustained howl. It all sounded like something being tortured just outside my bedroom window.
I awoke immediately, the screened window letting in the noisy chaos that actually was taking place in a nearby clearing. I knew, from past experience, the sounds were from coyotes, a routine that happens every August.
Coyotes, like red and gray wolves, bear their young in the spring, and by late summer these youngsters are old enough to travel with the family unit. In the case of coyotes, the unit howls seemingly for bonding, whereas wolves do so to communicate with their young. While some grown wolves hunt, the younger ones are left near an open area like a field or bog so they can call back and forth with the adults.
A week earlier, 75 miles to the north, a group of college students and I heard another variation of howling in the Papineau-Labelle Wildlife Reserve in southern Ontario. Those howls were more sustained, but at times as high-pitched as the coyotes I heard a week later. These were the howls of red wolves, a species extirpated from the southern United States, but fairly common in southern Ontario and Quebec. Minnesota, Michigan and Wisconsin wolves, once thought of as gray wolves, have been genetically linked to red wolves.
Red wolves are smaller than grays, and their northern rang follows the northern extent of white-tailed deer.
The best description of the howls we heard in Papineau-Labelle come from naturalist writer Edward Hoagland in his book "Red Wolves and Black Bears." Hoagland, a Vermont resident, writes, "Red wolves howl in a higher, less emotive pitch than gray wolves and don't blend with each other quite as stylishly, though they do employ more nuances and personality than a coyote family's gabble." Hoagland, who researched some of the last known red wolves in the southern United States, also compared their calls to those of coyotes. He writes, "A coyote's howl sounds hysterical, amateurish by comparison, chopped and frantic, almost like barnyard cackling." But the coyotes Hoagland were describing in his 1972 book were the small, western variety. Since then, geneticists have found that eastern coyotes have varying degrees of red-wolf genes, thus accounting for their increased size and, at times, almost wolf-like traits of killing deer and beaver and traveling in larger packs than western coyotes. Some of these wolf-coyote mixtures, the result of extensive interbreeding in southeastern Canada, are hard to classify.
"So, what should a hybrid sound like?" Bob Chambers asked me once. Chambers, professor emeritus at the State University of New York College of Environmental Science and Forestry and an eastern coyote expert, said, "In all my years of tracking and studying eastern coyotes in the Newcomb area, there were a couple of times when I wasn't sure exactly what I was hearing -- a coyote, a wolf, or a hybrid." Ray Masters, a wildlife technician at SUNY ESF, Newcomb, who has worked extensively with Chambers in the past, joined me on a southern Quebec wolf calling trip in 2000, and we luckily got to hear a couple of packs howl.
The next morning, Masters joined the other participants on the porch of the chalet where we had spent the night and announced, "I've heard that same howling before near Newcomb." Masters is not one to exaggerate, so that leads to the question: What is actually out there in northern New York? Judging from the latest research done at the University of Trent in Ontario by geneticists Drs. Bradley White and Paul Wilson, the clear differences once thought to separate red and gay wolves and eastern coyotes don't exist anymore in a portion of southern Canada and northeastern United States.
In fact, there are still core areas that are predominately red wolf (called eastern Canadian wolf by the researchers), in peripheral areas there is extensive interbreeding with coyotes going on in southern Ontario and Quebec, and we in northern New York may be getting some of the second or third generation offspring of those unions, so maybe some of the howls I heard in early August weren't pure coyotes exercising their vocal cords, but members of a wild canid species that is still evolving.
