It's February, and in my woodlot on the hard crust of snow that is coated with a light powder, I see fresh coyote tracks on a regular basis, for this is the time of year when the males and females prepare to mate.

They are also hungry, and moving about looking for food, whether a deer or a rabbit.

For many decades, these canine predators have been called coy-dogs, brush wolves, and a few other unmentionables, but for the most part, we now know from recent research they are a coyote-wolf hybrid, a hybrid with traits of both the wolf and western coyote.

In a recent study done by Dr. Roland Kays, curator of mammals at the New York State Museum in Albany, he and his colleagues genetically tested 696 coyotes — museum specimens and those shot by hunters or caught by trappers — and found most contained wolf genes. This comes as no surprise. Wildlife biologists in the 1970s and later Canadian geneticists in the 1990s proved that somewhere along their long northern journey eastward, the western coyote interbred with wolves in southern Ontario, probably in the early 1900s after wolves were extirpated in the northeastern United States, leaving a void for a large canine predator to fill.

Those first coyote colonizers did not breed with the large gray wolves of northern Canada, but rather the smaller wolves of southeastern Canada. Those wolves weigh in the 60- to 80-pound range. Researchers have speculated young males from broken packs mated with eastern-moving coyote females, so the coyotes entering St. Lawrence County in the 1930s were an altered species.

Kays and his colleagues, in an article published last fall in "Biology Letters," a peer-reviewed journal, found that not only are the eastern coyotes larger (average weight 30 to 50 pounds), but they have wider skulls and stronger jaws that are more efficient for hunting larger prey like deer (one-third of their diet) and beaver, even though small game is still key for their survival. Kays also found that western coyotes, which moved eastward south of the Great Lakes where there were no wolves, are now coming into contact with the wolf-coyote hybrids that have spread to places like western New York and Pennsylvania, just complicating the genetic mix even more in those areas. Needless to say, the state of our wild canid is in a state of flux, leaving open the question of what we actually have roaming around here. Dr. Bradley White, geneticist at the University of Trent in Ontario and an expert on these matters, thinks eastern coyotes may have to be classified as a separate species, not a wolf and not a western coyote. I couldn't agree more.

From my own unscientific observations, I have found differences between eastern coyotes and the smaller eastern wolves of southern Ontario and Quebec, but those differences are beginning to meld. For one, our coyotes don't sound like southern Quebec wolves, which have a plaintive, sustained howl similar to the larger gray wolves, but higher in pitch. In contrast, coyotes still make mostly the chaotic, high-pitched yaps and yells of the western variety.

Last year, however, I noticed some changes. Mixed in with those yaps were some sustained, albeit high, wolf-like howls. Another difference is the size of their feet. In the summer of 2006, while tracking wolves in the Mont Tremblent area of Quebec, I made a cast of tracks of two wolves using Plaster of Paris; one was 4½ inches across, the other 4 inches. The largest coyote tracks I have seen are barely 3 inches across.

After numerous studies, it is apparent the eastern coyote isn't easy to classify because it is a species still evolving, an animal that maintained the ability to survive in many different habitats from wilderness to suburbia while consuming a wide variety of foods — in short, an animal built to make it in the 21st century.

E-mail Dennis Aprill at daprill2000@yahoo.com and check out our Web site at www.pressrepublican.com/0105_outdoor_perspective for more photos and past articles.