Coyote Yipps

I’ve looked back at the photos I have of Teardrop and her siblings. Only a month ago she was thriving. She was small and she had something wrong with her eyes which were constantly tearing up, but otherwise she had a little round body just like the rest of her siblings. Behaviorally, she tended to keep to herself more than the others: I attributed this to her small size. Rough play was the order of the day and it seemed this was too much for her.

I posted her situation and a long video on September 16th. For that video, she had plopped herself down right in front of the camera as though she wanted her story to be known. Before that video, I had only been seeing her with IR at night which had not revealed the extent of her illness and emaciation.

Above is a series of videos I was able to capture during her last day.

And then it happened — I found her body. Her death, in my opinion, was a release — a release from the pain and discomfort her little body had to cope with due to an illness which was not of her choice nor of her making. Pup survival rate in the wild is not high. The videos, all taken within the last week, show she was in pain and withering away — she needed to be relieved of that.

Nature, even without humans around to make it worse, is not always pretty: it’s brutal, messy, and dirty. We tend to think of *nature* and what is *natural* as being good, pure, pristine and calm — but is it? Wild animals are always hungry, and they don’t know where the next meal is coming from or even if there will be a next meal. They are constantly plagued by bugs, sores, dirt, the weather in all its forms, the environmental situation they find themselves in. There is no relief from the pain of physical injuries, be they from a thorn in a foot pad to an actual broken limb. And there are diseases including distemper, rabies, mange that are endemic to wildlife. Above what nature has dealt them, we humans often worsen their lives with our hate, fears, and even our love — including feeding and befriending them — all of which inform their behaviors and alter them, and in the end make life more difficult for them.

After Teardrop’s death, and maybe even during her death, her family appeared in the field cameras. They had been around as individuals but not as a family before that, so I’m sure her dire situation is what attracted them. I’ve heard coyotes howl at the death of a family member, but my cameras are not triggered by sound, so I didn’t hear it if it happened. I don’t know if her family tried to help her, but I know that one of her brothers hung around, possibly not comprehending her death, her stillness, or her new odors that came with death — or maybe he was waiting for her. He waited around longer than the others and even came back and sat above where I found her.

I didn’t catch the situation until less than a week ago. I immediately called my wildlife vet who told me that, if the emaciation wasn’t caused by a systemic illness such as kidney disease which can’t be helped, it could be due to bad hunting skills. This struck a bell with me because I had observed since her birth that her eyes were always watery and she was constantly rubbing them. Over the last month — which is the timeframe when the emaciation took hold and progressed — parent coyotes were pushing and encouraging their youngsters to hunt more and more on their own by not bringing them food: “hey, if you want to eat, you’ll have to hunt.” It’s an act of love and kindness to push them to become self-sufficient, even though it might hurt a little. But without excellent eyes, maybe this was impossible.

Could we have captured her and fixed her, or sent her to a sanctuary? The answer in balance and realistically is no: there were too many negatives and no guarantees of success in this case. In the first place, we would have made life terrifyingly worse by trying to capture her: removing the youngster from the only family situation and life she has known is bad, even if you’re trying to save her life. As for a sanctuary: life without freedom and concomitant elements of a natural life is not much of a life. Their natural lives include exciting life cycle milestones such as dispersing, looking for a territory, finding a mate, defending that territory, raising a family and developing individual relationships with family members, feeding that family. A wild coyote’s life that doesn’t include these things, or the potential for these things, is a compromised life that I don’t believe they would want to live.

As I said, she was extra small from birth and had problems with her eyes from that time on, so she appears to have been born with a weak system right from the start. Again, coyote pup survival rate is not high.