“To live like a coyote is to embrace both the joy and the sorrow of the journey.” Quote
This is a two year old male who recently lost his best buddy brother to a bullet. Traumas are accepted by coyotes and they move on.
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Two days ago, this coyote was on the golf course in his territory, on one of the non-mowed interstices between fairways. He was hunting. He pounced several times but came up with nothing. Then he walked over to a spot and stuck his nose deep into the thick and long grasses there. He pulled out something the size of a vole and he began *toying* with it, the way coyotes do with their prey.
It took my blowing up the photos when I got home to realize that what that coyote was toying with was not a vole at all, but a torn golfer’s glove, an obvious treasure. Since he seemed to know exactly where it was hidden deep under the grasses, I assume he had buried it there — a treasure whose location only he knew.
So he toyed with his treasure as though it was a vole: he pawed at it, chewed it, tossed it in the air, pounced on it, rolled on it, caressed it. He was joyfully *into it* as several golfers stopped to watch. Then, after about 5 minutes, he calmly sauntered over to where he had extracted the treasure from the ground, and with his snout, he moved the grasses aside, placed his treasure as deep down as he could, and then used his snout to move the grasses over it. It was now buried again and ready to be plucked up when the urge to play with it arose!!
The entire sequence of events — from retrieving what he had hidden, joyfully playing with it, and then carefully putting it back — was purposeful and remembered. I have seen coyote cache food and treasures before: https://coyoteyipps.com/2020/11/28/caching-and-burying/
