Coyote Yipps

The light was too dim for me to see what the coyote had caught, but it looked like a fairly large “catch”  — bigger than an everyday vole. Whatever it was, it was carried to the side of the path, where it was “crunched” again and again. Ahh, yes, I’d heard that same sound before: it was the same sound my own dog made when he chewed on a pine cone! This coyote had found yet another toy to play with. This pine cone was almost 5 inches long.

Similar to Don Quixote and the Windmill, here is a juvenile coyote attacking a giant snake, so to speak. The coyote attacked, tugged at, pushed and bit this thing for about 45 seconds. It was a spirited and enthusiastic encounter, rivaled in intensity only by the frolicking play with its sibling. I have learned that coyotes love to play. They play with each other or they play alone. They play with sticks, with balls left by dogs, and even with, yes, dead rodents or snakes.

I watched as a young coyote waited to ambush another. It was an invitation to play. The first slide here shows the second coyote apologizing — by sticking its tongue out: it is not going to accept the invitation. By the third slide the second coyote has actually moved up the hill. If the invitation had been accepted, the second coyote would have charged the one lying in ambush, or it would have crouched down in the same manner, or it would have begun running off so as to be chased. None of these occurred, so the first just stood up and walked on. The expected playtime was dashed.

Spinning is what happens when you try to catch your own tail. You end up going round and around, faster and faster. No matter how fast you spin, your tail remains out of reach. So you change directions, hoping that this might be the right solution, but you get no closer than you did before. Dogs do this. Today I saw a wild coyote do it!! I watched for dizziness when the coyote had finished, but I didn’t see it!

This coyote is not hunting, though these photos are reminiscent of hunting scenes. This here is one continual sequence where  the coyote is just bouncing down a steep incline for the sheer joy of it!!

These two coyotes were running around, chasing each other, stalking each other, pouncing on one another and wrestling. It was a fun-filled frenzy of play. I didn’t catch the tug-of-war as it was happening — not until I zeroed in on my zoomed shots at home did I see what had been going on!

I was watching this coyote sit peacefully on a hillside in the early morning with two other coyotes. Then, the silence was broken by an intense and long sneezing fit by a human who was quite some distance away — maybe 600 feet or more. The person was not visible from where I was. In fact, no one was visible in the park. Maybe the sneezing was not related, but all had been calm when this coyote, at the end of the sneezing fit, grabbed a large dry branched twig and ran up the hill with it. The coyote was playing, excitedly, as can be seen by its expression, and maybe even inviting the another coyote to join in the play — there were no takers, though. The coyote jumped and bucked and then, when the twig got caught on another plant, the coyote pulled and pulled, tug-of-war fashion. The playing didn’t last long, and the coyote settled down as it had been doing before the sneezing fit.

Coyotes, just like us humans, enjoy playing and entertaining themselves. In the first slide you can see that the coyote had been sitting next to another coyote, and it may be it was trying to incite this one to play. The last slide is actually of the second coyote who went up to the spot — but not until the first one had abandoned the twig and moved on.

My first sense of this behavior when I took the photos was that the coyote had become agitated at the intense sneezing. But it took zooming in on the photographs to tell that there was no agitation at all — it was about playing.