Imagine having to keep up with the nutritional needs not only of yourself — that must be hard enough — but also of FIVE ravenous pups you’ve brought into the world! The nutritional needs of growing pups is tremendous!
This top video shows a mother coyote nursing four of her five 4-week-old pups. She is ever so patient through the frenzy of hungry little stomachs! I timed this feeding: it was done and over in just one minute and forty seconds: that’s how long a nursing session is.
I noted that within just three weeks of their birth, Mom was already bringing in semi-solid food in her stomach which she regurgitated for the pups: her milk just wasn’t enough for them.
In this next video, below, youngsters are poking at Mom’s mouth: that’s where they know solid food comes from. Young pups are ALWAYS hungry and they pester Mom until she delivers! Watching it for any length of time makes you wonder how she copes with it.
In the next few weeks, they will switch entirely to regurgitated food. I’ve seen regurgitated food continued to be brought in — though much less frequently as the pups continue to grow and become capable of hunting for themselves — for up to a year in some families: I wonder if this is a way of just keeping those pups around? Mom and Dad will do this as as they teach their brood how to hunt and where to find food.
Here is a video showing a different mother last year, regurgitating for her four-month-old pups in August. And here is a posting of a dad regurgitating food for his yearlings.
By the way, a couple of parents have allowed their children to crawl into such openings in our more naturally-wild parks. Maybe the openings look like they could become exciting little “forts” in the woods. Indeed that’s what they are — they’re already taken and belong to the wild critters who live there. There are plenty of signs everywhere throughout our parks advising that there are coyotes around. Please understand that coyotes NEED to protect their newborn pups. IF a child is nipped, there will be some tears and possibly a small wound to the child, but also it would be a tragedy because the coyote herself would most likely be euthanized — for simply protecting her pups. In the more overgrown woodsy parts of the parks we also have raccoons, skunks and plenty of rats who you should stay away from.
Two years ago, this coyote pair raised pups here in one of SF’s smaller parks. The coyotes had been tamed by feeders who not only fed them, but befriended them to the degree that the coyotes would wait around at the park entrance for handouts, as close as 5 feet or even less from people and their mostly leashed dogs. But unleashed dogs went chasing after the coyotes on a regular basis, making the coyotes very uncomfortable. The pups of course were kept totally secret, but I suppose dogs and people came close enough, often enough, to the secret den so that Mom decided she didn’t want to repeat the stressful experience.
The runt in a litter, when there is one, is the smallest and sometimes the weakest pup. Their biggest disadvantage is that, because all the other pups are larger than them, they have a harder time competing for Mom’s milk. It turns out that getting one’s fair share of milk during the first 48 hours after birth is very important: only that very initial supply of milk contains colostrum which is loaded with antibodies which primes the pups’ immune systems, without which they could be more vulnerable to illnesses.
Coyote Yipps 