Coyote 



Coyote 



Canis latrans Say 

 Called also Prairie Wolj. 



Length. 4 feet. 



Description. General colour fulvous, grizzled with black and white 

 hairs; under parts whitish; tail tipped with black. (Illustration 

 facing p. 285.) 



Range. Northern Mississippi Valley to the Rocky Mountains, 

 with allied species south to Texas and Mexico, and west- 

 ward to California and British Columbia. Dr. C. Hart 

 Merriam has shown that many of these coyotes are very 

 different from one another, and as in many of our other 

 larger animals, we find that instead of one wide ranging 

 form of the older authors there are really several perfectly 

 distinct species. The distribution of the various coyotes has 

 not yet been satisfactorily worked out. 



Coyotes are small, slinking wolves that live in burrows on 

 the plains, where they feed principally on jack rabbits, ground 

 squirrels and mice. 



They are often called prairie wolves to distinguish them 

 from the timber wolves or gray wolves. They combine the 

 swiftness, shy cunning and greed of the wolf and fox tribes, 

 but lack the ferociousness of their larger cousin, the timber 

 wolf. 



Being active, healthy brutes, they undoubtedly enjoy their 

 wild, unrestricted life of action and adventure, and are happy in 

 their own way, except when suffering from unusually hard luck 

 at hunting. Yet somehow they always look distressed and mis- 

 erable, and their whining howl at night seems to express all 

 the hopeless despair of some wretched spirit of the blind "view- 

 less wind" that whirls away before a storm "seeking for some- 

 thing lost, it cannot find." 



Like the gray wolf, coyotes hunt in packs at night, yap- 

 ping and howling as they run. 



They often follow the hunter at a safe distance in the hope 

 of picking up the offal of the game he has killed. The coyote 

 is now rare east of the bunch-grass plains. In Arkansas, Mis- 

 souri and Illinois, where they were once common, they are sel- 

 dom seen. But in the Butte regions of the upper Missouri and 



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