GENEKAL NOTES 
187 
however, when it became friendly with a female Airedale dog, lost some of its 
wariness, and frequently came near the farm buildings where the dog lived. It 
was killed with a shot gun in a field on the farm. 
Mr. Jones has generously deposited the skin and skull in the Biological Survey 
collection. United States National Museum, where the specimen becomes num- 
ber 235,503. It may be tentatively referred to Canis latrans latrans, but with 
our present confused knowledge of the taxonomic relations of the coyotes exact 
identification of individual specimens is almost impossible. The animal was 
adult, but not old, the teeth showing only a trace of wear. It differs in no pro- 
nounced color or cranial characteristics from a male specimen collected in May, 
1910, at Rockford, Iowa, "^hich may be considered typical latrans. 
The question naturally arises as to how a coyote reached this eastern locality. 
It is, of course, impossible to say definitely. The animal probably escaped from 
captivity. Or it may represent an extreme easterly extension of the geographic 
range of coyotes. There is no direct evidence for or against either of the sup- 
positions. It is known that the range of the coyote has gradually extended 
northward and eastward, but it would seem hardly probable that the species has, 
as yet, ingressed a region as far east as central Maryland. — Hartley H. T. 
Jackson, U. S. Biological Survey, Washington, D. C. 
AN OBSERVATION ON THE CARNIVOROUS PROPENSITIES OP THE GRAY GOPHER 
While on a camping trip in northern Minnesota during August I chanced to 
make an interesting observation on the preying habits of the gray gopher, Citellus 
franklini (Sabine) . On this particular occasion our party had stopped for lunch 
in a vacant yard in the forest of western Aitkin County. Suddenly we heard 
sharp squeals confing from the edge of a copse and looking in that direction we 
noticed what appeared to be a struggle going on in the grass. Hurrying to the 
spot we discovered a nearly full-grown gray gopher struggling with a young 
rabbit which it had seized behind the right ear. The gopher hesitated a moment 
on our approach, but did not release its grip until I stepped to within a pace of 
it, when it darted off a distance of two or three feet. The rabbit, I observed, 
was alive but unable to move. It was fully as large as the gopher. We stood 
still and the gopher returned to the attack, biting the rabbit furiously about the 
body. Again I frightened the gopher away but it returned once more to the 
attack and repeated its previous performance. I frightened it away a third time, 
but again it returned and rushed upon the prey biting it here and there about the 
body until it was apparently dead. Then running its nose rapidly over the car- 
cass the gopher began gnawing at the hind quarters. 
We left the scene and about twenty minutes later I returned to the spot and 
found the gopher still gnawing at the carcass, the hind quarters of which, except 
for skin and bones, had been devoured. Examining the spot where the struggle 
was first seen I found a small 'fform,” in which the rabbit had apparently been 
lying when it was pounced upon. A week or so previous to this occasion, at 
Gull Lake in Crow Wing County, I watched an individual of this same species 
making after a striped gopher, which, however, escaped into a brush-pile. — 
Arthur M. Johnson, Department of Botany, University of Minnesota. 
