By Valerie Blaine For the DailyHerald.com
It’s time for the proverbial Paul Revere to race through town crying, “The coyotes are coming! The coyotes are coming!”
The citizenry of suburbia will soon be up in arms, public officials will be a tizzy, and the media will have a heyday with news about vicious maulings by these purportedly ruthless varmints.
But I’m going to head it Revere at the pass. Coyote’s are not just coming, their here. And they’ve been here since the last public panic a year ago. The much-maligned coyotes are a reality in suburbia and knowing a bit about their behavior and ecology will help dispel unnecessary alarm.
First, let’s look at when and why most concerns about coyotes are raised.
Mating season
The coyotes that have been living at the perimeter of your subdivision, at the edge of the cornfield and behind the strip mall are more visible come
February because it’s courtship and mating season. These wild dogs are searching the canine equivalent of match.com. Coyotes take the dating game very seriously and will cover a lot of territory to find a match. That territory may well include your neighborhood.
As with human dating, coyote courtship is an expensive endeavor. Instead of cash, however, it’s calories that coyotes need.
As they pair up, they need calories in order to find and fashion suitable dens. An abandoned badger borrow may be a fixer-upper for a den, or Mr. and Mrs. Coyote may redesign a brush pile out back, or they may remodel the woodchuck hole under your garage.
Newly pregnant females also require extra caloric input. Both males and females hunt, but the males take over most of the grocery shopping when mom is great with pup. She will take whatever form of prenatal vitamins, snacks and sustenance she can get.
It doesn’t matter whether the calories come in the form of Pekingese or possum, Maltese or mouse, Bichon or bunny. Coyote is not a respecter of food. Is this malicious maleficence or the ecological reality of the complex food web?
The gestation period for coyotes is roughly 60 days. The female will give birth to four to nine blind and helpless pups in late April or May. As the pups are weaned, hunting is intensified for all the new mouths to feed. It will take five to six weeks for the pups to grow and develop enough to venture outside the den. Here they enter coyote kindergarten, the beginning of a lifetime of survival education.
Living in the Phoenix area, coyotes are a fact of life. Do NOT think that s fence will keep your small dog safe from a coyote. They can jump surprisingly high with a snack sized dog in their mouth. They are a daily fact of life here- if you go for a walk late at night, especially on days when the trash has been put out for collection in the morning, you WILL see coyotes. If you live next to a park or a golf course, they are there every night, I guarantee it. Protect your pooches appropriately. If you don’t, you’ll be posting “lost” posters on light poles, and when I see them, I fear the worst.