Although I spend a good bit of time in the woods, I have never seen a coyote in that environment. I have heard plenty of them yipping and yapping, or giving that lone, wavering howl. I’ve heard them here in South Carolina, out in Texas and up in Colorado. In Colorado, especially during the big game hunting seasons, you can tell which hunting area was successful by the packs of coyotes calling out dinner time.
I was at a SCDNR Take One Make One Youth Deer Clinic at the National Wild Turkey Federation Headquarters in Edgefield, SC last week and as I was leaving for a meeting in Columbia, I saw something in a field just on the outskirts of town. It looked like a big German Shepherd at first but after I grabbed my Nikon camera and zoomed in with the telephoto lens, I saw it was a coyote. I thought about taking a shot at him but thought better of it, especially when I saw the police car parked at an abandoned building just up the street. When I got back home and worked on the picture a little with some photo editing software, I thought he looked a little different. The picture posted to the Woods and Water SC Facebook page and a discussion started about whether he was a coyote or had some red wolf look to him. I sent the picture to Dr. John Kilgo, a USDA researcher stationed at the Savannah River Site in Aiken, but he couldn’t say for certain without a DNA sample. However, he did say it certainly looked “wolfish”.
So what do you think?