Posted by Ed Muderlak on October 24, 2007, 9:26 pm, in reply to "Re: Life Worth Living"
John: We have our share of coyotes, enough so that we can sit in the hot tub at nite and call them up by running our wet fingers around the rims of our wineglasses to simulate a howl, and the coyotes howl back. The first part of a coyote howl kind-of runs a chill up the back, sort of like a wolf in the Boundary Waters, but then they lose it and start babbling and yipping and yapping. ParkerDog sometimes disappears into the darkness to run them off...or so I thought until one day when I saw him nose to nose with a female coyote a couple hundred yards from the house. Add this to the "Secret Life of Dogs."
As to whether they get any pheasants, I've never seen any evidence, and verily believe the up and down in population is mostly controlled by wet springs and doused-out first nestings. Pheasants can take the 50 below when its dry, but 40 above and wet is a killer. A sure sign of a comming decline is when some of the birds are not quite mature when the season starts, as they don't survive the winter in sufficent numbers. From the sqwalking I hear morning and evening, I think we'll have an average year, up from four bad years since the last die off. EDM