I was on a conference call 20 minutes ago and embarrassed myself by blurting out, “COYOTE!” as I grabbed my camera. This time the memory card was in it.*
Mister Coyote
Some nights, when it’s quiet and dark, the coyotes have Coyote Committee meetings in the back yard, right under my window. I had a friend visiting from the city, once, when the CC meeting started up, and they came crashing into my bedroom asking me to protect them.
The local hunters, of course, shoot them. Because they shoot anything beautiful that they see. “Look at that AWESOME BEAR!!! OMG! (blam)” What a bizzare reaction to beauty; they should avoid going to fashion shows. A few years ago I found a dead turkey that someone had boxed up as coyote bait, on my land. I set up game cameras to try to catch them and poured diesel fuel onto the corpse of the poor turkey; I wonder if they ever figured out why the coyote didn’t come for the trap.
Coyotes have wonderful natural camouflage. Until today, this was the best picture I had of coyote:
Can you spot the coyote?
(*After the incident where Mr Robert Cat was sitting on the hood of my jeep for a photo-op and I shot portraits of him as he stalked off, my camera blinking “NO CARD” the whole time…)
If the second photo is like most of my wildlife photography,
the coyote is the darker blob in the middle.
That first photo is GREAT. Yes, I can see the coyote in the second one. I have a photo of a moose walking through my pasture that is very similar. No one ever believes me when I point at the dot and say, “that’s a moose!”.
One morning I woke up and snarled to myself, “So-and-So’s cows are in my pasture again!” Only to find out, once I had put on my glasses, that yes – those were cows all right. Elk cows. About 25 of them. THAT picture turned out far better than the moose one. By pure dumb luck. These are difficult shots to get!
I put my camera on “don’t take no pictures without card” so at least I know directly when I don’t have a card in the cam and sometimes I can even remedy the problem.
Gorgeous shot!
The darker fur surrounding the face gives the coyote gravitas. A good catch. If I ever got an equivalent picture of a fox… Those guys are also quite elusive and don’t hold committee meetings or at least do not hold them above ground and discuss matters at paw aloud.
Yes, the shape of the coyote in the snowy picture gives it away.
Does the CC leave any memos behind?
Yeah, coyote is dead center in the snow. I would never have seen him if he hadn’t been moving.
Ice Swimmer@#4:
Sometimes the Coyote Committee leaves spare parts of rabbit, but that is about it. Or maybe its Robert Cat who does that. And by “spare” I mean a few tufts of fur. There are representatives of the Woodchuck Cult (you can sometimes see them praying in the sun) and I am pretty sure they are repressed by the Cats and Coyotes.
kestrel@#1:
Coyote was about 30 feet from my house!
Now that my dogs have gotten out of the dog business the other critters are un woofed-at and there is an attractive supply of uneaten rabbits. It has been interesting to watch how their departure has caused explosion and rebalancing among the other critters. Deer and skunk now freely roam the yard un-woofed. It’s small consolation.
Sorry to hear about your dogs. :-( It does sound as though they led a glorious life woofing at things.