Excelent post! I agree that a lot has been said here in NY about the pros and cons of yotes, mostly cons. The Coydog thing I have always believed was just an urban legend. I love the one about the short tail Collie, ever here of a Australian Shepard,(short tails)probably the neighbors dog come to see what the racket was all about.
The planting of yotes by the DEC, yesI do believe that was done certainly. Was it a good idea, in my opinion no, but so was planting Fishers to kill the Porcupine remember how they decided that white rabbits were more tasty. Frankly I think planting Turkeys was a bad idea, because now we have no Pheasants to hunt, can't have both. OK I can live with that and I guess I can live with the yotes as long as they leave me alone.
We have a family that yodels all night every so often, sure gets the kennel barkingand I have seen them chase a doe around the field now and again, but I will say that the poulation of deerat least on my land has not decreced what so ever.
Interesting though I did shoot one yoteabout 15 years ago from my deer stand and he had numbers tatooed along the inside of his upper lip. Explain that one!

NYBowhunter - I didn't try to make my post sound as if I did not think that coyotes were a problem in certain areas - I was staying that the coyotes are here and it doesn't really matter how they got here but they are. I do think the season should be extended to year round and if the DEC has a problem with decreasing numbers too rapidly put a limit to 2 dogs a day or something. Good luck getting one in a day though cause those yotes are deffinately not stupid animals - their population did not take off like it did by mistake. They are excellent at adapting to what ever environment they are in.

Another thing - I have seen a huge increase in the numbers of coyotes areound me but the deer herd is still quite healthy and I haven't noticed a decline around me. The only thing I miss is the rabbits. I only see one every once in a while when back in the 90's my brother and me would go out back and kick brush piles and chase a rabbit out of almost every one we came to. That i do blame on the coyotes because even when I was trapping fox and had a few really good years when fox numbers were up I still had pretty good numbers of rabbits around it wasn't untill I started noticing more yotes around that i noticed there weren't many rabbits around anymore.

I got ya.I misunderstood what you were saying. I agree with that 100%. I'm not much on the conspiracy theories either.

Why do people think the NY DEC stocked coyotes?? Even the DEC can't stock, or intorudce animals w/o a full impactstudy beingcompleted. Plus, what do they have to gain?? Lower the deer population?? Thats like shooting themselves in the foot. They can do that by issuing more DMP's and earn some cash all the while.

Does anyone have any proof of stocking 'yotes by the DEC?

With yote populations increasing rapidly all over the northeast, did all our states stock them?? We haveadocumentedsteady increase in coyote population in the northeast over the past 60 years or more in NY, PA, and New England. If the DEC knew that, why would they stock more?? I just can't buy it...

This article was on here a while back, I found it very interesting.

Biological Investigators Discover Wolf Ancestry[/align]

Eastern Coyotes Are Becoming Coywolves[/align]

By DAVID ZIMMERMAN, News Correspondent[/align]Saturday July 2, 2005 [/align]
















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A handsome, stuffed, wild canine presides over the Vermont Department of Fish and Wildlife's conference room on Portland Street in St. Johnsbury.

Shot in Glover in 1998 by Eric Potter, the animal, a male, is a puzzler. With its gray, tan, black, and beige pelage, it looks like a coyote. But, as Fish and Wildlife biologist Thomas Decker points out, it weighed 72 pounds at death, and it's built like a wolf.

"It's smaller than a wolf, and larger than a coyote," Decker said. "It's a hybrid" - a cross - "between a large, eastern coyote and a wolf."

He said the animal's ancestry was confirmed by genetic testing. What it is not, he said, is a cross with a domestic dog. In fact, none of the coyotes tested in New England in recent years have turned out to carry dog genes, Decker said.

In New Hampshire, Eric Orf, a biologist with the state Fish and Game Department, agrees with Decker, saying it is "wrong" to call the animals "coydogs," because they have no dog DNA.

The "coywolf" is thus becoming a poster animal for issues that biologists, farmers, and sportsmen are trying to sort out: What are the "coyotes" now seen or killed in the Kingdom? And where do they come from?

For answers, researchers are turning more and more to genetic studies, called DNA profiles. The answers that geneticists come up with will help shape wildlife management plans - and may be decisive in the question as to whether wolves should be reintroduced in New England.

In point of fact, as hybrids, wolves already are here.

Several years ago, for example, Donald "Rocky" Larocque of Lyndonville, who is a mechanic for the St. Johnsbury highway department, was hunting deer in East Barnet. It was late in the season - Thanksgiving, he recalled in a phone interview - and late in the day he encountered a large "coyote" and shot it.

The animal, a female, weighed about 60 pounds, and appeared heavyset, more like a wolf than a coyote. Larocque said he showed it to Rodney Zwick, a professor at Lyndon State College, who was impressed enough to send the animal to a biologist in Kansas. Its DNA was tested, and it was "part wolf," Larocque said.

Based on DNA tests, a picture is emerging on the relationship of coyotes and other wild canines in the Northeast, although the history is still quite fuzzy.

In the Colonial era, there were few if any coyotes in New England. Wolves were here. But, strangely, because there are so few ancient wolf specimens still around in museums, DNA research to determine what kind of wolves they were cannot be done, according to a pair of biologists, Paul J. Wilson, a DNA profiler at Trent University in Peterborough, Ontario, and Walter J. Jakubas, a biologist with the Maine Department of Inland Fisheries and Wildlife.

The scant evidence, according to Jakubas, suggests they were not "timber wolves," or gray wolves (Canis lupus), as northern and western wolves now are called. Rather, he said they appear to have been similar to the red wolves (Canis rufus) found in Canada's Algonquin Provincial Park north of Toronto. Red wolves are also in the southeastern U.S., where a captive breeding project has been started to save them from extinction.

The settlement of New England destroyed or drove off the resident wolves, according to the scenario developed by Jakubas and Wilson. In the last century, they speculate, coyotes replaced wolves, filling their empty biological niche. The researchers said coyotes appear much abler than wolves to live among people.

What is unclear, is where the coyotes came from. "We don't know," Decker said.

Eastern coyotes are larger and heavier at 32 to 38 pounds than western coyotes at 22 to 30 pounds.

The diet of eastern coyotes includes white-tailed deer, while western coyotes feed mostly on rabbits and small game. The coyote in the Fish and Wildlife conference room had four pounds of deer meat in his belly when he died. But, aside from diet, part of the reason for the eastern coyotes' larger size may be hybridization with wolves.

The Fish and Wildlife specimen and Rocky Larocque's animal certainly have wolf genes. More tellingly, a study by Wilson and Jakubas shows that of 100 coyotes collected in Maine, 22 had half or more wolf ancestry - and one was 89 percent wolf. Over half of the specimens had eastern coyote ancestry, but only 4 percent were mostly descended from western coyotes (Canis latrans).

"The [introduction] of eastern Canadian wolf genes into eastwardly expanding coyotes could have provided a composite genome [Canis latrans X lycaon] that facilitated selection of animals with a larger body size ... that may be more adept at preying on deer than smaller western coyotes," Wilson and Jakubas report in their study. The study, co-written with Shevenell Mullen of the University of Maine, is awaiting publication.

In plain language, Wilson said his work suggests the large, eastern coyotes in Canada are hybrids of the smaller western coyotes and wolves that met and mated decades ago as the coyotes moved toward New England from their earlier western ranges. The animals, he said, may become amplified in size by further crossings between the now-larger eastern coyotes and Canadian wolves.

Vermont's Tom Decker said he wants to see more evidence published to support that view. However, he said, collecting evidence is difficult since no systematic genetic sampling of the state's coyotes has been done.

The gaps may soon be filled. Biologist Roland Kays, who is curator of the New York State Museum in Albany, said he and his associates are planning a major investigation to supplement the study by Wilson and Jakubas of coyotes from Maine. Their work "opens up a lot of new questions," Kays said.

Between 100 and 1,000 animals from throughout New York and New England will need to be studied to sort out their backgrounds, he said. Kays and his associates would like to get samples, particularly whole animals, along with information on where they were from. He can be reached for further information at 518-486-2005.

The outcome of further studies could discourage wildlife officials and conservationists who have talked about reintroducing wolves to the Northeast, Decker said. The usual goal of reintroduction efforts is to preserve true species, not create more hybrids.

The other side of the reintroduction coin is that hybrids may be better suited than purebred wolves to survive in 21st century New England.

"Once you get that coyote-and-wolf hybrid," Paul Wilson said, "it is a very adaptable animal." [/align]

Your making it up. Even if they did have a coyote marked for some reason, I think an ear tag would be easier than a tattoo on the inside of a yotes lip!

I will say that I have followed some coyote (trails) tracks and what they leave behind is devistating. In my area of woods there was massive invasion of coyotes about 4 years ago. A friend of mine and myself harvested 14 coyotes in 3 weekends on a track of around 500 acres.(only 3 of the coyotes were female)We decided that we needed to do something about the population as we found 5 deer, many turkeys, rabbits, ect ect.... 2 of the deer that we foundwere bucks. 1 was a 4 point and the other was a very nice 7 point.

Since the massive slaughter, the woods remained fairly quiet, until this season. We found 3 dead deer and not as much devastation. but I can tell by this sign that they are coming back. There are more tracks out there than there was last year but not nearly as many as there was 4 years ago.

As far as the coyote/ coy dog issue, I have completed 3 years taking biology courses, and will be enrolled for two more years. Although It is not 100% impossible for a coyote to breed with a domesticated dog, there are many factors that will greatly deplete the odds of this occuring. The scientific terms for this is (reproductive barriers) There are many reproductive barriers and they are broken down into two catigories. (PRE ZYGOTIC AND POST ZYGOTIC)

The firstpre zygomatic barrier for example would be called
(TEMPERAL ISOLATION)
Were mating or estrous cycles will occur at different times for land mammals and flowering of plants and flowers will occur at different seasons or times of day.
2nd(HABITAT ISOLATION)
Were populations of a species live in different habitats and do not meet. (this is not a problem with coyote and domestic dog, so this barrier does not apply)
3rd (BEHAVIORAL ISOLATION)
Were there is little or no sexual attraction between different species.

In a scientific study ofa groupsongbirds...scientist took a groupfromone species of birds and seperated them for a period of time. The species of birds were placed in different habitats that caused them to adapt new songs (languages) and some of the birds even adapted new colors for their feathers. The scientist found that when they brought the species back together, that the females were no longer attracted to the males of a different color and the newly adapted language was not understood by the original group of songbirds. This created a new species of songbirds.
( to be considered the same species, it has to be able to reproduce and reproduce with a fertile offspring) like the mule, it is unfertile, making a horse and a donkey (2) seperate species (even though they produced offspring, it was unfertile or sterile)

4th
(MECHANICAL ISOLATION)
Where there is structural differences between genitallia in mammals or flowers preventing copulation of pollen transfer. (this also would not apply to coyotes and dogs in that their genitallia would fit each others)

5th
( GAMETIC ISOLATION)
where male or female gametesdie before uniting or fail to unite
( where egg and sperm will not meet due toa species (males) sperm not surviving in the vaginal canal of another species (female)

POST ZYGOTIC BARRIERS
1st
(HYBRID INVIABILITTY)
where hybrids fail to develop or reach sexual maturity ( like certain diseases of human children where children die at a young age to prevent a population of a new species of humans from forming)

2nd
(HYBRID STERILITY)
where hybrids fail to produce "functional" gametes (like the mule example)

3rd
(HYBRID BREAKDOWN)
where offspring of hybrids are weak or infertile

with all this being said, even if a coyote bred with a dog, the hybrid offspring would not be able to reproduce for itself. In other words (A COYDOG CANNOT PRODUCE ANOTHER COYDOG) so the odds of massive groups of coydogs forming in a small area is highly unlikely, because it is the coming together of dogs and coyotes that can only produce a coydog. Honestly,it would also be unlikely that a dog communicate using the same noises and yelps that a coyote would use (intern making attraction and communication a large reproductive deterant.

A wolf is in the dog family, but it is not the same species as a dog.
A coyote is also related to the dog, but not in the same species.
however, a doberman pincher is a dog and so is a german shepperd, therefore allowing them to produce fertile offspring.( Although they look entirely different, they can still breed "BECAUSE THEY ARE THE SAME SPECIES"A dog that is a (mut) can breed and produce pups.
However,a coyote that breeds with a dog...produces a coydog that cannot breed with another dog or coyote and produce nothing. This indeed makes a population of (coy dogs) harder to come by.

ALSO IF THEREARE COY-WOLFS, THAT MEANS THAT THE GENERATION OFWOLVES WOULD HAVE HAD TO BE PRESENT IN ORDERTO BREED WITH THE COYOTES. SO IF THERE ARE COY WOLFS THERE, YOU BETTER BELEIVE THAT THERE ARE WOLVES THERE THAT MADE THEM...IN THE FACT THAT A COYDOG CAN'T PRODUCE COYDOG, NEITHER CAN A COYWOLF PRODUCE COYWOLF. IF AN ANIMAL IS NOT OF THE SAME SPECIES THAT IT BREEDS WITH, THEN THE OFFSPRING WILL NOT THRIVE. (BECAUSE ITS OFFSPRING CANNOT PRODUCE MORE OFFSPRING)
SO IF THE DEC CLAIMS THAT MOST OF THE COYOTES ARE FOUND WITH WOLF DNA, THAT MEANS THAT THERE SHOULD BE ALOT OF WOLVES RUNNING AROUND HERE WITH THE COYOTES TOO.

So you don't think it's possible that wolves could have bred with coyotes hundreds of years ago and even though the wolves were wiped out their DNA would be passed on and still be detected in the coyotes today?

Well I guess that would be your assumption wouldn't it. hell beforthe invention of micro chips all of our dogs were tattooed. Besides if the state did not want anyone to know what better way. I have no reason to make this up, I couldn't really care less as I said, they don't bother me. However if your inclined to think the DEC did not plant them, I have a swamp to sell.