As former Maine deer biologist, Gerry Lavigne reported recently in the SAM News that there has been a flurry of media coverage — with stories on TV and in print — purporting that Maine’s Eastern coyote is getting larger and taking on more wolf-like characteristics.

Is it true? Is our coyote, which started showing up in the 1940s, evolving into a new canid, one that is worthy of the new, catchy name, Coywolf?

Lavigne makes a compelling case that this coyote transformation isn’t actually happening.

There are a number of animal rights activists, including a geneticist, who have actually petitioned to have the scientific name of the Eastern coyote changed from Canis latans, to Canis oriens. This is a first step, according to Lavigne, to get the Maine coyote protected federally under the Endangered Species Act.

When it comes to Eastern coyotes, Lavigne is a scientist and a scholar who, as a career deer biologist, has studied these wild canids and their interrelationship with deer for years. Responding to the geneticist’s assertion that the wolf component in Maine’s eastern coyote gene pool may be increasing, Lavigne says, “That is patently absurd.”

Depending upon which study you read, Eastern coyotes have always contained 8 percent to 30 percent wolf DNA, going back to the 1940s. Lavigne says that has not changed in decades.

He backs up his case with ironclad data. Between 1970 and 1990, body weights of hundreds of coyotes from Maine, Quebec, Ontario, New Brunswick and Nova Scotia averaged 34.1 pounds for males and 29.7 pounds for females. This data covered all age classes. Lavigne’s own weight study of 131 coyotes last year showed that the weights were identical to weight averages taken of Eastern coyotes in Maine more than a decade ago.

There is more. The Coywolf adherents would have you believe the shopworn but disproven animal protectionists’ refrain that coyotes live solely on rodents, bugs and fruit, that they don’t kill deer. Fact: In the Northeast, venison comprises up to 80 percent of a coyote’s winter diet.

Of course, the end game in this Coywolf ploy is to use the Endangered Species Act to shut down the population control of Maine coyotes by the state and recreational trappers and hunters. Because wolves are far more popular and romanticized than coyotes, the Coywolf proponents have a public relations advantage, the facts notwithstanding.

What we could have is a repeat of the Canada Lynx narrative, a game-changing legal and regulatory quagmire that haunts us even today.

The author is editor of the “Northwoods Sporting Journal.” He is also a Maine guide and host of a weekly radio program — “Maine Outdoors” — heard Sundays at 7 p.m. on “The Voice of Maine News – Talk Network.” He has authored three books; online purchase information is available at www.maineoutdoorpublications.com.

Copy the Story Link

Comments are not available on this story.