In late October a young female hiker, Taylor Mitchell, was attacked and mauled by two coyotes in Cape Breton National Park in Nova Scotia. The woman was airlifted to a hospital in Halifax where she died from her wounds. Mitchell was not the first person to be attacked by coyotes. Just the first to die. If you Google “coyote attacks” you may be surprised to learn that over the past decade, dozens and dozens of people, especially children, have been hauled off by aggressive coyotes and badly injured. Earlier this year, in a suburb of Denver, there was a rash of people-coyote encounters.

According to Don MacLean, an outdoor writer for the Maine Northwoods Sporting Journal, his fellow Nova Scotians were shocked, surprised and saddened by the tragic death of the 19-year-old Toronto woman, who was a talented folk singer with a promising career ahead of her.

You have to ask: Should they, or we, be surprised? Perhaps not. Not if we really dig into this thing. After all, coyotes are wild animals, not creatures from Disney World. Their most predominat trait is that they are extremely opportunistic predators who will attack and eat just about anything under the sun to survive, including humans if given the opportunity to do so without risk to themselves. The Cape Breton “park coyotes” had been pushing the envelope before killing Taylor Mitchell. Here is what Don MacLean reported, which was not uncovered by the mainstream press:

“This is the third coyote attack in this area of Cape Breton Highlands Park in recent years. A few years ago, a young girl was bitten by a coyote, but didn’t suffer serious injury. That animal was killed and tested negative for rabies. Last winter, a cross country skier encountered an aggressive coyote close to where the recent attack took place. The skier used his ski poles to drive the coyote away. The fatal attack on Ms. Mitchell has shocked not only the general public, but experts as well. Biologists who study coyotes say that the attack is out of character for the species. However, the recent attack has prompted people throughout Eastern Canada to come forward with stories of coyotes, which were much more aggressive then they are supposed to be.”

Even Bob Bancroft, the Nova Scotian wildlife biologist, who, in his remarks emphasized the rarity of this coyote-inflicted death, admitted to having experienced his own coyote encounter. He said, “A coyote came straight at me. It happened very, very quickly. It stopped and I just stood my ground. I didn’t act. It actually regrouped and charged again. And I think the fact that I didn’t act like a prey item convinced it to leave me alone.”

Reading between the lines of his other remarks to the press, Bancroft seems to be speculating that Mitchell may have hastened her own demise by the way she reacted to the coyote attacks. “They (the coyotes) may have just capitalized on a situation where a young person was acting vulnerable and very frightened by their presence,” Bancroft said.

Most astonishing to me, as I reviewed the post-attack comments made by wildlife officials and animal rights groups, is the lock-step predictability of the officials’ reactions to or analysis of aggressive coyote behavior. They imply that it is the fault of the humans for either being where they were, or for not being adept at warding off an attack with warlike gestures. The other common refrain is that “coyote attacks are a rarity, the exception not the rule.”

Here is an example, a press report following the rash of coyote attacks last spring near Denver:

Wildlife officials are working to educate the public: Coyotes have always been here, they’ve adapted to urban landscapes and they prefer to avoid humans.

“Ninety-five percent of this problem is a human problem, and we really need to focus on that 95 percent to solve it,” said Nicole Rosmarino, wildlife program director of the environmental group WildEarth Guardians.

Since December, four people in the Denver area have been nipped or bitten by coyotes. A fifth told police a coyote lunged at him.

State wildlife officers have killed seven coyotes. An eighth was killed by a sharpshooter hired by Greenwood Village, in Denver’s southern suburbs.

The Nova Scotian biologist Bancroft said,” Coyote attacks are extremely rare. They are usually very shy, though they can be bold.”

What about Bancroft’s own encounter? What about the other Nova Scotians, the skier, or the girl who was bitten? For that matter, what about the dozens and dozens of people throughout the country that have been attacked by coyotes? The horrible “accidental” death of the Toronto folk singer was destined to happen sooner or later, and may even have been predictable if you look at the other less dramatic coyote encounters in that national park.

According to outdoor writer MacLean, the death of the Toronto hiker has left its mark on Nova Scotians. He writes, “The fatal attack in Cape Breton ensures that no one in Eastern Canada will look at coyotes the same way again.”

It is too bad that it takes an innocent young woman’s agonizing death for people to see this canine predator for what it is: a wild animal, an effective and opportunistic killing machine that will attack, kill and eat whatever it can, whenever it can, wherever it can.

The anecdotal evidence suggests that our increasingly plentiful Eastern coyotes in Maine, which are really hybrids with wolve genes, are evolving generally into larger animals that more resemble their wolf progenitors than the scraggly coydogs of yesteryear. Coyotes have decimated our deer numbers in many areas of Maine and, given the attacks in Nova Scotia and other areas of the United States, they may in time represent a threat to livestock and humans in our state as well.

V. Paul Reynolds is editor of the Northwoods Sporting Journal and has wriiten his first book, A Maine Deer Hunter’s Logbook. He is also a Maine Guide, co-host of a weekly radio program “Maine Outdoors” heard Sundays at 7 p.m. on The Voice of Maine News-Talk Network (WVOM-FM 103.9, WQVM 101.3) and former information officer for the Maine Dept. of Fish and Wildlife. His e-mail address is [email protected].