Darlene Update

[Ninurta]

Coyotes have become a nuisance there now, and they have a bounty on them over there - $50 bucks for a male, and $75 for a female, because the females can pop out litters of new nuisances.
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If they are going to kill them, they have to kill them all or they are will just breed more.

Why killing doesn't work.

Shoot or poison coyotes and you will have just as many again within a year or two. Kill one or both members of the alpha pair (A)—the only pair who normally reproduces—and other pairs will form and reproduce. At the same time, lone coyotes will move in to mate, young coyotes will start having offspring sooner ...

https://www.humanesociety.org/resources/...oesnt-work

I don't think the objective is to exterminate them so much as to keep the population numbers down and under control.

They were eradicated in the eastern US for nearly 100 years, but then some prairie coyotes invaded by crossing the Mississippi river in Minnesota, where it's narrowest. On their way, they interbred with Timber Wolves in Minnesota and the Upper Peninsula of Michigan, and the result was that all of the coyotes in the eastern US that have been tested so far have some degree of admixture with wolves. They call them "coywolves". Some are more mixed, some less. I saw one in Buchanan County, VA one morning that was about 5 feet long from the tip of his nose to the root of his tail - HUGE for a coyote - and who had grayer hair than the usual tan of a coyote, and a slightly heavier muzzle and less pointed ears, both wolf traits. I'm guessing the wolf was pretty strong in that one!

There are also a few Red Wolves around now. They too were nearly exterminated, but a breeding program is bringing them back. There is a breeding facility in eastern North Carolina where they are bred, and then they are taken to the mountains in western North Carolina and released into the wild. Now, being wolves, and wild, they are pretty mobile, and don't always stay where they are released. That's why they are now occasionally seen elsewhere. It's hard to tell them from a coyote except by an expert - they are smaller than Timber wolves, and have other coyote-looking traits as well, and are often mistaken for coyotes or coywolves.

Elk are also being brought back into the area, after an absence of almost 200 years. There is a pretty big herd of them in Buchanan County, VA - about 400, last time I checked. Before that, the last elk killed in these parts was killed in 1820, just north of here in WV. This herd started from stragglers that were in a re-introduction program in Kentucky. They failed to realize that elk can't read border markers, so not all of them stayed in Kentucky - some crossed the state line into VA, and established a herd in Buchanan County. They are "legal" to hunt in some places in VA now, but everywhere they are legal to hunt, there aren't any there to be hunted. It's illegal to hunt them in counties where they actually exist. In all of the counties where they don't exist, the elk season is exactly the same as the deer season... but there aren't any there to kill.

I'd like to see them bring back Woodland Bison here, too, but I don't think that will ever happen, because I think the species is extinct now. Woodland Bison were larger than the Plains Bison we still have out west. I don't know why - it seems like navigating the woods would favor a smaller Bison rather than a larger one, but that's just the way it was in the real world. They used to roam all over the place here. I have records from Lord Dunmore's War that show that some people, among them Daniel Boone, used to bring in Woodland Bison pelts and sell them to the government at Russell's Fort in what is now Castlewood, VA. They hunted them locally, and sometimes went as far afield as Eastern and Central Kentucky to hunt them.

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