How do I know if I see one? I know they are in CT, and I have plenty of pics of coyotes, but could they be coywolves?
Their exact appearance depends on the hybridization involved. However, the ones around here:
1) Colored like a coyote but the build, body, movement, and size of a large wolf
2) Actively engaged in attempting to eat you (vs coyote actively trying to avoid you)
Early last spring, I saw what I was sure was a wolf running along the ridge in the woods. Now, keep in mind I'm the first rural-ish lot outside a major metro area in Ohio, so wolves aren't something that they have around here. Since it was headed towards a major shopping area, I called a series of government offices to try find out if they thought a wolf at walmart was a problem. No one believed me until I got a hold of a lady at the Department of Agriculture. She asked me if I could get to a computer to look at some pictures and, sure enough, it was exactly what I had seen. I had through it was a muddy wolf (it was raining that day) but it turned out to be a coywolf. In my county and the two north of me, she said they're becoming a
BIG problem for farmers. The biggest difficulty is that they do not have the innate skittishness that coyotes and wolves have, so they're not afraid of humans and they're overall more aggressive than either species. Since they're bigger and work in a pack, they bring down cattle and horses. When the farmers go out to see what the **** is going on, they're attacking the farmers rather than running away. She said that, as a representative of the government, she couldn't tell a private citizen what to do but she thought it was important that I know all of the armed employees of the agency had been issued a shoot-on-sight order for coywolves and that they were considered a nuisance animal so there was no closed season or bag limit on them. Message received.
So I did some research on them and it turns out Michigan is having problems with them. They've had two police horses killed by coywolves and an adult male jogger was brought down in Livonia (which is suburban). When I asked about appropriate ammo to take care of the problem, people on one of the hunters' forums replied with stories of their own run-ins with them. One man reported having to get on his snowmobile to go roaring after a family of cross-country skiiers who hadn't seen that a pack of coywolves was stalking them through the forest and the children were about to be taken.
Fast forward a few months and I go out at about 3am to walk across the driveway and make sure the barn is locked. Around the corner of the barn comes a coywolf. We both stopped for a split second, then he charged at me. I drew but was so startled (I'd never drawn a gun and meant it before that) that my first shot hit the dirt in front of him. He started to turn away, I assume because of the noise, and my second shot hit him hard enough to roll him over but he got right back up and ran away. I haven't seen him since so I don't know if it's the fact that the seasons turned and all the underbrush has been hiding him, or if he got scared away, or if it made it 50 yards into the brush and died. No idea and I'm hoping I don't see him again this winter as the brush dies off. There's a rifle rack on the tractor now though.
