Fredericksburg.com - MORE ON COYOTES: The coyote is a member of the dog family. In size and shape the coyote is like a medium-size collie dog, but its tail is round and bushy and is carried straight out below the level of its back. The coyote is one of the few wild animals whose vocalizations are commonly heard. At night coyotes both howl (a high quavering cry) and emit a series of short, high-pitched yips. To the seasoned outdoorsman, the howl of the coyote is truly a song of the West.

IT HAS TAKEN much longer than predicted, but coyotes are finally here.

And their numbers are starting to increase dramatically.

For most Americans born east of the Mississippi River, coyotes were varmints whose howls gave flavor to the Western movies we watched while growing up.

A coyote's howl either symbolized the lonesomeness of the prairie as a couple of cowboys sat around the fire on a moonlit night or was the sound Indians used while signaling each other somewhere out there in the dark.

When I was growing up, coyotes were Western creatures, animals no one dreamed of seeing in the civilized East.

No more. These days, coyotes call virtually every state in the lower 48--including Virginia--home.

Coyotes in Virginia

The mighty Mississippi River was always the barrier that prevented coyotes from moving east. Sometime in the late 1960s or early 1970s, however, these prairie wolves, as they are sometimes called, began migrating north through Canada, around the Mississippi.

By the mid-1980s there were coyotes in Virginia and a population explosion was predicted. Except in isolated areas, however, it didn't happen back then.

One of those isolated areas was Highland County, where, in some of the best sheep country in the state, coyotes established squatting rights and proliferated.

Highland's problem became so bad that federal trappers were called in to help control the population. The trapping program, according to friends, has had no dramatic effect. Once established, nothing short of an atomic bomb can eradicate a coyote population.

Parts of Southwest Virginia, especially the area around Tazewell, also watched coyotes establish a solid foothold in the 1980s, but except for an occasional sighting, these animals never bred in great numbers in Central and Northern Virginia.

Spotted locally

That seems to be changing. I talked to a taxidermist recently who said he has mounted several coyotes taken in Orange County, and one hunter/trapper in Culpeper said he has killed about a dozen coyotes in the past two years. In fact, he says one female is raising a litter of pups within a few hundred yards of his house.

Another Culpeper outdoorsman reports he has killed several coyotes over the past several years.

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