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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.

April 28, 2007 12:35 am

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.

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.

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.

Two weeks ago a friend drove up all excited, saying he had just seen a coyote running across the highway in the Chancellorsville battlefield on State Route 3.

I have seen three coyotes myself, one live animal on my farm and two dead ones on the highway--one near Lignum (again on Route 3) and another near Remington in Fauquier County.

A friend who hunts in New Kent County told me of a coyote coming into a woman's yard and grabbing a small beagle, which he dragged off into the woods for lunch.

While I was in the middle of writing this column, a friend called from south of Richmond. He had just taken a shot at a coyote that had been circling a farmhouse all morning.

Why was the coyote hanging around? The farmer's female Labrador retriever was in heat. While coyotes will eat small dogs, they will readily breed with larger ones.

The coyotes are here, folks, and it is highly unlikely that we will ever be rid of them.

In fact, coyotes, as I said earlier, are everywhere. Just within the past month a coyote turned up in a Quiznos sub shop in Chicago and another almost created havoc on an airport runway in Orlando.

A third, even more frightening story, told of a 22-month-old child in New Jersey who was attacked by a coyote. As I said, coyotes are everywhere.

Western coyotes seldom attack people or dogs, but they will go after sheep and occasionally a newborn calf.

And they do love cats. A cat to a coyote is like chocolate candy to a human. Coyotes will kill any cat they can find.

Eastern coyotes differ from Western coyotes in color, size and habits. Experts theorize that in their migration through Minnesota and Canada, coyotes interbred with wolves and took on some wolf characteristics.

While doing a story in Highland County seven or eight years ago, I came in very close contact with a coyote and it looked much more like a wolf than any of the Western coyotes I had previously seen.

Coyotes in Highland often hunt in packs, like wolves, and not alone, as do Western coyotes.

As coyote populations build up in this area, it will be interesting to see how they adapt to increasingly suburban surroundings. But, make no mistake about it, they will adapt.

In Culpeper and Orange we already have wild hogs, another species of pest I never thought I would see in this area, and now coyote numbers are on the rise.

Add to this the fact that black bears are occasionally making their way from the Blue Ridge Mountains all the way to the Fredericksburg suburbs.

It's getting to be a wild world out there, and you never know what you're going to see when you walk out the back door these days.

After all, I remember a few years ago when a subdivision near me had its own buffalo running around.