{"id":29602,"date":"2015-02-17T06:43:42","date_gmt":"2015-02-17T13:43:42","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.featheredphotography.com\/blog\/?p=29602"},"modified":"2015-02-17T06:43:42","modified_gmt":"2015-02-17T13:43:42","slug":"coyote-aggression-and-serious-coyote-injury","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/2015\/02\/17\/coyote-aggression-and-serious-coyote-injury\/","title":{"rendered":"Coyote Aggression And Serious Coyote Injury"},"content":{"rendered":"

Yesterday morning there was ample evidence of serious social tension among the Antelope Island coyotes.<\/p>\n

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\"coyote<\/p>\n

As I made a turn in the road I encountered this pair of coyotes chasing off a lone coyote out of frame to the left.<\/p>\n

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\"coyote<\/p>\n

Soon they abandoned the chase and crossed the road into poor light.\u00a0The pair bond was strong between these two as there was lots of touchy-feely contact between them during this entire episode. Here one of them begins to howl as the other looks in the direction of the third coyote off in the distance.\u00a0 Notice the angle and position of the\u00a0right-front leg of the animal on the right.\u00a0That leg had obviously been severely injured in the past as evidenced by its deformed shape and swelling.<\/p>\n

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\"coyote<\/p>\n

The coyote had a severe limp and normally put very little weight on that foot but as you’re about to see, when forced to run the animal endured the apparent pain\/discomfort and did put significant weight on it.\u00a0I don’t think that could be done on a fresh injury like this.\u00a0I believe the lower leg had been broken in the past and then healed in a deformed manner.<\/p>\n

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\"coyote<\/p>\n

Soon both coyotes looked directly toward the third animal several hundred yards away and…<\/p>\n

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\"coyote<\/p>\n

took off after it once again.<\/p>\n

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\"coyote<\/p>\n

This is the coyote they were chasing.<\/p>\n

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\"coyote<\/p>\n

This was a sustained chase and I’m confident there would have been serious mayhem if the pair\u00a0had caught the interloper.\u00a0 But they didn’t.<\/p>\n

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\"coyote<\/p>\n

I believe that the aggressive pair was slowed down by the injury and that the uninjured animal was careful that it didn’t outpace its mate and catch the interloper in a “fair” fight. At one point, in apparent frustration, the healthy coyote showed its teeth to its mate, then snarled…<\/p>\n

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\"coyote<\/p>\n

and snapped at him\/her.<\/p>\n

By this time the third coyote had apparently made its escape and all the commotion had attracted other wildlife watchers. Since I don’t play well in a crowd I left the area.\u00a0Of course I don’t know how this coyote was injured – there’s many possibilities but one of them is that it was injured in a fight with another coyote.<\/p>\n

But the\u00a0most\u00a0gruesome coyote injury I\u00a0photographed yesterday was along the causeway as I approached the island earlier that morning.\u00a0If you’re squeamish about animal injury I’d suggest that you avoid scrolling down to these last two images.\u00a0I’ll leave extra space here so you can avoid seeing the photos if you choose to do so.<\/p>\n

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\"coyote<\/p>\n

This coyote and its apparent mate were working their way east along the\u00a0south side of the causeway when I encountered them so I had a difficult time getting light on the injury but here you can see that the top of the snout is grossly swollen (compare its shape to earlier photos above).<\/p>\n

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\"coyote<\/p>\n

When the poor animal turned its head the reason for the swelling became apparent.\u00a0I strongly suspect that this injury was caused by an aggressive encounter with another coyote. This animal’s behavior seemed to be normal and I have hopes that the injury will heal and the coyote will survive.\u00a0 You can be sure that I’ll be watching for it in the weeks to come.<\/p>\n

Ron<\/p>\n

Note:\u00a0It’s the philosophy of\u00a0park managers to let nature take its course in such instances\u00a0so rescue\/rehab isn’t an option for this\u00a0injured coyote. Personally, I agree with that philosophy in cases like this.<\/em><\/p>\n

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 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Yesterday morning there was ample evidence of serious social tension among the Antelope Island coyotes.<\/p>\n

Continue reading<\/span><\/i><\/a> <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":29607,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[3,334,374],"tags":[31,401,98,614,1539,2416],"class_list":["post-29602","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-antelope-island","category-birds","category-coyotes","tag-antelope-island-2","tag-canis-latrans","tag-coyote","tag-injury","tag-mated-pair","tag-pair-bond"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/02\/coyote-4404-ron-dudley.jpg","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p1zzJh-7Hs","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/29602","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=29602"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/29602\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/29607"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=29602"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=29602"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=29602"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}