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According to Wikipedia, the gestation period for coyote pups is 60-63 days. Add another month for the pups to be mature enough to leave the den. The ones I hear tonight are likely the tangible result of the caterwauling party I heard late last fall. Or maybe I'm mistaken and the fall party was just a party and the messing around is happening tonight. That would be in temporal alignment with the Wikipedia article. Sure sounds like pups to me. Outside, I stepped to the edge of the west porch to listen to the feral chorus and noticed it was a bright clear night with many stars in evident. The flashing lights overhead were quickly identified as an aircraft. As it sped on toward Tulsa, I noticed Pleiades in the wake and over to the left, high in the southern sky, Orion. According to the article, the coyote is a long time resident of North America, two million years and counting. In the Wikipedia discussion on coyote genetics, I found some humor: 'Preliminary genetic evidence, however, has shown that "coyotes" in some areas are, genetically speaking, 85-90 percent Canis latrans, and from ten to fifteen percent Canis lupus, along with some domestic dog DNA; this prompted one researcher to suggest, jokingly, that they be called "Canis soupus," as they are a "soup" (mixture) of canid species.' |
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