Coyote sightings, once confined to the backroads and backcountry, have expanded to the backstreets.
Coyotes can be spotted about anywhere now, including the city limits of Temple and, really, any urban area that borders farmland or prairie.
That would include places that would appear to be anything but coyote friendly, like Los An gel es where a band of coyotes thrives in the smog-choked confines of that city, subsisting on everything from garbage to gardens to rodents to family pets.
The Los Angeles coyotes are described as being simply 'too stubborn and too clever to surrender to the sprawls of civili zation.'
Coyotes have also been spotted in Washington, D.C., New York and Chicago.
The coyote is, and always been, nothing if not adaptable.
'It would be silly to consider the coyote as an 'intellectual be ing.' But no other wild animal of historic times has shown it self so adaptable to change,' J. Frank Dobie wrote in his book 'The Voice of the Coyote' in 1949, well before the extent of the an imal's adaptive abilities were truly realized.
'He is an opportunist, taking advantage of realities around him, new as well as old, machine-made as well as natural.'
Part of the coyote's adaptability, aside from not being a finicky eater, might have to do with its ability to walk a fine line between being sociable and solitary. They are not, as a lot of people believe, reclusive.
'Coyotes delight in coming together, especially at night before the hunt,' Dobie wrote. 'They are essentially social.
'Had they, bison-like, persisted in following an inherited instinct for gregariousness, they would by now have been eliminated from most of their territory. The passenger pigeon perished because it could not modify its habit of extreme gregariousness.'
Even if coyotes aren't reclusive, they live up to their reputation as being smart. They may prefer to saunter across an open prairie where they can see everything that's happening in front of them and play with their coyote buddies, but they have learned to hunker down and blend in with their surroundings when people are around.
In Temple, at least one coyote is thought to be roaming creek beds and tributaries around Canyon Creek and Marlandwood Road, and is a suspect in the case of several missing cats and small dogs.
Larger dogs tend to fare a little better with coyotes. They can sometimes be seen playing with them, and most rural people have seen at least one dog that clearly had a coyote parent.
Small dogs, and especially cats, don't find the coyote at all sociable.
Long-time trapper Joe E. Hill, who was a prime source for Dobie's book, wrote about the coyote's propensity for killing cats.
'During long years of trapping and trying to read all the signs, I have found a large number of house cats killed by coyotes,' Hill wrote.
'My belief is that most coyotes will kill any cat that does not beat them to a tree. Some coyotes will certainly eat a cat as readily as they eat a rabbit.
'One captive coyote I had would kill and eat every cat that came within the length of its chain.'
Cats and people who own and love cats, should know this too: according to wildlife biologists, the coyote is the only mid-sized carnivore that is expanding its range in North America.
