I’d normally be getting ready for a hike, but my car is dead and UPS is bringing a package some time today.
A blue jay calls and a cardinal, two squirrels, a dove and a flock of little birds scatter. The blue jay settles in for a nice meal of sunflower seeds. It’s odd for the TV to be on - but when things go awry, sometimes changing my pattern is all I can do. So here is another New York story.
Someone saw a coyote in Central Park at 10:30 PM last night and now reporters and the police are swarming the park looking for this canid. This is the only member of the dog family that cannot be tamed; you can tame a wolf or wolf/dog mix, a red fox and a grey fox - but not coyote. I learned this from a wildlife rehabilitator.
My guess is that it got here because some human discovered that when baby wild animals reach puberty - they are unmanageable.
New York’s police force is large enough to spare manpower to hopefully trap and relocate this animal before it eats someone’s dog or cat.
Coyotes are amazing. Despite relentless attempts to exterminate them, they manage to survive and thrive. If we hadn’t exterminated their main competitor, the wolf, coyotes would not be so prevalent now.
I’m so tempted to get on a soap box about global warming and my deep concern that our gluttonous consumption of fossil fuels gives us less than ten years to come up with another strategy or risk a huge social and economic collapse.
This is one of those days when I feel tempted to fret at all that I have failed to accomplish as a human being on this planet. And then I realize that what I really need is a warm cup of something with chocolate in it and a few moments watching the blue jay get spooked by what turns out to be a gull, rather than a hawk.
It’s time to open the joke book or find some other way to deal with an atypical day.
Update: 4:20 PM
Well, apparently this coyote was caught and is on its way to live in a wildlife facility “upstate.” The folks involved named the canid Hal, first spotted on Sunday and actively hunted for the last 24 hours. There’s even footage taken from the traffic helicopter. They think the coyote swam here. It’s possible. If this individual were willing to be captured, I’m still thinking the animal was released.
Apparently the last coyote caught in Central Park was in 1999. I remember that coyote, now a resident of the Queens Zoo. If they have been imprinted on humans, I guess this is a happy ending for these two coyotes.