Sorry folks. These pictures (bottom) aren't pretty, but damn are they fascinating.
When driving one of my kids to school today I noticed something odd out the window, and after the tot was safely in class I circled back to see what it was. There on the sidewalk was what appeared to be the severed leg of a deer, partially frozen, and particularly haggard looking.
I've been speculating with some friends on Facebook this morning as to how it got there. The sidewalk in question ran beside a road that penetrates the Rouge Valley, a large urban park that I've written about before. In that park deer and coyotes are plentiful, along with many other forms of wildlife. There was what looked like a weak blood trail from the leg to the gully beside the sidewalk, so it appeared that something had dragged the leg up from the bush. The woods get quite heavy not twenty feet from the sidewalk.
I initially imagined that a coyote had taken his share of a group kill up to high ground on the sidewalk, and then got spooked by a passing car. Yet some questioned if perhaps the deer had been hit by a truck, or that maybe a vulture had brought the carrion to that spot. (Although it's a pretty damn big leg) The reason why some of the comments were skeptical of coyotes' involvement was because coyotes aren't supposed to hunt in packs. Unless this deer was, sick, old, or very young - it should have been able to escape from one.
But then a few other commenters turned me on to the existence of the eastern coyote, or the Coywolf. Apparently, wolves and coyotes began interbreeding some time ago, after the coyotes migrated to eastern lands from their native west. According to a story in the Toronto Star:
The larger, highly adaptable animals "have the wolf characteristics of pack hunting and aggression and the coyote characteristics of lack of fear of human-developed areas," says Trent University geneticist Bradley White, who's been studying the hybrids for 12 years."
The article goes on to say that farmers in the regions surrounding the Rouge have seen plenty of the Coywolves in action, reporting attacks by bigger, bolder and smarter coyotes. They say pack hunting on sheep and cattle in broad daylight is becoming commonplace. Scientific American has a nice article on the new hybrids as well. According to Wikipedia:
The coywolf is a canid hybrid having a mixture of genetic stock from western coyote (Canis latrans) and either the Gray wolf (Canis lupus) or the Red wolf (Canis rufus). They come from a constantly evolving gene pool and are viewed by some scientists as an emerging species.
Ho-hum. Once again we see evolution doing it's thing, making slight changes that seem almost insignificant to a short-lived observer, and yet build upon one another to spawn enitrely new characteristics, followed by entirely new species. Even in our suburbs it's happening, day in, and day out.
So who knows. There's certainly no way to be sure who put that leg there. That being said, it just might require a coyote's willingness to live near humans, coupled with a wolf's raw ability to kill, in order to have landed a severed leg so close to my suburban home.
Have a look at the images below and let me know if you can provide any sort of forensic analysis. And feel free to add detail or correct any mistakes in the comments section below. However if these pictures are indeed the discarded midnight snack of something like a coywolf, then that means that something pretty amazing happened this morning.
It means that on my way to dropping off my kid at school, I looked out my car window, and saw evolution in action.
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