The Coywolf, and other stories

I spent this holiday weekend in a frigid Ottawa, conducting a couple of interviews with interesting people and  visiting family. 

Looking out onto the frozen Rideau canal - comparison below with the same view in September - it's about -16C, and I'm lying in the snow 

 Like any wintry big city, Ottawa was a combination of icy picturesque, and mucky heaps of cleared snow.

Canadian Parliament buildings

The Ottawa River, from shore to frozen shore

Heaps of the stuff...

On my way to Ottawa I saw a coywolf, boldly watching the traffic at the side of the highway. There's increasing evidence that the 'Eastern Coyote' is in fact a hybrid of western coyotes and wolves. The western coyote - much more like a long-legged fox - expanded its range in the decades after wolves were extinguished in the eastern US and Canada. Reconstructions of the genetics suggest that they encountered a remnant wolf population in the Algonquin park in Ontario, and bred to form the foundation of perhaps a new species. The coywolf is intermediate in size and appearance between the coyote and the wolf. 

The coywolf...unfortunately not my picture...

I wrote in an earlier post about the superabundance of deer in the eastern woods. A plausible hypothesis is that these coywolves have been more successful than the 'pedigree' coyotes due to their larger size and  ability to kill deer, and yet avoid the fairytale-based hatred that wolves themselves receive. Essentially, we created a resource, and the flexible canine template has adapted to make use of it. Coywolves are now probably the top predator in New England, and have been found between the cracks in our civilisation, living nocturnally in towns and cities as well as the deeper forests - even recorded in Central Park in New York. There have been some signs more recently of coywolves becoming more wolf-like in behaviour and size, with some isolated instances of attacks on humans, as well as the killing of feral and domestic cats and small pet dogs left unattended. Such a trend doesn't bode well for finding an intelligent balance between the natural world and our determination to defend Fluffy and Kitty with our semi-automatic rifles. Perhaps the answer lies in having really big dogs...

Update...also of interest from the Economist: http://www.economist.com/news/united-states/21573167-coyote-quietly-conquering-urban-america-dogged-persistence

Our Mardi Gras celebration meal in the staff dining room

Meanwhile, further positive news of the advance of modern thinking and enlightenment. The State of Mississippi has just ratified the 13th Amendment outlawing slavery. It appears that an earlier process was not fully completed, and the last step has now been finally completed. This would be a piece of comic bureaucratic bungling if it wasn't for the fact that the earlier ratification process dates back only to 1995. Mississippi clearly needed a full 130 years of reflection before making this dramatic step.

The big snow - Nemo arrives

So, with much fanfare, Nemo arrived yesterday. This winter storm - a classic New England nor'easter - came about with the meeting of two component storms - one moving east across the northern states which provided the cold, and a warmer system moving north easterly up from Georgia, which provided the moisture. By 4pm on Friday we had at Massachusetts-wide state of emergency, and a ban on all road travel.

Through daylight hours on Friday there wasn't much snow:

Mid morning

Lunchtime

Mid afternoon

early evening

 ...the real snow arrived overnight, and by morning the same view looked like this:

breakfast time on Saturday

snow drift above my kitchen windowsill

Our heroic 'Woods Crew' travelled along tricky roads to dig us out - principally to ensure that emergency vehicles could reach the buildings if needed. A great deal of snowblowing:

Ron with a little snowblower, tractor mounted one in the background

The view down the hill - you can see the snow-blast line from the big snowblower on the sugar maples that line the road

Since it didn't look like I was going anywhere by car...

Er, car, snow, you get the idea...

I took to the snowshoes. It will probably be a bit easier tomorrow as the snow packs down a bit. The snowshoes meant I wasn't plunging up to my knees with every step, but I was still sinking deeply, and moving quite slowly. I followed the old road through the 'woods filled up with snow', in homage to Robert Frost.

Big  footprints

woods filled up with snow, and a road less travelled...

For those of us who like the numbers, the snow is lying undrifted about 20 inches deep. Not far away in Connecticut they had nearly double that, 38 inches. The closest place that counts as having records is the city of Worcester, about 25 miles away, where they had the third highest snowfall ever. Boston had its fifth highest snowstorm total, and the highest ever single-day snowfall total. With an icy irony, the blizzard (and the Governor's edict) prevented a number of us Harvard Forest residents from travelling to Amherst, 25 miles away, for an evening watching...indoor ice hockey.

Finally, since this is my 2nd amazing storm event, I'll end with a quote from Weather Underground's Weather Historian, Christopher C. Burt:

'I might add that is a bit unsettling that two of the most significant storms in the past 300 years to strike the northeastern quadrant of the U.S. have occurred within just four months from one another.'