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.