Humans a ‘novel prey’ for coyotes in Cape Breton Highlands National Park: study
Melvin Hines was already well-acquainted with the wild when he saw his first.
“I’d been roamin’ around the mountains since I was a little kid, a hunter my whole life,” the Meat Cove-based hunting guide remembered Wednesday.
It was in the early 1980s.
His uncle, a longtime trapper of the untamed mountains behind Meat Cove, had caught something no one had seen before in a snare.
Men who, like their ancestors, fed their families through long winters with rifle, trap and shotgun came to see the predator laid out on the kitchen table.
“It was a beautiful, intimidating animal,” said Hines of seeing the creature which according to his recollection weighed about 27 kilograms.
“But there was no trouble telling it was something wild. That was no dog.”
The eastern coyote had arrived in the Cape Breton Highlands.
This province’s news cycle was briefly topped last week by the report of a cyclist chased and bitten by a coyote while riding the Cabot Trail in the Green Cove area of Cape Breton Highlands National Park.
The woman reportedly escaped with relatively minor physical injuries and the coyote was chased off with the aid of passing motorists. Days later, a Mountie shot a coyote in the same area that was behaving, according to Parks Canada, in an “atypical” manner and so was “likely” the culprit in the earlier attack.
Patrols by Parks Canada staff resulted in two other coyotes being killed.
“While we cannot be 100% certain that these are the same coyotes involved in the reported incidents, the likelihood is quite high,” reads a press release issued Thursday by Parks Canada.
“Parks Canada is confident in this assessment and believes the area to be safe, although visitors are asked, as always, to be cautious when enjoying the outdoors.”
‘Lost its natural fear of humans’
With the coyotes dead, the release goes on to state that several lookouts and walking trails closed after the attack have been reopened.
“This action is unusual, and indicates the animal had been habituated and lost its natural fear of humans,” reads the release.
But that coyote’s behaviour wasn’t entirely atypical — at least not for a coyote in the Cape Breton Highlands. And a study released this summer found that it’s not that coyotes in the park are getting “habituated to humans,” it’s that unique conditions in the park lead them to every now and then start looking at people as food.
With its headline-grabbing title, Severe environmental conditions create severe conflicts: A novel ecological pathway to extreme coyote attacks on humans, the study sought answers as to why.
“Given the size of moose, their primary prey, combined with limited alternative prey, it seems coyote attacks on humans may be a unique circumstance leading to attempts at switching to a novel prey,” reads the study.
“Coyote attacks continued in the park for several years following the fatal attack, despite the lethal removal of individual coyotes involved in that incident and other non-lethal attacks.”
People are, sometimes, the above-mentioned “novel prey.”
Past attacks
Although quite rare – compared to the fact that some 150,000 people visit Cape Breton Highlands National Park every year – it happens.
In 2009, a pack of coyotes attacked and killed 19-year-old Toronto musician Taylor Mitchell as she hiked the Skyline trail. Since then, according to the study, there’s been 32 “coyote-human incidents” in the park including seven individual cases where the animals bit and injured people.
Make that eight, including last week’s attack on the cyclist.
Compared to most of the rest of North America, where there are lots of coyotes living near people but very few incidents, the rate of attacks is a lot higher in Cape Breton National Park.
So, what’s going on?
The cackling howls and haunting chatter rural Nova Scotians hear in the dark are a testament to how fast nature moves.
The eastern coyote’s evolution is a story of the genetic hybridization and fast expansion of a species to fill an ecological vacuum.
Before European settlers arrived, the eastern wolf was king.
Weighing up to 70 kilograms, the apex predator’s range extended across eastern North America into Nova Scotia, where they hunted in packs to kill deer, moose, caribou and many smaller prey animals.
Trapping and hunting for export to Europe began with the first settlers.
London Custom House records show the first Nova Scotia wolf pelt was received in 1753 and the last in 1867. A total of 1,368 wolf skins were received by that custom house over the intervening century.
But it was habitat destruction, the clearing of land for farms, and bounties on the wolves by young colonial governments that saw eastern wolves driven from the southern portion of their range (including Nova Scotia) through the late 1800s.
Nature abhors a vacuum.
So, in stepped the western coyote.
The small canine with an average adult weight of eight to 15 kilograms hunts small game where forests meet grasslands.
All the new fields being cleared by settlers through the 18th century created lots of this forest edge habitat. Without many wolves around, the western coyote started moving east. A 2014 genetic study led by Stony Brook University biologists found early on during their eastward migration, western coyotes bred with wolves and dogs and through a few dozen generations became the eastern coyote.
The geneticists call it hybridization — historic interbreeding that provided the eastern coyote with a large genetic tool-box to draw from as they expanded into a wide variety of habitats.
Within a few generations, they can get big or small to fit their environment and prey.
“Coyotes in areas of high deer density are genetically more wolf-like, suggesting that natural selection for wolf-like traits may result in local adaptation at a fine geographic scale,” reads the study, titled Assessment of coyote-wolf-dog admixture using ancestry-informative diagnostic SNPs.
Expanding habitat
There are lots of white-tailed deer in Nova Scotia and in the century that followed the killing of the last grey wolf, there was room waiting for a predator to hunt them.
Having been confirmed in New Brunswick since 1958, the first coyote was trapped in this province in 1977 by Howard Porter, near Country Harbour, Guysborough County.
Despite a $50 per animal bounty put on them by the provincial government through the early ‘80s, they have expanded their habitat to include all of Nova Scotia.
And yet, coyote attacks on people on the mainland are exceedingly rare.
There, they hunt deer and have many forms of small game to turn to.
“They just don’t tend to target people,” said Tricia Flemming, human-wildlife co-existence biologist with the Department of Natural Resources.
“Fear of (a) coyote encounter should not stop (people) from going outdoors. But there are steps to reduce those risks – hike in groups, be aware of your surroundings for a lot of good reasons and if you have a dog, keep it on a leash.”
Those odds just may be a bit higher if you’re in Cape Breton Highlands National Park.
Moose hunters
“Snow in the trees, it was really dirty out,” Hines recounted.
“So I came across the barrens, they crossed him. There were four coyotes right on it, they were tracking him. I wasn’t particularly interested in hunting the moose, it was just a big animal and I was following it. So I left off.”
As a guide, it’s been Hines’s job to follow and understand moose behaviour throughout the year.
While tracking, he’s encountered his fellow predator, also on the hunt.
At upwards of 600 kilograms, an adult male moose can be four times the weight of an adult male white-tailed deer.
For human hunters, that means a larger calibre rifle and often hiring someone who knows what they’re doing to help (like Hines).
It’s a much larger genetic, organizational and behavioural step if you’re going to tackle the animal and kill it with your teeth.
While the coyotes of the Cape Breton Highlands prefer to take down moose when they get bogged down in the snow, they also work as a group to hunt them.
That makes them different from coyotes pretty well anywhere else in North America.
‘Prey-switching’
“We suggest that the unprovoked, severe attacks on people in (Cape Breton Highlands National Park) are at least partially the result of prey-switching by coyotes that had specialized on a very large prey species in the absence of alternative smaller prey and an extreme resource-limited environment,” reads the study on the park’s coyote population.
The study’s authors trapped 23 coyotes in the park between 2011 and 2013, took whisker samples from them and tagged them with radio-collars to track their movements.
By analyzing the composition of the whisker samples, they could tell the animal’s diet over the preceding months. They were able to cross reference this data with a separate study on coyote scat (poop) that largely verified the estimates of what they were eating.
They found that on average, 55 per cent of the coyote’s diet was moose, a quarter of it came from snowshoe hare, about 12 per cent was deer and what remained was from small animals.
A key finding was what they didn’t find — evidence of human-sourced food in the diet.
They also didn’t find it in whisker samples from two of the coyotes that were believed to have killed Taylor Mitchell.
People feeding wild animals, resulting in their habituation to humans is often the culprit in attacks — and was suggested by Parks Canada as a likely cause of last week’s attack on the cyclist.
But the study’s authors find that has not typically been the case in Cape Breton Highlands National Park.
“Coyotes in the park are not subjected to hunting or trapping, and without these negative stimuli they may not view humans with the fear that typifies the coyote-human relationship elsewhere,” reads the study.
The authors compared the incidents in Cape Breton Highlands National Park to cases on other continents where big cats have started hunting people.
They suggest that because the coyotes in the park are accustomed to taking large prey and there is a low density of small mammals for them to hunt, when food is scarce, they sometimes look at people.
Hunted
“I’ll never forget it,” said Colin Fraser.
A few years back, while checking his 10-kilometre-long trap line that begins at the border of Cape Breton Highlands National Park and ends on North Mountain, Fraser came across a coyote caught in a snare.
It was still alive.
As he approached, the animal started barking.
“Then three swarmed me from behind,” said Fraser.
“Had to shoot two. It wasn’t good.”
For four decades, Fraser has been a source of what the above-mentioned study’s authors dubbed “negative stimuli” for the coyotes living along the borders of the park.
Their interactions with Fraser cause them to equate humans with death.
But Fraser’s getting old and doesn’t expect to be trapping them much longer.
“I was going to give up this year, but my son’s helping me and there was that cyclist attacked,” said Fraser.
The price has dropped from a high of $150 a pelt to nearly nothing and the $30 bounty placed on coyotes after Mitchell’s killing was dropped in 2015.
“I think they should put the bounty back,” said Fraser.
The study’s authors recommend against bounties.
While coyotes are a new arrival, they have become part of our wild.
However, they do recommend that Cape Breton Highlands National Park managers be quicker to kill coyotes when they begin to show an interest in humans.
“It is important that, while rare, managers and the public are aware that coyotes are capable of serious, unprovoked attacks on people under rare circumstances,” reads the study’s recommendations.
“This awareness would be important in areas with similar ecological characteristics to Cape Breton Highlands National Park, in which coyotes may prey-switch to large prey in the absence of alternative foods. In systems with limited prey, people using parks should be aware of carnivores, even coyotes, and take appropriate precautions, such as hiking with a partner and carrying a stick or bear spray…”
As for Fraser, he has another warning.
“They’re looking for something small and alone,” said Fraser.
“They’re not to be trusted.”
