Bartram's wolf

[mrs. hornet22]

H22 was just telling me this weekend that he saw two solid black coyotes in Monroe, Ga. just last week.

 

[killerv]

Among those of us who trap, here at GON, there have been plenty of examples that show pretty conclusively that the red wolf is still around...

Friend sent me a pic of one in a trap caught I wanna say a little north of monroe county, somewhere in that area.

 

[NCHillbilly]

Some pics from my latest camera pull. These critters look almost identical to the "official" breeding stock red woofs they have at the WNC Nature Center here.

 

[WOODIE13]

View attachment 1264414View attachment 1264415

That center pic looks great, love the red.

We got a few red looking ones, first one I caught had some wild markings compared to the others I caught.

 

[mguthrie]

Bartram mentioned wolves several times in Travels. Another description from the book:



The species in question is the Florida black wolf, (Canis lupus floridanus,) which used to roam through much of the southeast. It supposedly went extinct in the early 1900s, except that it didn't.

I shot this a couple weeks ago on the club me and @tugboat are members of. He saw it the evening I killed it and said he’s seen a bigger one on the club. This one is a male and weighed 25lbs

 

[kayaksteve]

Sunday morning I had a doe come busting up from a creek through a laurel thicket right at me with what I thought was a buck right behind her. By the time I got turned and my gun up they were coming right under my stand. I realized it was a doe and a yearling with a coyote about 10 feet behind them. I gave a whistle and popped the coyote when it stopped. Usually I’d just let it walk but I like the deer better than the coyote. She was actually kinda small compared to what I usually see around here.

 

[redneck_billcollector]

I've shot a couple of black yotes here in Twiggs. Other than color - just another yote.

Having trapped coyotes out west, I can say without a doubt, I have never trapped one nor seen one out west when the fur market was up in the late 70s and early 80s, where on the other hand, they are all over the southeast. Genetic studies done on "eastern coyotes" from New England to Florida by various Universities all found one thing, they are not coyotes as we know them from out west. They all have a percentage of Wolf DNA that is not present in the western populations. The scientific community is even trying to get away from even calling them "eastern coyote" and instead are using the name "coy-wolf." They are a hybrid that occurs naturally. Well, we know that is how the Red Wolf and the other eastern varieties of wolves came about at the end of the Pleistocene. Due to environmental stress, timber/gray wolves bred with coyotes and due to forestation, the smaller hybrid functioned better in the, at the time, heavily forested east and with the white-tailed deer being its primary prey base. In the mid-late 70s I trapped a rather large number of these animals in SOWEGA in the Flint River Basin and they were not the same animal I was trapping out west; they were larger, and their heads were "blockier" like a wolf's head. What we have here is either residual populations of Red Wolves that never were extirpated or the re-evolution of the Red Wolf following the same path it followed at the end of the Pleistocene. I have yet to see a genetic study that looks at the timeline with regards to cross breeding. I do know I have been fortunate to spend hours watching Red Wolves, certified ones at that, and they truly are no different in either habit or appearance than our "just another yote(s)".

 

[redneck_billcollector]

Sunday morning I had a doe come busting up from a creek through a laurel thicket right at me with what I thought was a buck right behind her. By the time I got turned and my gun up they were coming right under my stand. I realized it was a doe and a yearling with a coyote about 10 feet behind them. I gave a whistle and popped the coyote when it stopped. Usually I’d just let it walk but I like the deer better than the coyote. She was actually kinda small compared to what I usually see around here.View attachment 1272692

Being in my 60s and having hunted deer in the "good ol' days" of the late 1960s & early 1970s, I can say fact certain that we have more deer now than we have had in almost 2 centuries (basing on historical records and my observations as a very young deer hunter). Canine cervid predators are good at selecting those that are not healthy. Most diseases in cervid populations, such as CWD, occur when their populations reach unhealthy densities. I can remember after our cervid population boom by the second half of the 1980s the outbreaks of Blue Tongue and finding emaciated deer carcasses rather often. Now it is a rare day that I travel 20 miles down rural roads that I do not see half a dozen or so deer dead on the side of the road. The problem is people think we can control nature, when in reality what we do when we attempt to is to knock it out of whack. These canine predators did not show up in Ga. until we had our population explosion of deer in the mid-1970s, all of a sudden they were everywhere, starting out in the Flint River Basin and then spreading throughout Ga and the southeast. We will never be able to control nature, especially by trying to wipe out cervid predators, if we do manage to do that, the only outcome will be a cervid population crash due to disease. Our arrogance when it comes to nature never ceases to amaze me, we want deer with impressive racks to somehow make use a "great hunter" when in reality we are in the long run doing more harm to the deer population than good. At least we have learned that we need to harvest so many does for every buck harvested. Sadly, there are those that want to limit doe harvest now because they are only used to the artificially high deer populations we have now.

 

[redneck_billcollector]

Can you define deep south because they (black yotes) are here in WV, PA and other Northern states.

True, sorry. They are becoming common up and down the Atlantic seaboard and will be common wherever wolf DNA mixes with coyote DNA.

 

[NCHillbilly]

Having trapped coyotes out west, I can say without a doubt, I have never trapped one nor seen one out west when the fur market was up in the late 70s and early 80s, where on the other hand, they are all over the southeast. Genetic studies done on "eastern coyotes" from New England to Florida by various Universities all found one thing, they are not coyotes as we know them from out west. They all have a percentage of Wolf DNA that is not present in the western populations. The scientific community is even trying to get away from even calling them "eastern coyote" and instead are using the name "coy-wolf." They are a hybrid that occurs naturally. Well, we know that is how the Red Wolf and the other eastern varieties of wolves came about at the end of the Pleistocene. Due to environmental stress, timber/gray wolves bred with coyotes and due to forestation, the smaller hybrid functioned better in the, at the time, heavily forested east and with the white-tailed deer being its primary prey base. In the mid-late 70s I trapped a rather large number of these animals in SOWEGA in the Flint River Basin and they were not the same animal I was trapping out west; they were larger, and their heads were "blockier" like a wolf's head. What we have here is either residual populations of Red Wolves that never were extirpated or the re-evolution of the Red Wolf following the same path it followed at the end of the Pleistocene. I have yet to see a genetic study that looks at the timeline with regards to cross breeding. I do know I have been fortunate to spend hours watching Red Wolves, certified ones at that, and they truly are no different in either habit or appearance than our "just another yote(s)".

Agree 100%.