I heard them, but I could not see them. Somewhere out there in the calm, dark, February night on the navy blue snow there was a pack of coyotes. I know it is a territorial, resident, denning pack because they are conducting a “group yip-howl”; a demonic, cacophony of off-pitch yips, offered up by each pack member, all at once. Only resident coyote packs perform this ritual when they with their “troops” (off-spring, siblings, aunts and uncles) are standing on their defended denning territory. Research conducted right here in Jackson Hole informs me that this is an energetically inexpensive way for resident packs to fight with one another in order to defend their territories.

 

The distant percolating howl stops abruptly as if on cue and I am left standing in the silent winter night. Now I listen very intently. Sure enough!  There it is! It is an even more distant group-yip answer from the Snake River bottom. That means there is an adjacent territorial coyote pack howling back to say “Oh yeah?  Well if you guys come over into our denning territory by the River, we’ll beat you up!” And so it goes, and so it goes. Ritualized vocal combat in the heart of the canine mating season.  Research in Yellowstone has documented that in the absence of wolves or our loud-mouthed domestic dogs (a coyote’s arch enemy) denning territories are held by packs for decades in the same areas, generation after generation. Once good habitat for raising a coyote family it tends to remain good habitat unless… wolves or dogs…

 

You can have a good chance of hearing a coyote group yip-howl. Try sleeping with your windows cracked open a bit during February and March and ask you wife to wake you if she hears anything.    – Tom Segerstrom
photo courtesy of Mark Gocke