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By Malcolm C. MacPherson
Rappahannock News Staff Writer
Coyotes, shadowy, shy creatures who have amazing qualities of adaptation to the presence of human neighbors, have been sighted in Rappahannock County to the delight and dismay of animal lovers.
This was no joke for Demaris Miller, a county resident and lover of horses and other domesticated animals that she keeps on her farm, Persimmon Ridge on the Hughes River in Sperryville.
On Saturday, May 8, Miller reacted to a strange series of “yips.”
“I heard her before I saw her,” she says.
The coyote, which Miller deduced to be a female, was making a “ruckus, an unusual call not like any of my animals. I know it wasn’t a bird.” She raises two donkeys, calves and miniature cattle, and dogs. The coyote was heading in the direction of the river, until it went out of sight.
Miller was certain she had seen a coyote. She knows coyotes from photographs, and she knows the distinctions between coyotes and foxes, which are frequent visitors to local pastures.
.Coyotes will attack farm animals, where there is opportunity, and Miller raises miniature cattle, some weighing 70 pounds or less which are vulnerable when they are young.
However, her two donkeys protect the pasture from strangers like the coyote, indeed, from stray dogs and bears, too. They make noises to frighten away visitors and chase them out of the pasture, catch them and kick them.
“I’d shoot (the coyote) if I could see it was attacking one of
See COYOTE, Page A6
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