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It was a late summer evening in Keyser Hollow a few years ago, and my wife Clay and I sat outside listening to the sounds of the crickets and katydids. Suddenly, we were transfixed by a high-pitched bark. It came from no more than a hundred yards away, but tiie animal was concealed in the woods of Shenandoah National Plark. This first yelp was quickly followed by another, and another, and then the yelps merged into a howl.
Before the echoes of this first howl had died away, it was answered by another, a little farther into the forest. The first animal immediately responded, and was answered back again. For the next five minutes, the animals continued to exchange barks and howls as they worked their way deeper into the park, and then they were gone.
We sat mesmerized, realizing that what we had heard was a pair of coyotes, communicating to each other as they started their evening hunt.
For nearly a century, the howl of the wild canid was absent from Rappahannock County. The timber wolf, known to scientists as Canis lupus, was last recorded in Virginia in Tazewell County in 1910, and its smaller cousin, Canis nifus, the red wolf of southeastern coastal areas, Had been exterminated from the Commonwealth decades before.
However, even before the last of our two native species of wolves was gone, the third wild canid of North America, Canis latrans, the coyote or brush wolf, was already moving east from its original range west of the Mississippi River. They moved by two routes, a northern one around the Great Lakes into New York and New England, and a Southern route from Arkansas and Louisiana. They’re now found in all 49 of the continental United States, and in every county of Virginia. Perhaps these two waves actually met right here in the Commonwealth, where they also may have encountered coyotes illegally introduced by hunting dubs.
“Coyotes used railroads and highways as travel corridors,” said retired Game Warden Jim Bangston who added, “the first coyote to be positively identified in Rappahannock County was shot by John Clark on his cattle farm in Harris Hollow in 1984.” The animal, which weighed more than 40
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