As anyone who watches our livestream can confirm, coyotes come through our backyard almost every night. They’re hungry, and they’re hunting, but we rarely see them succeed.
In this video, we do see a coyote succeed. She (the coyote was female) managed to snatch a baby raccoon as he scrambled up a cedar tree to safety. It all happened in a split second (a cliché, I know, but it was fast). The mama raccoon saw the coyote and raced up the cedar tree, followed by her little one, and the coyote executed a perfect flying leap and just managed to snag the baby.
A half a second longer, and the baby would have been safe.
The coyote ran toward the creek with the mama raccoon in screaming pursuit. As the coyote neared the creek gate, she dropped the baby – she needed to focus on the enraged mother raccoon almost literally on her tail – and she ran down into the creek. The mama raccoon took refuge in a little tree, and the coyote turned and came back in, only to be chased out once more by the mama. The third time the coyote came back, the mama let her pass by; she didn’t come down from the tree for 40 seconds.
The logical thing for the coyote to do was to pick up the baby – who apparently had already been killed by a sharp shake – and run off with dinner. But that didn’t happen. We have no idea why. The coyote went on through and left the dead baby raccoon where he lay.
This all happened around 2:00 am. We were streaming a camera that showed the raccoon chasing the coyote out to the creek but not the other views – Dan pieced this all together the next day. Our diligent overnight livestream watchers reported what they’d seen, and the next morning we went to take a look around and found the dead baby.
He was curled up as if asleep – indeed, for a second, I thought he was asleep, but of course no raccoon would sleep on the ground, alone, by one of our trails. And then I noticed a fly on his nose. He was completely unmarked. No signs of any injury at all.
Poor little baby raccoon. And poor mama raccoon. And, finally, poor coyote working so hard and still leaving hungry.
Note: Some of you may be puzzled that Dan pronounces “coyote” with two syllables,”coy-ote”, instead of the more common three syllables, “coy-oh-tee”. “Coy-ote” is a regional pronunciation, pretty common in the US southwest. Dan grew up saying “coy-ote”, so around here, these guys are “coy-otes”, not “coy-oh-tees”.
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