Going for a walk a day or two after a fresh snowfall can be an enlightening exercise, if you're curious about the "neighbours." Everyone's familiar with the four-paw prints of cottontails, the most common mid-size mammal in most of Durham Region, after squirrels. But I was surprised to find veritable cottontail highways trampled in the snow in a nearby meadow, twisting under dogwood and nannyberry bushes, where thick branches offer protection from predators dropping down from the sky.
Danger doesn't just come from above -- great horned owls by night or red-tailed hawks by day. Rabbits have to be wary of four-footed predators as well, everything from house cats to weasels and foxes. And coyotes.
Though tracks were everywhere, I flushed only one cottontail on my walk that early morning, a brown furry form that went streaking off across the white snow into a thicket. Not five minutes later I froze in place when I heard from across the creek valley a long, drawn-out howl that I first thought must be something mechanical. A second howl was followed by high, excited yipping that went on for almost a minute before abruptly cutting off. Coyotes eating breakfast.
I learned of that possibility from a reader in Ajax when I mentioned coyotes in a January column. Bev Ewen told me how he and his wife were camping four years ago near Regina, Saskatchewan, in an area where coyotes abound. "Every night at 2 a.m. we could hear them yowling and barking," he wrote in an e-mail. "As quickly as the noise began, it would stop for the rest of the night. Camped beside us was a local couple who told us that the yowling occurs when the parents are teaching their pups to hunt. As soon as they caught their prey, the noises would stop, they would consume it and then head for their dens for the rest of the night." Sure enough, I didn't hear another yip or bark.
Coyotes and cottontails, both North American natives, greatly increased their range as European settlers cut down the great forests. Two hundred years ago Durham Region was home to gray wolves and snowshoe hares instead. While all "wolves" were systematically shot, trapped and poisoned, the more adaptable Canis latrans, or "barking dog," despite interbreeding with larger timber wolves, was better able to stay out of sight of humans, and live on the smaller game that flourished in open conditions. Coyotes now range from coast to coast and Costa Rica to Alaska.
Snowshoe hares vanished with habitat loss. My husband remembers seeing them in a dense wet woods in the Shoal Point area of south Pickering in the 1970s, a rich habitat where balsam fir and winterberry grew in abundance, until the woods was clearcut. Snowshoe hares are still found in the Oak Ridges Moraine.
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Durham outdoors writer Margaret Carney has more than 3,000 species on her life list of birds, seen in far-flung corners of the planet.