MULGRAVE — Mayor Ron Chisholm is not used to feeling like the hapless victim in a Halloween creature feature. But there he was, two weeks ago, taking his morning walk the way he always does, when he received an urgent text message.
“I was out on the path and someone in a car who’d just passed me sent me a note saying I’d better get my ass in gear because one was coming for me,” he says. “It was only an eighth of a kilometre behind me, only three minutes behind where I’d just been... This was 8:30 in the morning and right on Main St.... But it was coming.”
To be clear, ‘it’ was a tawny, toothy, fully-grown coyote – the animal the American humourist Mark Twain once described as “a living, breathing allegory of want”— and it was stalking him in broad daylight.
“You don’t see that often,” Chisholm told The Journal last week. “Normally, they only come out after dark.”
He should know. He’d had an earlier call-of-the-wild encounter just the night before – only, that time, things got a little more up close and personal. “I was out checking on a friend’s vehicle, two coyotes came toward me, one snarling with teeth showing and another one standing right beside him. I pitched two handfuls of rocks, and ran for my truck.”
He’s not the only one in this normally serene community of 700 in eastern Guysborough County who’s rattled by coyote encounters. Over the past month, Chisholm said, dozens of residents have reported sightings and near misses in town with more – and more aggressive – coyotes than they can remember. The situation has become so fraught that municipal officials have advised residents to stay indoors when the sun goes down, and they’ve reached out to the Nova Scotia Department of Natural Resources and Renewables (DNRR) for help.
“We have engaged an aggressive wildlife trapper, who is on site,” the department’s director of wildlife Andrew Boyne told The Journal last week. Noting that two animals – a male and a female – have already been captured, he said, “The trapper will be tending traps over the next two weeks. Any coyotes we catch will be euthanized and their carcasses sent to the vet college in PEI [Atlantic Veterinary College] for necropsies, just to make sure there’s no disease happening. There’s nothing to suggest that there is.”
There’s also nothing in particular to explain what’s going on.
“There are more coyotes, for sure,” said Chisholm, who’s also a hunter. “There were four dead last week [Oct. 14-20], hit by cars. And [their behaviour] is very strange; for them to come right into town and walk down Main St.... I’ve known coyotes to be very, very skittish... Now, even where we have the trail cam right by the wharf – where there’s always beating and banging going on – they’re not scared off. Usually they would be deterred by that.”
Indeed, Boyne said, “We get reports pretty regularly of coyotes, but seldom of aggressive coyotes and seldom of bunches of them, like this. They are wild animals and they will behave in ways that we can’t predict... There are quite a few snowshoe hare around. There’s no question that, with large population of hare, you’re going to see large populations of coyotes, just for the natural cycle of ecology.”
Chisholm suggested recent clearing of nearby woodlands for industrial development could also be driving the critters into town, where dogs, cats, and even chickens make for easy prey.
Despite the local situation, Boyne said DNRR specialists haven’t noticed that coyote populations in Nova Scotia – which are notoriously difficult to nail down owing to the animals’ stealthy nature – are growing, or that individuals are generally becoming more aggressive. “There was a cyclist in Cape Breton last year, and then we had an aggressive wildlife trapper [deployed] on a trail inside Halifax sometime in the last year, or so. But we’re not seeing this repeated elsewhere in the province right now, [except] Mulgrave.”
For the time being, he said, “We’ve asked people to be diligent, to keep their eyes on their children, their pets on leashes, and [when] walking at night, not to walk alone. We’ve only ever had one [tragic] case [in Nova Scotia] – over 10 years ago in Cape Breton Highlands National Park. Even when [coyotes] are acting aggressively, they can still deterred from doing anything beyond [just] acting.”
That’s good advice, Chisholm said. “There’s nothing the town can do. We’ve got to [rely] on DNRR. This has got to be done in the proper manner. We can’t just go out there and start shooting off guns within the town’s limits... otherwise somebody’s going to jail.”