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They do very well in wooded, agricultural and even suburban areas. “Their feeding habits and their adaptability means they’ll probably be in Alabama from now on. Highly elusive, coyotes can practically live in a person’s backyard without anyone even knowing it. They thrive all across Alabama and, unlike wolves, adapt well to living close to people. They survive in mountainous terrain, forests, agricultural lands, prairies, swamps and even marshes. Incredibly adaptable, coyotes can live practically anywhere and eat anything. A 45-pound coyote is a really big coyote.” Female coyotes in Alabama normally average 25 to 35 pounds. Coyotes look bigger in the winter when they have thicker fur that gives them a fluffier appearance. Many people think a coyote is a lot bigger than it really is and might believe it’s a wolf. “If they saw an actual wolf in Alabama, it’s probably an escapee from captivity. “People have called me claiming to have seen a wolf, but it’s usually a coyote, feral dog or even a coyote-dog hybrid,” Tharp explains. Fish and Wildlife Service declared red wolves extinct in the wild. Of those, only 17 were genetically pure red wolves. From 1973 to 1980, wildlife officers in that area trapped about 400 canines, but only 43 wolves. But by 1921, only a few red wolves remained in the rugged hills of Walker and Colbert counties and they soon disappeared.īy the 1960s, a remnant wolf population still hunted the swamps of eastern Texas and southwest Louisiana. Red wolves, smaller cousins of gray or timber wolves, also ranged across the southeastern United States as far north as the Ohio River. They now populate every state in the contiguous United States. By the 1960s, coyotes naturally expanded eastward from their native range in western states to fill the void left by the vanished gray and red wolves. With forests cleared and lush crops attracting mice, rabbits, rats and other small animals and no competition from wolves, coyotes thrived. In the early 1900s, some people released coyotes in Alabama as game animals after wolves disappeared. Coyotes were originally a western species, but moved eastward in the past 50 years.” “Red wolves were native to Alabama, but they have been extirpated from the state, primarily from loss of habitat. “Big cats were here,” says Richard Tharp, an Alabama Department of Conservation and Natural Resources game biologist in Enterprise. They heard cat screams and wolf howls just beyond the dark trees barely illuminated by the dancing campfire flames.
WILD DOGS IN ALABAMA FULL
When early settlers moved into what became Alabama, they found an untamed wilderness full of powerful toothy creatures, some capable of attacking, killing and even eating humans. Hybart They live in every county in Alabama