The Invasion

The roots of the coyote's emergence in North Carolina stretch back hundreds of years to 1630, when the Massachusetts Bay Colony issued the first bounty for a wolf in the Americas, establishing a trend of killings that would only explode in the hundreds of years to follow.

As settlers pushed into every nook and cranny of the United States, red wolves and their larger cousins, grey wolves, garnered a nasty reputation for raiding livestock and damaging the livelihoods of early settlers.

Eventually the United States government stepped in, offering up lump sums of cash for the eradication of wolves. According to the USFWS , wolf-killing peaked during the early 20th century, and in just years the species was nearly extinct.

Even with wolf populations across the U.S. rebounding in recent years , an unintended consequence of the mass-eradication of the species emerged. Coyotes stepped in to fill the void left behind by wolves, and without the larger predators keeping their numbers in check, population boomed, according the Roland Kays, a scientist at the North Carolina Museum of Natural Sciences.

Over the last 30 years coyotes began pushing East, spreading across much of the East Coast, even popping up in urban areas like New York City .

A captive red wolf at the Sandy Ridge Captive Red Wolf Facility on March 21, 2013. (B. Bartel/USFWS)

In fact, the population of coyotes has boomed to a point that even those tasked with studying the creatures have a hard time pinning down just how many of the canids exist.

"Actually counting the number of coyotes is one of the hardest challenges in wildlife biology," said Kays. "We have no idea how many are out there in different areas. What we do know is that they have definitely increased, and are probably still increasing."

And this influx of coyotes poses problems for the USFWS.

"When this program started coyotes were a rare thing in North Carolina," said Rabon. "Now, they occur basically everywhere."

More coyotes means more interactions between coyotes and red wolves. Those interactions can have potentially damning consequences on conservation efforts. Red wolves and coyotes can interbreed, producing hybrid offspring that muddle the lineage of the wolves, setting back repopulation efforts.

According to Kays, the red wolf's endangered status only exacerbates interbreeding problems.

"Different species will usually breed with each other when one is really really rare," said Kays. "They don't have anyone else to breed with, so they take the next best thing they can get."

To combat interbreeding and lower coyote populations in the area the USFWS captures and sterilizes coyotes, keeping their hormones intact. Sterilized coyotes are then outfitted with radio collars, released back into the wild and utilized by the USFWS to expand the range of red wolves.

"We'll use sterile coyotes to hold territory where we don't have wolves," said Rabon. "Then as the wolf population grows if they [wolves] want to take over an area being held by a coyote we can either go in and remove that coyote, or more likely, the wolf will just go in and kick that coyote out."

Rabon said the USFWS tracks and monitors roughly the same amount of coyotes, 60, as they do red wolves, leaving around 120 radio-collared canids roaming the Albemarle Peninsula.

And, given the similarities between coyotes and red wolves, the USFWS and conservationists believe that some of the gunshot mortalities could be chalked up to a case of mistaken identity.

Differentiating between red wolves and coyotes with the naked eye can be particularly difficult. Rabon said that larger coyotes can weigh 35 to 40 pounds, and while red wolves are typically in the 60-pound range, smaller females can weigh 45 to 50 pounds, infringing on the typical size of a large coyote.

"You're talking about wild animals who don't typically look like our overfed pets, so judging 60 pounds versus 40 pounds at a distance might be incredibly difficult," said Rabon.

"They also look a lot alike; they have a lot of the same colorations. I can certainly see how if you were to see a red wolf in the wild you might think 'Wow, that's a big coyote.'"

Still, that did little to explain why none of the coyotes tracked by the USFWS were killed via gunshot during the same time period the six wolves were lost, a fact Rabon chalks up to hunting and the allure of the "big catch."

"Because it's [the red wolf] a larger animal it becomes that much more of a prize," said Rabon. "It's just like going after the big buck if you're deer hunting. You'll take the doe, but you prefer the buck."

This map shows the expansion of coyote range over the past three centuries. Aggressive predator control programs and hunting contributed to the eradication of larger predators like wolves, allowing coyotes to spread rapidly into nearly every area of North America.