Coyote attacks two-year-old girl in Weymouth, MA.

[nastygunz]

Coyote attacks two-year-old girl in Weymouth, MA
Aug 24, 2011 
(NECN: Josh Brogadir, Weymouth, MA) - This was a frightening attack, a little girl walking alongside her grandmother, before noon today, when a coyote came out of the woods and bit her head.
");?> "She was walking along and from behind a coyote came up and knocked the baby down and took a bite from the back of her head, a pretty good sized bite, " said Robin Gallagher, the aunt of the two-year-old girl who now has stitches in her head.

Gallagher did not want to say her niece's name but told us she's home from the hospital resting, hours after the frightening attack.

It was before noon, she was walking alongside her grandmother next to this stroller by these hedges on Clarendon Street in South Weymouth, Massachusetts.

The coyote came out of nowhere.

Fortunately, Elle Ramponi rushed outside to help when she heard the girl scream.

"He wasn't moving that coyote, so I just told her, get over here, opened the door and I told her to run," Ramponi said.

"She said come into the house, and they did which really was a godsend because if no one was around, I mean that coyote was really trying to go after them," Gallagher said.

Animal control officers have been searching for the coyote, to see if it is rabid.

Neighbors are worried.

"The fact that they didn't catch the animal when it's out in daylight is a little concerning," said neighbor Brian Letendre.

So where do these coyotes live?

According to Ramponi, animal control officers say there are five packs of coyotes living in these woods by the reservoir.

Other neighbors say they've seen coyotes walking on the street.

"It looks like a German Shepherd that nobody took care of, just really scruffy, it's pretty scary, I have five grandchildren too that come over all the time and I told them today stay home, don't come over," neighbor Denise Hatch said.

They say construction over by the reservoir is moving the coyotes around.

Whatever caused this wild animal to attack this little girl, it certainly could have been much worse.

"They are where they are but it's just horrifying that it went after a child like that, a small child that was with a bigger person," Ramponi added.

And Ramponi says after the attack, she called 911, looked out her back window and the coyote was still in her backyard, listening to the girl scream, she thinks.

As of now, Weymouth Police say the coyote still has not been found.

[securpro]

It seems to me that most so called coyote attacks on people happen in more northern states than the south... Something just don't sound right , Are they 100% positive it was a coyote?  Sounds like a coydog to me ?

[slagmaker]

Hey a coyote will attack a fawn that is standing next to its mother. Why would a small child standing next to an adult be any diffrent.

[fuzz269]

Dang coyotes are startin to do this alot more often all over the place, going to have to buy more traps for this fall.

[nastygunz]

Perhaps the info I read about yankeeyotes being bigger, more pack oriented and more prone to hunt larger game, and wolf genes?
--------------------------------------

For coyotes, at least, study finds New Englanders a special breed
New research says these large, russet coyotes, born on Cape Cod, are a hybrid of wolf and coyote. (Jonathan Way)
By Murray Carpenter
Globe Correspondent / February 17, 2010
E-mail this article  To: Invalid E-mail address Add a personal message:(80 character limit)  Your E-mail: Invalid E-mail address   
Sending your articleYour article has been sent. E-mail| Print| Reprints| | ShareThisText size â€" + New England coyotes are bigger than their cousins on the Western plains, and often have russet coats. They look more wolflike. Now research suggests this is because they hybridized with wolves as they migrated east over the last century.

The mixing of coyote and wolf genes allowed the animal to rapidly evolve larger, more powerful jaws, better adapted to preying on whitetail deer. One Massachusetts biologist says the animals deserve a new moniker: coywolves. The genetic mixing is also giving federal regulators headaches as they try to figure out which creatures need protection.

Coyotes are recent arrivals in the eastern United States, colonizing the habitat over the last century after native wolves were killed off and forests cleared. In a paper published this month in the journal Biology Letters, Roland Kays, curator of mammals at the New York State Museum, shows that the coyotes that migrated east through Ohio were not as well adapted to the Northeast as those that came through southern Canada, hybridizing with wolves en route.

Kays says the hybridization gave northern-migrating coyotes the evolutionary edge over the southern-migrating population, allowing them to colonize the region five times as fast.

“Probably the Ohio coyotes are slowly getting larger every generation,’’ Kays said. “That would take a long time to do the typical evolution process, because the variation comes about slowly. But when you have hybridization, all of a sudden you have a whole range of variants, many of which are probably not well suited, but this large coyote variant was well suited.’’

Not only are the Eastern coyotes bigger than their Western cousins, they have more varied coloration, which Kays said “can happen just from mixing up the coyote and wolf genes.’’ In addition to the typical gray coats, many Eastern coyotes are reddish. Kays said some even look like German shepherds, but do not carry any dog genes.

Biologist Jonathan Way, who tracked coyotes around Boston and Cape Cod for years while earning his doctorate at Boston College, wrote a paper on coyote genetics for an upcoming issue of the journal Northeastern Naturalist. Way said Eastern coyotes are so distinct they deserve a new name.

“Whether you are up in northern Maine or down on Cape Cod, they are absolutely hybrids,’’ said Way. “I just don’t think calling an animal that’s a hybrid one species name, i.e., coyote, is appropriate.’’ He proposes the name coywolf.

But Kays considers the Eastern population a race of coyote, much more coyotelike than wolflike. “This is a very dynamic process, and to start putting names on things now is not appropriate,’’ Kays said.

Michael Amaral, a biologist with the US Fish and Wildlife Service who specializes in endangered species, said that a related genetic puzzle is complicating things for federal regulators. The service protects the gray wolf (Canis lupus) and the red wolf of the Southeastern United States (Canis rufus) under the Endangered Species Act. But the emerging genetic picture shows a confusing continuum among wolf and coyote species.

Western coyotes (Canis latrans) and gray wolves bookend the group. In between are the Eastern coyotes and the smaller wolves known as Eastern Canadian wolves (Canis lycaon), a type that some biologists say is a distinct species closely related to red wolves. The thriving wolf population in the Great Lakes region shows mixed genealogy.

Amaral said that because Eastern wolves hybridize with coyotes to the south and with gray wolves to the west, “you cannot draw hard lines on a map and say these are lycaon and these are lupus and these are latrans.’’

Further blurring the wildlife management picture, coyotes can be legally hunted in unlimited numbers throughout New England, while wolves are federally protected.

Amaral says full-blooded wolves occasionally disperse into New England from Canada and have been killed by hunters aiming for trophy-size coyotes. His advice to hunters staring through the sights at such an animal: hold fire. Said Amaral, “I think anything over 50 pounds is a supernormal-size Eastern coyote and probably should be considered of unknown taxonomic identity and left alone.’’

Meanwhile, wolves seem to be trickling back into their onetime New England stamping grounds via coyotes, regaining their ecological niche one gene at a time.