I was woken by the coyotes’ singing last night. We don’t hear them very often here in our valley: those we see seem to be passing through.
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\nI wasn’t able to listen for more than the few seconds needed to identify the sound. Dudley joined in with an eerie howl in a much lower pitch. By the time I could get him to be quiet, the coyotes had stopped, and that was probably why he had stopped as well. Dudley doesn’t howl very often. In fact, I don’t know if I had heard him do so before last night.<\/p>\n
I’ve been here long enough now that it no longer seems affected to use the local pronunciation, ki-yote, stress on the first syllable, rather than the one I grew up with, ky-ot-i, stress on the second syllable. The pronunciation seemed very odd to me when we first moved here, but now I use it without thinking.<\/p>\n
Mostly, and gratefully, we have seen very little of the larger wildlife in this area aside from deer in our ten years here. Neighbors reported bears in our valley a few weeks ago, but I didn’t see any sign of them. Dudley did become rather unglued late one night, barking and whining frantically, and since it was around the time of the bear reports, I decided he had probably smelled them. <\/p>\n
A few years ago, after dark, I thought I heard a mountain lion snarl up on a neighboring ridge. Whatever it was, it was large and it was pissed. The horses were quite agitated as well, and I checked them later to make sure everyone was okay. They were dozing, and surprised to see me in the middle of the night.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
I was woken by the coyotes’ singing last night. We don’t hear them very often here in our valley: those we see seem to be passing through.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"activitypub_content_warning":"","activitypub_content_visibility":"","activitypub_max_image_attachments":4,"activitypub_interaction_policy_quote":"anyone","activitypub_status":"","footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[4],"tags":[110,69,107],"class_list":["post-388","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-life","tag-colorado","tag-coyote","tag-life"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/s4Npw-coyote","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.stardel.com\/fiveacres\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/388","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.stardel.com\/fiveacres\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.stardel.com\/fiveacres\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.stardel.com\/fiveacres\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.stardel.com\/fiveacres\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=388"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.stardel.com\/fiveacres\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/388\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.stardel.com\/fiveacres\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=388"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.stardel.com\/fiveacres\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=388"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.stardel.com\/fiveacres\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=388"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}