I've just had three days of doing tours at Mesa Verde; tomorrow begins four more days of tours. Day before yesterday, as I was going up Prater Canyon toward the Montezuma Valley Overlook, I came up behind a red pickup truck moving very slowly. Then I realized the driver was keeping pace with a coyote ambling along on the side of the road. The critter seemed to think the bike lane marked on the newly resurfaced entrance road was his personal hiking path. He finally turned off and climbed the bank to watch the traffic go by, still quite unconcerned about the people.
Yesterday, as our tour bus was driving out on the mesa top loop, another coyote sauntered nonchalantly down the pavement ahead of us for a ways, finally turning off into the woods when we pulled over at our tour stop.
Lately, my tour folks and I have had to be careful to watch where we step if we take a morning tour down the path to Spruce Tree House ... the blacktop path is liberally sprinkled with tarry little poop piles that I'm guessing were left there by members of the dog family ... foxes or coyotes.
Which got me to thinking about the phenomenon we observed every fall at Chaco ... when the kids and I drove out to the school bus stop in the morning, the blacktop road was always littered with piles of coyote droppings, full of seeds from the berries they'd been eating. It was suggested that, while the bear may do it in the woods, the coyotes do it on the road because they can see in all directions so they won't be attacked while in a compromising position.
Which brings me to wonder if the bedazed coyotes I've been seeing aren't maybe a little loopy from fermentation in the berries they've been scarfing down. I'm just sayin' ... tv
2 comments:
Your thought on druken "dogs" could be right on the money! We had pileated woodpeckers last fall eating the fermenting cherries and they acted very strange. They weren't inhibited at all!
Robins do it annually in Wisconsin: get drunk on fermented Mountain Ash berries in Fall, that is.
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