With spring arriving and wildlife encounters set to increase as the weather gets warmer, the N.C. Wildlife Resources Commission (NCWRC) has helpful guidance for what to do when encountering various wildlife. 

I was hiking in the woods above our house at sunrise when coyotes began to howl behind me, and they howled and howled.

A new whole-genome (the entire genetic makeup) study published in Science Advances on July 27 is giving the already muddied waters of wolf-coyote ancestry another stir.

Mark Rogers sticks his hand through the cold air outside Bethel Grocery into the even more frigid interior of the standalone freezer settled beside the building along U.S. 276 in Haywood County. There’s a dead coyote inside, folded body hard and rigid through a combination of cold and rigor mortis. Rogers pulls it out into the sunlight, where bright rays bounce shine off its array of red, gray and white hairs.

It’s been 30 years since Raymond Bunn saw his first coyote, and that moment — Clay County, 1986 — is not one he’s likely to forget. 

“I remember well seeing it,” said Bunn, manager at Shed’s Hunting Supply in Sylva. “When I first seen it, I thought it was a German shepherd dog or something like that, but it was a coyote.”

In Cherokee, a dead coyote is worth more than a live one — about $25 more.

In the coming weeks, the Eastern Band of Cherokee Indian’s Fisheries and Wildlife Department will begin doling out $25 bounties to enrolled tribal members for each coyote they shoot and kill on tribal land. Cherokee hunters can exchange the coyote carcasses for money but get to keep the pelt if they want. The bodies will be incinerated.