Remember though that the den may have other animals other than fox or coyote such as skunks or snakes so use caution. If you are unable to see the tracks you can also put crumpled paper in front of the den. If the paper is moved and you have not had a heavy wind storm you will know at least something lives there.

Coyotes eat everything they can dead or alive & are opportunists.Here in AZ they take many peoples pets-dogs,cats. They can and will take down a full grown fox or good sized dog or lrg. cat especially if there are more than one coyote hunting together. In Southern Ohio where my sister lives they actually have a coyote watch system set up;when someone sees a coyote in their yard or close by they call a special city number and then a call system actually calls all the houses in the area letting everyone know to keep watch over their pets when they are let out in the yards. We as people have built buildings, streets everywhere and the coyotes have and will continue to adapt to the environment that we are overtaking. They keep smaller animals (rabbits,mice,rats)under control. Everything on the planet has it's purpose even if we humans finds whatever it is to be a nuisance.

Jay, I just do not understand why the coyotes seem to be losing their fear of humans lately, but it is obvious they have. I miss the good old days when they turned tail and slunk away like the varmints they are. Maybe too many are breeding with feral dogs and too many dog genes are wiping out their fear of human beings. I am glad that the one Judy's daughter saw didn't come after her. I know it is very rare for them to attack people, but occasionally one does. I have read about the fairly new hybrid Coywolves but aren't we all too far away from wolf habitat to have them here? I am fairly sure we are down here at my end of the state. Since you're so close to Colorado, I could see Coywolves maybe being more likely there. For those of you who haven't seen anything about Coywolves before, here's some info on them: CoyWolf We are seeing the same recklessness on the part of bobcats, but since they are smaller, they don't scare me as much. That doesn't mean I want to get too close to one. I also think we are seeing them out more in daylight, year-round, and it doesn't seem to matter if it is a dry year or a wet year, so I'm thinking they are not necessarily being driven to hunt in the daylight hours because food is scarce. I don't know if coyotes and bobcats feed on foxes, but I assume they do. We see tons ot coyotes and bobcats now and almost never see a fox. I miss seeing the darling little red foxes and gray foxes running up the road. (I wouldn't feel that way if one was trying to grab a small chicken, like a banty of a half-grown standard chicken.) And, one more thing. Ever since the flooding of 2015, we almost never see raccoons in our yard. Before that, we had them all over. We aren't seeing many possums or armadillos either. At first I attributed this to the flooding, and figured it merely swept away a lot of them. Maybe it did, but maybe it didn't. Maybe the predators are eating them. Carol, That's always a possibility. In the bad cougar year, my hands shook so much after an encounter that I had a hard time opening the door. It wasn't even locked, I don't think. It was just that my hands were shaking so much I couldn't turn the door knob. I tried to call Tim and had a hard time operating the cell phone, and it didn't matter because he was in one room with the door closed and his phone was 3 rooms away. (This caused a loud disagreement because I already had told him over and over to keep his phone near him because I was having so may wildlife scares.) The time a skunk chased me from the back garden area to the house was almost as scary. It wasn't that I thought the skunk would kill me, but I feared he'd catch up with me and bite me and then I'd have to have rabies shots. Reading what I just wrote has me thinking I have lost my mind and should just move back to the city. What in the world are all these wild things doing in my life????? We have so much more wildlife now than we had when we moved here. That's not right. They should be afraid of us and should be vacating our property to avoid close human contact, and they certainly aren't doing that. Dawn

Yes park ranger told me you could tell by hair in scat