Vacation time is coming! Yea! I'm done with this. Post and be critical as much as you want! That's what some of you so enjoy doing the most. Seems like walking on eggshells here with some of you. And some can't wait to make an issue out of something that was not intended the way you twist it to appear. DONE!

Oh, I see. I thought perhaps US Air had gone out of business right after the incident or something. Gosh, I hate feeling so powerless when dealing with big companies. Two months ago DH and I bought a new sofa, loveseat and upholstered chair for our livingroom from a well-known, long established store here is So Calif called Wickes. We bought our first living room set from them when we were newlyweds in 1973. The new furniture was delivered on a Saturday and we knew immediately we had made a mistake when selecting the chair. The following weekend we drove over to Wickes to ask them how to exchange it for another we liked. They told us, no can do, they filed for bankruptcy on Monday. What??? We then told them we would accept an even exchange for another chair that cost $100 less. Nope. grrrrr. Jodi-

wanton - that article was interesting, particularly re noting their ability to quickly adapt to new environments. I went through DH's Flickr pictures looking at the history of 'our' coyotes.... The coyotes moved into the woodlot in late fall or early winter of 2013. In his comments on this picture from mid-Feb. 2014 - not one of 'our' pack - he refers to ours being nocturnal and only catching a brief glimpse of one. In this picture from August 2014, the female is quite comfortable lounging on the grass, outside the woodlot, in daylight, in an area where lots of people are present at times. In this picture from June 2015 you can see the collar on the male. It was collared in early October 2013 20 miles away. He had to cross Hwy 401 - one of the busiest highways in North America! - and other busy roads in order to get to the woodlot here. He was born in the spring of 2013. So they are smart, and grow up fast, and travel far! (The collar was supposed to automatically drop off within a year but obviously malfunctioned.) In this picture from July 2015 you can see that the female (who had 3 pups that spring) is comfortable napping in a parking spot outside a seniors' residence! Both the adults were casually strolling the neighbourhood and going into backyards. By the fall 2015, they all had mange - this picture is one of the pups. The Humane Society and a wildlife service was able to trap and treat the juveniles but, as far as we know, were not able to trap the adults. So it is probable that the coyotes currently in the woods are from last year's pups that were treated for mange. The original breeding pair are likely dead from mange. A few days before this picture was taken in early Feb. 2016, DH and Cole had the confrontation with a coyote in the backyard. That prompted us to build the fence extension. Certainly a determined coyote could still get over the fence but the fence should at least slow it down! Plus the extension part is likely to get knocked over as a coyote scrambled over it. Before we do out with a dog (no dog here goes out unsupervised now!) we look to see if the top of the fence looks intact.... Given the Russian experiments with domesticating foxes, beginning in 1959 (very interesting - lots of stuff on YouTube and Google...), we can only hope that eventually removing all aggressive coyotes might someday result in a 'kinder and gentler' coy-wolf :-)

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