For a week, Vanessa Prior’s Great Pyrenees named Ruth Bader has had a friend--a black coyote that researchers have been tracking since late December when it was first spotted in Smyrna.
It ended up in Prior’s backyard in East Cobb, where for a week it would show up every morning to play with Ruth Bader.
“(They were) playing together and jumping in the pool and chasing each other,” she tells WSB’s Sandra Parrish.
“Was it a coyote; was it a fox; half dog-half fox? I really wasn’t sure,” says Prior.
Wondering what the animal was, she posted on social media looking for answers.
It’s actually a melanistic coyote according to Chris Mowry, a biology professor at Berry College and co-founder of the Atlanta Coyote Project. He says while rare, it’s more common in the Southeast.
“In the West, for example, we rarely see black coyotes. But here in the Southeast, it’s in the gene pool,” he says.
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The coyote’s affection for dogs may also be a genetic trait that’s been discovered in wolves and dogs that Mowry would like to learn more about.
“This potentially gives us the opportunity to look for this gene in this animal. We don’t know for sure, but [I] have some suspicions that perhaps there’s a genetic basis,” he says.
That’s why he enlisted the help of licensed coyote trapper Brandon Sanders of Sanders Wildlife Incorporated and Lara Shaw, a known dog trapper with Angels Among Us Pet Rescue.
Both set up cameras in Prior’s yard and like clockwork the coyote would appear every morning for her play date.
“Ruth Bader—she is the hero. Because if she hadn’t been playing with the coyote, we wouldn’t be here right now,” says Shaw.
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Within two days, the coyote was caught in one of two traps set up in the backyard of a home behind Prior’s house. Sanders transported it to the Yellow River Wildlife Sanctuary in Lilburn where it will live happily with another coyote and allow Mowry to continue his studies of it.
He had to get special permission for the Georgia Department of Natural Resources to capture and relocate it.
“Biologists who study coyotes—we’re not in the business of capturing and relocating coyotes. But this was a unique situation in that this coyote was not acting aggressively but on the contrary was acting very friendly,” he says.
Prior says she’s happy the coyote will be saved but knows it will be missed.
“Ruth Bader is definitely going to miss her,” she says.