Crying wolf in NYC! Central Park’s ‘giant’ coyote is actually part wolf, experts say
It was a coyote in wolf’s clothing.
The large, gray eastern coyote encountered last weekend by a jogger in Central Park is part wolf, according to biologists who told The Post all coyotes currently roaming the northeast are the result of decades of cross-hybridization between the two species.
“They all have some wolf ancestry, meaning that the animals in Central Park, and elsewhere in the city and throughout New York State, are descended from coyotes who interbred with eastern wolves,” explained Chris Nagy, a wildlife biologist with the Westchester nature preserve Mianus River Gorge.
Nagy said coyotes and wolves first began interbreeding about 100 years ago in Ontario, Canada.
“The coyotes we see now in the eastern United States are the descendants of those crosses, and have mixed back and forth with each other as they spread down the east coast,” Nagy said.
Brett Cohn posted the fascinating footage of his coyote encounter to social media.
Cohn told The Post he was jogging along the 72nd Street Traverse toward The Ramble just after 7 a.m., and did a double-take when he spotted the coyote.
“I got to where the horses usually congregate during the day and all of sudden I looked up and there’s like a giant coyote staring right at me,” Cohn explained.
The Central Park coyote, though, is not what’s known as a coywolf — the result of a full-bred wolf mating with a pure-blooded coyote.
“The eastern coyote,” said Roland Kays, a zoologist with the College of Natural Resources at North Carolina State University, is “an exciting new type of coyote in the midst of an amazing evolutionary transition. Call it a distinct ‘subspecies,’ call it an ‘ecomorph,’ or call it by its scientific name Canis latrans var. But don’t call it a new species, and please, don’t call it the coywolf.”
According to Nagy, the Central Park coyote appears to have wolf ancestry, but likely “had parents that were mostly coyote” and just “a little wolf.”
Fear not, though: both experts claim eastern coyotes, despite being part wolf, pose no greater threat to man than full-blooded coyotes.
Jon Way, founder of Eastern Coyote Research, worries the Central Park coyote could face the same fate as Flaco the Owl.
“Hopefully, it survives all of the rat poison that will likely eventually kill it whether ingested directly or through eating the dead rodents,” Way said.
