What is it about the wild primitive sound of a pack of coyotes hunting and howling at night that touches someplace deep inside of you?

They were more likely defining or claiming their territory from the neighboring groups of coyotes, especially at night. They generally don’t vocalize much when hunting, they don’t want to give their positions away to their prey.

Whereas when they are challenging their neighbors they want to get an idea of the relative sizes of the packs before they decide if the challenge is worth the risk.

Some of my best coyote hunting has been when I find the seam between two rival groups and start using challenge calls on them.

@WestRiverrat I heard one pack, no replies to it. This is fairly recent behavior in NY. The coyotes didn’t hunt in packs in the past

@Adirondackwannabe You probably had a pack move into a new territory near you then. If they were driven out of their old territory by a larger more aggressive pack, they may be testing the area. Also they can hear a lot better than we can, you may not hear the other pack, but the coyotes will.

@WestRiverrat Where are you located?

I’m not sure, but Paul Winter probably felt something of the same thing about wolves.

We hear more than one howling at night all the time. It is hard to tell whether it is one pack or a territorial call and response between several lone wolves, so to speak.

Maybe you were raised by wolves, but you don’t remember. Nah, kidding.

I have no idea, but I think I get what you mean. Although I’ve never heard a wolf in real life, I kinda get this cool feeling when I hear owls hooting. Seems all magical and shit, like you can relate, for some bizarre reason. Maybe it’s a really primal thing. At one point in existence, all people and cultures were close to nature, much more than now. Take Indians for a good example. Maybe what you feel is some dormant remnant of our times when we closer to nature, kind of like how people are naturally afraid of the dark due to our caveman days, when people got attacked by nocturnal prey.

We heard one behind my house last winter.
My grandson was convinced they were werewolves.

It touches me as long as my cats are in safely for the night. Otherwise the kill whoop sends me running outside with a flashlight.

Beautiful, brings out the beast within us all!

@Adirondackwannabe Ooohh! I know exactly what you mean. I miss hearing them every summer’s night.

It makes me want to take off my clothes, and run naked into the woods under the moon light, and run free with the wolves…. Hoping they wouldn’t attack me, but it makes me want to be very natural and primal. The howling of wolves makes me feel peaceful. Tranquility. It makes me feel like earth is my home and we should respect mother nature.

I’ve never felt that way.

@Coloma: My only reaction, other than remembering the two dozen chickens and guinea fowl (RIP) my sister used to own, is to make sure Milo is locked inside safely for the night.

@gailcalled Yes, 2 summers ago it was carnage over this way, a family of Coyotes were denning in the ravine between my neighbors property and mine, we suffered a lot of losses, cats, chickens. They seem to have moved on, for now. Every few years there is a surge of activity, cycles of nature.

Once at dusk two springs ago, I noticed that Milo was trotting out of the woods in a state of oblivion with a red fox right behind him. I turned reflexively into a banshee and tore after them both.

My reaction is to go out and make lots of noise to scare them off of my acreage. I try to protect the little mammals I feed on my property.