Saturday, January 24, 2026

random thoughts – Day 2,139 (Saturday) – wiley

Neighborhood coyote.
It was a mostly quiet Saturday before the big winter storm forecast to barrel through the area. While the grocery stores were packed with panic shopping (so I heard), I lounged on my couch playing chess on Duolingo and sort of looking out the window. That’s when I saw an unfamiliar large dog loose in the driveway with no human in sight. 

Most of the neighborhood dogs are small to medium sized and almost exclusively attached to a leash anchored by a human when they pass the house. When I looked closer today, this one wasn’t a big dog, it was a coyote. It was heftier than Wile E. Coyote of cartoon fame, pausing briefly in the shadow at the end of the driveway.

The animal stood at the foot of my driveway and I scrambled for the phone/camera. Stupidly, I took a couple photos from the bottom half of the window where the screen is so they weren’t clear. When the critter limped into my front yard and along the length of the front of the house, I fumbled with the camera. The best I managed to get was a photo of the wiley one from the shoulders back as it hobbled by the rhododendron.

Most of a coyote and some rhododendron.
From the window at the front of the house, I ran to the window in the craft room, then to the spare bathroom, and finally to the guest room in the back, hoping for another glimpse and a better photo, preferably clear and with an entire coyote. Meanwhile, the coyote had turned left around the corner of the house, then diagonally to the right into the woods out back and out of sight, leaving a trail of tracks in the snow. I finally spotted it out back, steadily limping its way through the trees, just far enough away to not get a good picture.

No comments:

Post a Comment