Is there a coyote in your backyard? Chances are you do share space with these highly adaptable and smart wild relatives of your family dog. You may not have seen them around because coyotes mostly roam their territories at night, looking for food. They eat rabbits, groundhogs, mice, voles, deer, birdseed, unprotected garbage and vegetables from your compost pile. They may even dine on your free-roaming cat or small dog. 

It might un-nerve you to know that coyotes prowl your property as you sleep, but you should not consider them a threat. Rather, think of them as good neighbors. They are just like any other New Hampshire citizen who wants to get a place of his own, find true love and raise a nice family. But, for coyotes to achieve this bliss, they must be social and hook up with other coyotes in the area. And, like many people today, coyotes meet others by creating a MySpace page.
 

No, coyotes don’t open accounts at www.myspace.com to set up a profile. Instead, they pee on trees. A coyote’s MySpace page is the scent post that marks its home range or territory. These posts, which they may “sweeten” with piles of their twisty poo, can be trees, posts, rocks or any other prominent feature that sits at the edge of their territory. Coyote home ranges are quite a bit bigger than a Web page, though, with a core area of two or three square miles and an extended range of about 25 square miles, depending on available resources.

When you walk outside these days, the cooler air and colorful leaves clearly indicate change. You can feel excitement brewing in the forests and fields as animals begin to roam in search of food to fatten up for the upcoming winter challenges. This foraging behavior is not limited to the feathered and furred, though. It also applies to political animals as they grub across the Granite State, fattening up on public support in preparation for the challenging primary season.

Fortunately for the average citizen, now is the time to enjoy the parade of both of these hungry animals. You can put out a birdfeeder and watch wildlife feast right outside your window, or you can attend one of the abundant presidential candidate events and watch politicians work up to a feeding frenzy. Better still, you can do both by enjoying the similarities between some of the most common New Hampshire animals that come to birdfeeders and the candidates running for president. 

Life is unfair enough without having cheaters in the game. Recent sports scandals involving doping and game-fixing has left fans wondering if they are the dopes for cheering on a bunch of crooks. It turns out that nature has its own share of scandalous cheaters who rig the game in their favor. Perhaps, by examining these wild cheaters, we can gain better insight on how to clean up professional sports.

Ecologists have termed nature’s cheaters “aggressive mimics.” These are creatures that disguise themselves as other animals to gain a deadly advantage. Put simply, they are real world examples of “wolves is sheep’s clothing.”

One of the most interesting and relatively common aggressive mimics is the lacewing. Larvae of this dainty-looking insect are voracious predators of smaller insects, especially aphids. However, lacewings have difficulty preying on some species of aphids because ants protect the aphids like farmers protecting their flock. Some aphids bribe ants to be their bodyguards by excreting a sweet liquid called honeydew from their anuses. The ants love this ass-ade and will attack anything that threatens their sugar daddies.

Father’s Day has passed, and we are reminded once again of what a worthless holiday it is. Since it was on Sunday, no one got a day off from work, no schools were closed and no one marched in a Father’s Day parade.  Father’s Day sales were the only “events,” and those were only for the most stereotypical dad gear—tools, ties and tires. It is time that we called the day what it really is: “Feeble Attempt at Equality Day.”