Coyote in Winter (+ repost)
by Roger Kirchen
This Coyote (Canis latrans) showed up under the crabapple trees as I was waiting for birds to feed on the crabapples.
The coyote would move its head low over the ground and then dig into the snow. At first, I thought that it was listening for mice under the snow. However, it never showed the sudden action that goes along with mousing. And neither did it pull out a mouse.
It was feeding on fallen crabapples (under the snow). As fallen crabapples under the snow do not make any noise (I would think so!), I assume that the coyote located them by scent.
A quick search on google indicates that coyotes do eat crabapples on occasion.
I selected this photo because the coyote is lit by the setting sun, its distant look and the good view of its bushy tail.
Canon 7D, Sigma 150-500 at 403 mm, f/10, ISO 640, 1/640 sec, HH, natural light, PP in LR4. Cropped to 68 % of original (shoulda used 500 mm instead of 403, and a lower POV).
All comments are much appreciated. Thanks for looking. Roger.
Comments
7 commentsI was so busy shooting that I had centered the coyote too much in the frame. No pixels at the right and bottom, dark vegetation at the top (which I wanted to crop out when I saw the capture). Therefore, a less than ideal placement of the coyote in the image. Thanks for pointing this out and thereby getting me to try to do something about it.
The embedded repost is a composite of two images: the original one and another one taken further to the right (coyote pose not great). I merged the two in Photoshop using layers. The repost has a pano format. I might revisit and try to add some vertical space.