This come from John Smith’s Map of Virginia (1608), which describes the geography, people, flora, and fauna of Chesapeake Bay upon arrival of the English:
Their Foxes are like our siluer haired Conies, of a small proportion, and not smelling like those in England. Their Dogges of that country are like their Wolues, and cannot barke but howle; and their wolues [are] not much bigger then our English Foxes.
It is the same John Smith one associates with Pocahontas.
Some accounts suggest that these little wolves were red wolves, but even if we accept the assumption that red wolves were any kind of valid species before the arrival of Columbus (which is a big if), no one would ever say that red wolves were just a bit bigger than a red fox.
That description seems to fit a coyote a bit better. There are known remains of a coyote in West Virginia that date to the Pleistocene, so it might be that when the English first arrived in Chesapeake Bay, there were actually some coyotes running about.
When I first red that line, I thought Smith had been referring to the gray fox, but when I checked the source, I discovered that he mentions the native gray fox in the preceding sentence– a “siluer haired” fox is “not [as] smelling” a red fox. Gray foxes don’t have the musky red fox odor, which is a feature that often gets mentioned in early references to the gray fox.
I think this piece is in reference to a population of coyotes that was living near Chesapeake Bay in the seventeenth century. However, they may not have been very common, for I don’t know of any good coyote remains from that region that have been dated to this time period.
It is an unusual statement. I don’t know of what other animal Smith could be describing other than a coyote, but we don’t have any evidence of coyote remains from that time period in Virginia or Maryland.
So I don’t know exactly what kind of wild dog Smith was actually referring to.
I think the coyote is the best guess I can conjure.
I think it might be very interesting to know if coyotes were “always there” and if a coyote variant was the real “red wolf”. One might be able to find evidence in archeological or fossil record (archeological as possibly one might find bones of animals killed by man).
Perhaps this was a common hybrid area – similar to the hybrid areas of elephants and I believe, some of the zebras. Sadly, either way, the attempts to “preserve” red wolves has been done the wrong way. If there were ever a unique coyote variant in the range of the red wolf, the extermination attempts probably eliminated it. If always a hybrid “zone”, one now has a problem of justifying preservation of these animals especially while doing little for say, Mexican wolves.
For the purposes of placing animals on an Endangered Species list, it becomes important that there be some means to avoid excessive “lumping” (all cougars are the same so the Florida version isn’t important so long as the CA version is common) OR excessive “splitting” (was the quagga unique or not?).
Nature isn’t that “black/white”. There are both natural hybrids and cases of “species in the process” isolation and probably everything in between.
Peggy Richter
That’s a possibility.
I am not saying for certain that this is a coyote, but it seems fishy that Smith would make such a bizarre claim about the size of a supposed wolf in Virginia.
The only wolves that are of that size are significantly smaller sized Arabian wolves, the newly discovered African wolf, and the extinct Honshu wolf. It has also been determined that the Arabian wolf has the same gene variant that makes dogs smaller.
I know of no North American wolves that were historically that small. The smaller sized animals have always been coyote.
One away you can tell a wolf from a coyote– if they are the same size– is the coyote will have a proportionally larger brain case. Coyotes have the larger brains in proportion to their body size of any living dog species.
Whatever that means, you be the judge.
[…] Is this an account of Eastern coyotes in early Virginia? […]
[…] thought that the brown wolves of the South were also coyotes, which might explain why John Smith wrote that that wolves of Virginia were much smaller than those of Europe. They weren’t wolves at all. They were coyotes living […]