2101_1137 Grrr!
Things get a little testy on the prairie dog mound! Coyote edged in close and Badger finally snapped at her, digging those huge claws in to spray loose earth in all directions; Coyote reciprocated with a snap, and that was all. A little spat, over in three seconds. No contact. Nothing serious.
Was Badger protecting a kill? I don't think so - or rather, not at that very moment. Was Coyote testing for weakness? Maybe, but she probably knows that badgers are fierce little critters, easily able to hold their own vs the trickster. I may be wrong, but I suspect Coyote was just having a little fun while testing the limits of Badger's tolerance. It has been my view for a long time that badgers take everything seriously while coyotes find everything amusing. I know, I know. Anthropomorphizing. The real problem may be that we don't have words that describe the motivations of another species, about which we can only guess. We are stuck with the limited spectrum of human emotional response descriptors. Something may be going on that is beyond our vocabulary. Intelligent animals such as the coyote experience the world very differently from us; they are subtle, not mechanistic, and just as their thoughts are coyote-thoughts, their emotional world is also coyote in nature. I don't want to deny them a broad range of experience. We gaze upon them across an unfathomable gulf of mystery.
More to come...
Photographed in Grasslands National Park, Saskatchewan (Canada). Don't use this image on websites, blogs, or other media without explicit permission ©2021 James R. Page - all rights reserved.
2101_1137 Grrr!
Things get a little testy on the prairie dog mound! Coyote edged in close and Badger finally snapped at her, digging those huge claws in to spray loose earth in all directions; Coyote reciprocated with a snap, and that was all. A little spat, over in three seconds. No contact. Nothing serious.
Was Badger protecting a kill? I don't think so - or rather, not at that very moment. Was Coyote testing for weakness? Maybe, but she probably knows that badgers are fierce little critters, easily able to hold their own vs the trickster. I may be wrong, but I suspect Coyote was just having a little fun while testing the limits of Badger's tolerance. It has been my view for a long time that badgers take everything seriously while coyotes find everything amusing. I know, I know. Anthropomorphizing. The real problem may be that we don't have words that describe the motivations of another species, about which we can only guess. We are stuck with the limited spectrum of human emotional response descriptors. Something may be going on that is beyond our vocabulary. Intelligent animals such as the coyote experience the world very differently from us; they are subtle, not mechanistic, and just as their thoughts are coyote-thoughts, their emotional world is also coyote in nature. I don't want to deny them a broad range of experience. We gaze upon them across an unfathomable gulf of mystery.
More to come...
Photographed in Grasslands National Park, Saskatchewan (Canada). Don't use this image on websites, blogs, or other media without explicit permission ©2021 James R. Page - all rights reserved.