Sixteen of us are standing at the edge of a field, in the dark, with our ears cocked into the night. We are on Clinton Wildlife Management Area in Hunterdon County. To the west a band of light along the horizon tries to rise off route I-78 to shade the stars that twinkle overhead. But the mostly unlit countryside wins out and we can make out the faint contour of the Milky Way. The air pulses with the sounds of katydids while we strain to hear evidence of our intended "prey," that of eastern coyotes.

Our "coyote guide" is Mike Madonia of the NJ Division of Fish and Wildlife, Wildlife Control Unit. He has given up a Saturday night to help us learn about coyotes in New Jersey, a predator that is widespread but very secretive and seldom seen by people. Mike has dealt with coyotes on a variety of levels with the Division. He’s been involved with coyote research by helping to trap and fit these animals with radio collars and then tracking their movements. He also helps livestock and pet owners deal with damage caused by coyotes. His extensive field experience is a nice compliment to the wildlife degree that he earned at Rutgers University.

Before we made our way to the field, Mike gave a coyote primer via Power Point presentation at the Clinton office. He pointed out that coyotes inhabit all twenty-one counties in New Jersey. They are known as eastern coyotes and differ from those that inhabit the west in that they are bigger and tend to hunt in packs more frequently.

  Coyotes breed during the months of January and February. After about a 60-day gestation females produce an average of five young, although Mike says the Division has received reports of up to eleven.

One of the first things the Division does is to be certain that a coyote and not another creature is responsible for the kills. Mike described the classic signs of a coyote-killed sheep: two puncture marks in the sheep’s lower mandible. These marks are made when the coyote’s upper incisors clamp on to the sheep’s mandible while the coyote’s lower jaw attempts to crush the sheep’s windpipe to kill it by suffocation. They look for other evidence that it was a coyote, too like tracks, scat and hair.

Mike mimics the sound of a wounded rabbit to entice a coyote or other predator to come in.

Mike explained that correcting these problems requires long-term solutions, which usually involves proper protective fencing or some other means to keep coyotes from having access to the livestock, rather than just removing the problem animal. But standing here in the dark, we aren’t looking for hair, or tracks, or scat, or puncture marks for that matter. We are listening for another mark of coyotes: their eerie territorial howls. Mike has just turned off a recording of territorial high-pitched howls, yips and barks of a coyote family group, which he broadcast across the field in hopes of eliciting a response from a local pack. Coyotes are still in their family groups from late August and into the fall, and they will sometimes howl in response to another family group that has moved into their territory. Earlier he mimicked the sounds that a rabbit makes when it gets injured. Often when predators hear such a sound they'll come in to investigate hoping to get an easy meal, but we had no takers.

When Mike played the territorial howls we didn’t hear anything then either – at first.

Twenty minutes later Mike plays the recording again. I held up one of the speakers from the CD player over my head to give the recording better range. When the series of howls reached their end, I relaxed my arm and waited expectantly for a response to come out of the darkness. What I heard instead was the next recording on the CD – "Distressed Coyote Pup." Mike had accidentally hit the "Next" button on the player. Holy smokes! It was unexpected, LOUD, and fittingly enough, very distressing on one’s ears, especially when you happen to be the one standing six inches from the speakers. I nearly peeled out of my skin.

Then a few minutes after we hear three barks deep from within the heart of the Wildlife Management Area. It comes from an isolated spot, no houses or roads. Mike is pretty certain the source of the barks is a coyote. "There aren’t any houses in that direction, and if it were a dog," he said "the barking would be nonstop." It lacked the drama of orchestral-strength howling, but it was exciting enough. Other folks, including Mike, heard a brief yip-whine as well, but I wasn’t able to get a bead on that. Maybe I was still recovering from "Distressed Coyote Pup."

Even if we didn’t hear anything, there was something delightful about standing out in a field in the dark and being surrounded by all the expectation that comes from trying to engage wildlife in a beautiful setting.