On the road through the meadow, I came across some coyote scat that blended in well with gravel surface. I was a little disappointed to see that they changed their diet, and I wasn’t seeing any more of the bright orange apple scat. The menu appears to have switched over as the apples ran out, now it appears that they are eating grapes. There is a vineyard on the other side of the river from the arboretum. The water is still pretty shallow and the current isn’t very swift so they could easily cross, or they could always use the bridge.
Coyotes are opportunistic predators that eat a wide variety of foods that includes lots of fruits. When I found the apple scat, it was interesting to see sizable chunks of apple fairly undigested. In this pile of scat, I found a berry that had been swallowed, passed through the coyote’s digestion system and out the other side as a whole grape! I rolled it out of the scat and realized that somehow it hadn’t been smashed or punctured, which doesn’t seem possible. In one of the photos below, I rolled the grape over to the side and put a couple of seeds beside it. The arboretum caretakers Patrick and Conner came by as I was investigating the scat and they thought it looked like grapes in the scat too. Patrick thought I should go over to the vineyard and see what kind of grapes are growing and compare them. That’s a good idea. Afterwards, I gently pushed on the berry with a stick. It popped and the juice oozed out with a couple of seeds. I wondered what surprises might show up next in the coyote scat. Do coyotes eat rosehips?
