Werewolves of Bethesda
On an early morning in December, 2023, I turned onto Democracy Boulevard.
Democracy runs east-west through Bethesda, Maryland. It passes through commercial areas, strip malls, a few high-rises, wooded glades with single-family homes, and denser, apartment-style housing. The road hosts strips of forested lands along both sides but it does so in the manner of a city, with buildings breaking up the tree cover. The exceptions, where the tree cover remains continuous, are the single family homes and the parks.
The largest employers in the area are hospitals: Naval Medical, National Institutes of Health, and Sibley Hospital. All three complexes keep their spaces relatively lush with flowers and grasses. They maintain freshwater ponds with ducks, geese, and deer. The largest parks in the area are the Cabin John Regional Park, Rollins Park, Garret Park, and Rock Creek Park. Bethesda is home to countless smaller community parks and other areas of green, living space like the Congressional Country Club.
Despite the parks and other examples of relatively-tamed nature, though, Bethesda is functionally part of Washington, D.C. It's considered one of the more densely populated areas in the United States. That's why it was a surprise to meet a wolf on Democracy Boulevard.
As I pulled up to a stoplight, it was on my right. I didn't notice it. In the dark, morning twilight, most of my visibility came from my headlights. Off to the side, even a large animal remained a dim silhouette. As I sat and waited for the light to turn, though, the wolf crossed from right to left.
It may have taken a full second for me to become aware of what it was.
And maybe it was a coyote. If so, it was the biggest, healthiest-looking coyote I'd ever seen. After it trotted in front of my car, it stopped for a moment in the highway meridian, turned, and stared at me.
The proper name, most likely, is coywolf. Many years ago, probably in Maine or Ontario according to the geneticists who track such things, a wolf interbred with a coyote. The result was a lithe, slightly delicate wolf. Or perhaps it was an unusually large, strong, and thick-haired coyote. The interbreeding has happened so many times and has been so successful that the process has spawned a term to match the canid. Now the east coast of the United States has 'coywolves.'
I had seen coyotes out west. This beast was considerably taller and more majestic. Its fur was heavy and, weirdly, too beautiful for a coyote. The street lights on the other side of the animal provided back-lighting that showed the fur as a sort of ghostly corona surrounding its wolf-like body. The fur, in fact, had the patterns and shades of grey, white, and black that are stereotypical for both wolves and coywolves.
It couldn't have been a wolf, not in Maryland. Or so I have been told. But it seemed as tall as a wolf, perhaps a bit thinner, with long legs and narrow jaw. It might have had the bushiest tail I've seen on a wild animal. The black-furred tail reminded of how sheerly beautiful and healthy some wild animals seem. Large raptors are often like this for me, awe-inspiring and impressive up close. My mind's eye recalls, with a sense of startlement, turning to notice a peregrine falcon sitting on a picnic table as I hiked by on a secluded trail, a height which brought the bird's head level with mine. It hit me with its piercing gaze as if I had rudely interrupted something. Wild horses, too, often look groomed. They're always ready to pose for the covers of romance paperbacks.
And this coywolf, too. Beautiful.
As I maneuvered my car towards my seven-story office garage, which took a full U-turn on Democracy Boulevard, I inadvertently followed the path of the coywolf. In a few seconds, I caught sight of it moving. It had crossed the empty highway and hopped up to the grassy border of the Marriott building. Without any back-lighting, it presented a dark, quadruped shape as it loped between the high-rises. I recognized where it was going. There couldn't be any other destination.
At the center of four large office complexes lay a retention pond. This was a good sized body of water, a permanent fixture in the landscape surrounded by mulberry trees, a stretch of thick bamboo, cat-o-nine-tails, and signs warning passers-by that this constrained clump of the natural world was a protected wilderness area.
For years, the geese had driven out the ducks from the pond, outlasted the herons, and had in fact, occasionally chased hikers walking along the asphalt path that ran around the office complex and through the protected area. They pooped up a storm, of course. Geese droppings were so common a hazard on the hiking path that the day-walkers, as a habit, scraped their shoes on the grass before re-entering their workplaces. There was no way to count on avoiding all the goose poop.
I hadn't hiked through the area much lately due to the pandemic shutdowns and slow transition into hybrid workspaces. The sight of the coywolf, who had disappeared behind a wall of my parking garage, inspired me to vow to visit it. Mentally, I started to list my meetings and the breaks between them. I looked for a chance to stroll outside, if only for a few minutes.
In my office suite, I ran into another commuter and described to her the coywolf. She didn't react the way I'd expected, impressed with nature. She had heard warnings about coywolfs in our area, particularly around Rock Creek Park. They had eaten a few, small dogs.
"Would you have thought it was so beautiful," she asked me, "if you were out of your car?"
"Huh." That was a good question.
Before my ten o'clock meeting, I managed to sprint down the stairs and out the back doors of my building. From there, it was a short walk to the pond. To my surprise, the pond had changed since my last hike around it.
There was almost no goose poop. It was the first thing I noticed. My approach was a double-time march and it was trouble free. Going off the trail was harder. The bamboo had grown up nearly to the asphalt. I had to patrol around the grove to the cattail reeds, then to the rivulet that ran into the pond, which provided an open space with a view. It was also the most obvious path for the coywolf. I couldn't make out recognizable paw prints in the mud, though.
When I got a clear look at the scene, I found all the geese in the water. There wasn't a single individual on shore. In fact, the geese gently paddled close together in a cluster near the center. Instead of there being more geese, which I would have expected with fewer people around than ever, there were only a dozen visible. The birds looked smaller than in previous years, not larger. I wondered about that, too. I wasn't sure the coywolf could be responsible. The biggest geese were probably as large as the coywolf and pretty tough, too.
And yet this is the way it was.
There's never one of any large animal, of course. The coywolf couldn't be alone. This recent stabilization of forces, probably including the changes in vegetation around the pond, was one that had taken years for the geese and coywolves to achieve. I was lucky to have arrived to work at the right time, noticed something (admittedly, right in front of my eyes), and taken an opportunity to follow up and see the adjusted balance of nature.
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