Sept. 21, 2017 – West Bend, WI – “We found it Sunday morning in our driveway and Dave got a picture before the maggots and things got in.”
A normal call for DNR Warden Bill Mitchell as he checked out a report from a neighbor in West Bend who lived just west of Silverbrook Drive.
The woman feared it was a coyote attack. “You can see it’s been shoved around,” she said. “It’s just the innards and when my husband took the picture it was just the way it came out of the animal.”
The woman’s driveway was stained with blood and a fly-infested mess of “innards” lay nestled next to a pile of mulch.
Mitchell worked his cell phone. He had an inkling what type of animal was involved – both the carcass and the carnivore but he wanted to make sure. “Something ate an animal but just left the intestine,” he said. “The whole body carcass is gone except for the intestine; it was eviscerated.”
Mitchell checked in with the DNR’s Tom Isaac and local trapper Chuck Dreher. “It looked like someone had performed surgery because it was just so neat,” said the woman.
“We used to get chipmunks,” said the woman. “Two years ago Dave trapped 13. Last year we had two. And we have less bunnies this year. My garden is happy….” But the neighbor wanted to know who or what has been prowling the area.
“We’ve seen fox and the raccoons have eaten all the fish out of my pond,” she said.
Dreher, Isaac, and Mitchell all came to the same conclusion. “It’s a feral cat,” said Mitchell. “A cat will not eat the intestines. A cougar will and a coyote will eat the intestines but a cat will not.”
Mitchell said the feral cat is probably responsible for eliminating the chipmunk and rabbit population in the neighborhood as well.
“Feral cats are the No. 1 predator of songbirds,” he said. “A coyote will kill rabbits and little dogs.”
“I was walking my dogs on the Eisenbahn Trail about three weeks ago, right behind Decorah School, and it was right before dark and a coyote went across the trail,” said Mitchell. “It’s obviously bigger; it’s not a fox and it’s not a dog and it’s got a pointy nose.”
A woman in Richfield also recently saw a coyote and Scott Sager bagged a coyote in the Town of Kewaskum that recently came out while he was walking his dog.
Coyote photo courtesy Scott Sager.
