{"id":6879,"date":"2012-12-17T11:04:01","date_gmt":"2012-12-17T19:04:01","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.kootenay-lake.ca\/?p=6879"},"modified":"2012-12-17T15:21:03","modified_gmt":"2012-12-17T23:21:03","slug":"coyote-loping","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blog.kootenay-lake.ca\/?p=6879","title":{"rendered":"Coyote loping"},"content":{"rendered":"

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How does an animal walk on four legs? There isn’t a single way to do it. Rather animals employ a variety of different gaits. Many sources discuss the gaits of horses (e.g., Wikipedia<\/a>): walk, trot, canter, gallop. Fewer sources take an interest in other\u00a0quadrupeds. Do all\u00a0quadrupeds\u00a0walk in the same way (one leg moves at a time)? Probably, but I don’t know. Do they all have the same range of gaits? No, horses do not stot; mule deer do. Do bears and deer have the same types of gaits? Again, I don’t know. Maybe my readers can help me with this.<\/p>\n

In the past, I have only seen coyotes standing or walking, but coyotes also have a variety of gaits depending on how quickly they wish to move. A site that illustrates and discusses these gaits is Coyote Yipps<\/a>\u00a0created by a person with far more access to this interesting animal than I have. Using Coyote Yipps as a source, I discovered that I have just seen a coyote lope. Loping is merely a western term for the canter, but as the range of the coyote is confined to North America, loping it is.<\/p>\n

A coyote in a snow field pauses and looks around.
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It then walks away. Notice that three legs are down and one is up. In walking, the coyote moves its legs one at a time. This is the usual way I have seen a coyote move.
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The coyote breaks into a loping run. It is the first time I have seen this coyote gait.
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  How does an animal walk on four legs? There isn’t a single way to do it. Rather animals employ a variety of different gaits. Many sources discuss the gaits of horses (e.g., Wikipedia): walk, trot, canter, gallop. Fewer sources … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[11],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-6879","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-mammals"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.kootenay-lake.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6879","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.kootenay-lake.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.kootenay-lake.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.kootenay-lake.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.kootenay-lake.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=6879"}],"version-history":[{"count":8,"href":"https:\/\/blog.kootenay-lake.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6879\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":6887,"href":"https:\/\/blog.kootenay-lake.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6879\/revisions\/6887"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.kootenay-lake.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=6879"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.kootenay-lake.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=6879"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.kootenay-lake.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=6879"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}