Nonfiction Picture Book Wednesday: Coyote Moon Blog Tour

Thank you Maria Gianferrari for stopping by today and sharing about your new book, COYOTE MOON, with some cool facts and resources about coyotes. 

CELEBRATING THE RELEASE OF COYOTE MOON WITH
TOP TEN COOL THINGS ABOUT COYOTES

1.    EASTERN COYOTES VS. WESTERN COYOTES:
Eastern coyotes are also known as “coywolves,” due to their hybrid heritage. European settlement in eastern North America decimated the wolf population through hunting, deforestation and poisoning. Western coyotes moved into former wolf territory, and wolves viewed them as mates rather than competition for resources.

Coywolves are larger than western coyotes. They have longer legs, bigger paws, larger skulls, shorter snouts, smaller ears and bushier tails.

Here’s a short video that shows their physical differences: 

You can find more information on coywolves on Dr. Jonathan Way’s Eastern Coyote/Coywolf Research website.

2.     RANGE:
Coyotes live in every US state except Hawaii. Their range extends throughout North America as far north as Alaska, and as far south as Panama, and coast to coast in the continental US. 

Click on image to see original site. 

3.    GOTHAM COYOTES!:
You read that right—coyotes have adapted to urban living are thriving in New York City! Scientists involved in the Gotham Project study these city dwellers.

Here’s an image of a mother and her pups:

For more images and videos, visit Gotham Coyote’s Gallery

Coyotes live in most of our cities. Check out 10 Fascinating Facts about Urban Coyotes

4.    ADAPTABILITY:
One of the main reasons coyotes can easily be our neighbors is due to their adaptability, especially when it comes to their diet. They are opportunistic, which means they eat what’s available and most plentiful in their environment. Desert denizens eat lizards, snakes and prickly pear. City supper might be rats or mice or squirrels. In the country or residential areas, it might be voles, rabbits, turkeys or even feral cats. Coyotes also eat watermelons, berries, other fallen fruit, and insects like grasshoppers or grubs. They will even scavenge and eat carrion.

5.    ECOSYSTEM BALANCE:
Predators such as coyotes help maintain balance in an ecosystem by controlling the populations of rodents, rabbits, and even Canada Geese by eating their eggs. They also help the songbird population by keeping feral cat colonies in check.  [image #4 from CM]

Visit Project Coyote to learn more about the role in maintaining ecosystem balance.

Though it’s not directly about coyotes, Dorothy Hinshaw Patent’s When the Wolves Returned: Restoring Nature’s Balance in Yellowstone is a wonderful study of a canine predator’s role in an ecosystem.

6.    HELPERS:
When coyote mates have a new litter of pups, some juveniles from the previous year’s litter may not choose to disperse and find their own home territory. Instead, they stay on to help raise the new pups.

7.    OLYMPIC ATHLETES:
Coyotes are agile and very athletic: 

·      Long jump: up to 12 feet!

·      High jump: over 6 feet!

·      Sprint:  up to 40 miles per hour!!

8.    CANIS LATRANS:
That’s the coyote’s Latin name, and it means “barking dog,” an appropriate name for a canid that uses all kinds of sounds to communicate. They’re also known as North America’s “song dog.”

For an extensive list of their vocalizations, have a look at “Translating the Song Dog”  

9.    COYOTE CULLING:
Coyote populations self-regulate by availability of food and habitat. Killing coyotes disrupts the group hierarchy resulting in an increase in coyotes reproducing as well as larger litter sizes due to decreased competition for food.

10. CO-EXISTENCE:
Coyotes are here to stay, so let’s keep them wild! Most human-coyote conflicts stem from feeding coyotes, either overtly or inadvertently.

Here are some basic steps you can take to discourage them from being bold:

·      Keep pet food inside.

·      Keep birdseed off the ground since it attracts rodents, and rodents attract coyotes.

·      Clean-up fallen fruit.

·      Keep compost in secure containers.

·      Close off crawl spaces under decks to prevent denning.

·      Keep cats inside.

·      Don’t leave your dog unattended in your yard.

If a coyote seems habituated, and is frequenting your yard, practice hazing techniques to re-instill fear:

·      Stand tall, yell and wave your arms.

·      Make loud noises with pots, pans or noisemakers.

Want to learn even more about coyotes? Here are some books and websites:

·      I Am Coyote by Geri Vistein and her website: Coyote Lives in Maine

·      Suburban Howls: Tracking the Eastern Coyote in Urban Massachusetts by Jonathan G. Way and his website: Eastern Coyote/Coywolf Research

·      The Daily Coyote by Shreve Stockton and the Daily Coyote website

·      Gotham Coyote

·      Urban Coyote Research

·      Project Coyote

·      The Natural History of the Urban Coyote

·      Coyote: Seeking the Hunter in Our Midst by Catherine Reid

·      God’s Dog: A Celebration of the North American Coyote by Hope Ryden

·      Eastern Coyote: The Story of Its Success by Gerry Parker

·      Coyote: North America’s Dog by Stephen R. Swinburne

A new release that I haven’t yet read, but sounds fantastic:

·      Coyote America: A Natural and Supernatural History by Dan Flores

About the author: Maria Gianferrari was inspired to write Coyote Moon after her first coywolf sighting on a moonlit night in her own Massachusetts backyard. Maria now lives in Northern Virginia with her scientist husband, artist daughter, and rescue dog, Becca. Coyote Moon has received starred reviews from Kirkus, School Library Journal and Publisher’s Weekly and is a Junior Library Guild selection. This is Maria’s first book for Roaring Brook Press. To learn more about Maria please visit her at mariagianferrari.com, on Facebook or Instagram.

Check out the other stops on the Blog Tour

FRI 7/15:                   Pragmatic Mom (+ 3 book giveaway)

MON 7/18:                 Nonfiction Detectives

TUES 7/19:                Debtastic Reads

WED 7/20:                 Kid Lit Frenzy

THURS 7/21:              Librarian’s Quest

FRI 7/22:                   Kidlit411

MON 7/25:                 The Reading Zone

TUES 7/26:                Bartography

WED 7/27:                 Unleashing Readers

Enter the rafflecopter to win a copy of Coyote Moon. Winner must be 13 years old or older and have a US mailing address: 

Don't forget to link up your nonfiction reviews

Why I've been gone - medical errors, surgery, and more.

So those of you who follow me on Twitter may have noticed that I haven't been blogging or tweeting much since LATFOB (the end of April), and I just wanted to do an update post explaining why.

The Tuesday after LATFOB, I ended up in emergency surgery for a perforation in my digestive system (it turned out to be a hole in my stomach), and life became very complicated, very quickly. If you want the short version, skip to the paragraph after the picture with me holding my diploma. If you want the long version, here it is: 

I had some horrible pain Monday evening in my abdomen and shoulder, went to the ER, they put me on pain meds, took x-rays, and mistakenly told me I had done something to my shoulder and the pain was just so bad that I couldn't breathe. This was actually plausible, considering I had spent the weekend lugging around heavy bags of books the entire weekend; the problem was that the ER then sent me home hopped up on pain meds and told me to call my doctor in the morning. I woke up about five hours later, in screaming pain, unable to move (I couldn't even sit up). Then, the ER calls us back (which apparently never happens) and told us that I needed to get back to the ER RIGHT NOW and to call 911. Apparently someone who actually knew what to look for on the x-ray figured out that air had escaped and was trapped in my side and my shoulder joint, thus indicating a hole somewhere in my digestive system. So I arrive at the hospital and the doctor is waiting outside the door. They took me directly into a room and started prepping me for surgery, which they got me into less than an hour later. I was in the hospital for a week recovering, and then I was discharged but I couldn't return to school. 

The biggest issue, though, was that the biopsy can back negative for ulceration, and thus began the great goose chase of finding a cause. The first possible cause my doctors looked at was a gastrinoma tumor, which would cause high level of stomach acid. They did a blood test, and my gastrin levels were three times the normal human amount, and thus told me I had a tumor.

Finding out that I had a tumor was the hardest part of this whole process - when I was in the hospital, I knew I was getting better and that I would eventually be discharged and everything would be okay. But suddenly we were talking about more surgery, about the high probability of the tumor being cancerous, and asking questions like “Is it worth going to college for four years when you may not make it through the next five years?”

We had a CT scan done, to try and find the tumor. But they couldn't find the tumor, and so decided to repeat the blood test, but have me stop taking the acid-suppressing medication I was on. The blood test showed normal levels of gastrin. See, gastrin is the chemical signal to make stomach acid, but I was on acid-suppressing medication, so my body was overcompensating - much like how if your computer freezes, you click the mouse a bunch of times to try to get a response. So I never actually had a tumor, just false-positive test results.

During this time, I was experiencing some digestive pain, so I called the surgeon’s office to see if I should start taking the acid-suppressing medication again. I was then told that my symptoms were “probably my gallstones.” Apparently my doctors had only read the part of the CT scan report that said “no tumor” and failed to read the sentence below that said “multiple gallstones are present.” I was promptly told then that I had to stop eating all dairy and all fat. So we took a copy of my medical file and went straight to my gastroenterologist, who I’ve been seeing for a couple of years now, since we were a little frustrated with the surgeon’s office at that point.

I should probably say that though I did eventually return to school, I didn't take any of my AP tests, and I was checked out of school a couple weeks before graduation (my teachers gave me grades based off of my work that semester without taking into account the finals that I never took). So the day that I go to the gastroenterologist is the day of graduation. I go to graduation rehearsal, then drive straight to the gastroenterologist’s office, where I am finally told that I definitely don't have a tumor (and never should have been told that in the first place - the diagnosable threshold is ten times to normal human level of gastrin, and I only had three times the normal human level), that the gallstones are nothing to worry about, and that I can eat whatever I want - the digestive pain was from my anxiety. So I go back home, put on my cap and gown, get my diploma, go straight to bed, wake up the next day, grab my suitcase, and get on a 10-hour flight to London. So that was a bit of a whirlwind. 

I am now back from Britain and in good health. Everything still isn't back to normal, but I’m getting there. The next step is to get back to blogging - I read lots of books during my recovery and my trip, so starting next week, you’ll be getting YA Friday book reviews again! Bear with me, though, some of them are from February, but I’ll try to catch up the best I can. I also want to get back to the archery range, and am starting to go back to church, too. Life is slowly returning to normal. I am happy to announce that I will be attending Westmont College this fall.

A couple of other things:

Many people were shocked when a recent study revealed that medical errors are the third leading cause of death in America, but I wasn’t so shocked, considering that I would have likely died if a more experienced radiologist hadn’t examined my x-rays after I had been sent home.

Hank Green of the vlogbrothers posted this video today, and it deeply resonated with me - he discusses chronic illnesses and how hurtful typical responses can be, and the human tendency to want to find underlying reasons for difficult situations. If a person with a chronic illness can just solve their medical issues by doing [fill in the blank], then they are implicitly at fault for their own chronic illness.

I was surprised how intense this script came out. Apparently this is something that's been stewing in me for a long time. I didn't realize it until I got really annoyed at a friend for saying something that I should have seen as thoughtful and kind.

 

One last thing - I’d like to thank the amazing nurses I had while I was in the hospital. Every single one was kind, helpful, and knew exactly what they were doing. They were the ones who cheered me on in my recovery, and I am indebted to them. 

You can expect a new YA Friday book review next week, and recaps of LATFOB and my trip to Britain soon.

Carolyn is a teen blogger who shares her favorite YA reads and favorite book related finds with readers on Fridays.