Coyote, originally uploaded by Ali Crehan.

Coyotes are pretty common around here. They adapt well to their circumstances and manage to eke out an existence even in the cities. It’s not unusual to have your headlights frame a coyote as she crosses the road or to see one trot through a neighborhood.

When I lived in Quincy, a city,  we had coyotes in our area, and I saw one run down the street in the middle of the day. She was a nursing mother, half-starved and mange-ridden, dodging cars and raiding someone’s backyard dog bowl for food.

When I spied a coyote in Scituate last summer, it was nothing like that poor animal – it was confident and quiet and beautiful and it went silently on its way through the field at dusk.

This particular coyote no longer lopes through woods or down city streets; it’s been taxidermied and is on display at the South Shore Natural Science Center in Norwell. It’s still a gorgeous creature, I think.

Oh, and for those saying, “Hey, what’s the Scituate connection?” Well, I couldn’t grab a photo of last summer’s coyote, so this subs for that moment I couldn’t capture. And, AHEM, Norwell was part of Scituate until fairly recently – it wasn’t until 1849 that they split from us, and they continued to call themselves South Scituate until the year 1888, when they decided to re-christen themselves as Norwell!