Sitting on a log on a mid-December morning last year in the woods near Cooperstown, Brian, a 22-year-old deer hunter, heard rustling behind him.
“I looked over my shoulder and there’s a huge ‘dog’ looking at me dead in my eyes,” he recalled.
What he thought was a large coyote had its nose to the ground and appeared to be stalking him around 7:30 a.m. Scared, the hunter aimed his muzzleloader and fired at the animal that was 15 yards away.
Brian searched for the carcass, doing three circles through the woods. He didn’t find it.
He concluded the canid must have been drawn to him by doe urine he had sprayed on the forest floor and on his boots to attract bucks.
The next day he returned with his hunting partners and found the dead animal under a downed tree.
Brian thought the first coyote he ever shot was a state record, so he contacted the state Department of Environmental Conservation Within a few days, a DEC officer visited him and measured and weighed the animal and took a sample for genetic testing, Brian said.
John Glowa, who heads the Maine Wolf Coalition, also came calling. He had discovered a photo of Brian and the animal on a Facebook page for hunters.
Glowa arranged for fellow wolf advocate Joe Butera, president of the Northeastern Ecological Recovery Society, to obtain DNA for testing. Butera went to Belvedere Mountain Taxidermy, where Brian had dropped off his specimen to be mounted, and gathered a sample.
Brian would be stunned more than six months later to learn he had taken an 85-pound Great Lakes gray wolf, an endangered species. He told
