Coyote Settles the South by Lane John;

Author:Lane, John;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: University of Georgia Press
Published: 2016-08-15T00:00:00+00:00

Danny’s Field

If I hadn’a believed it, I wouldn’a seen it.

—Attributed to Mark Twain

Larry Stallings took us out to Danny’s Field in Auburn University’s Solon Dixon Forestry Education Center’s white Ford pickup. It was early in March and the morning sun rose straight ahead as we drove north on Route 29 in “L.A.” (Lower Alabama), forty miles from the Gulf of Mexico. We sat three abreast on the single bench seat and Larry narrated in his dry, flat Alabama drawl. Mike Willis sat in the middle with his hand cupped over his ear so he could hear what Larry was saying. I leaned into the passenger-side door taking notes. We passed Alabama forests and fields alternating in sections along the country road. “Most time you see ’em in the fields,” Larry said. “I keep a rifle in the truck for hogs and coyotes. Most time it’s just one. If you see two it’s usually a male and a female.”

Mike and I were down from South Carolina for a week touring Solon Dixon to scare up whatever we could learn about Alabama coyotes. We were there as guests of Rhett Johnson, the retired director of the Solon Dixon Forestry Center. I’d met Rhett in Spartanburg, where he lectured about longleaf pine ecosystems, and when he heard I was interested in coyotes, he invited me down to Alabama. He said he’d set me up with a place to stay at the center and take me out and to see the property. Mike Willis had a week off and wanted to tag along.

I’ll admit that when I first heard from Rhett that Auburn University has 5,300 acres of pine, hardwood, and river bottom swamp, I imagined that I might have finally hit on an eastern coyote Shangri-la. I thought the forest center might be a perfect refuge for the pioneering wild southern canines. I thought all that land might offer a spot where coyotes could live out their lives like predators on the wild plains of Africa, performing daily in a sort of blood drama produced by Walt Disney, some place like James Dickey’s “The Heaven of Animals,” where the wild prey and predators live “at the cycle’s center,” and where they could let “their instincts / wholly bloom.”

But on arrival I learned from Rhett that the work that goes on at Solon Dixon is much more complex than my cartoon wilderness tableau. At Solon Dixon the “cycle’s center” is managed with particular objectives in mind, and it has been managed that way for thirty years since the Dixon family gifted the former cutover timber plantation (at its time the largest gift ever by a living donor) to Auburn University.

The management objectives of the Solon Dixon are spelled out in the brochure about the center given to me upon arrival—to provide quality natural resource education, a base for forest product research, and manage the resources of the center wisely and economically. For the first three decades Rhett carried out these objectives at Solon Dixon,

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