A couple of nights ago, Wife and I were sitting in the bedroom talking when we heard a sound we’ve heard before.

Coyotes.

But we’ve never heard them this close to our house. It sounded like they were in the greenbelt immediately behind our house… not far away at all.

Honestly I wasn’t too concerned because we were inside, so what can they do (the neighbor’s cats were the ones in danger)… but all those howls do get your attention — it certainly got Sasha’s attention. Puppy-girl went into “seek and destroy” mode like a good defender. I didn’t let her out tho because frankly if the yotes were in the immediate area I didn’t need her getting into anything — that’d be an ugly fight to break up.

I went outside to look around. I did see some shapes/eyes scurry away but I wasn’t in the best position so I have no idea what I saw. But as I kept scanning (thank you to 200 lumens of Streamlight Super Tac X) eventually I caught a few pairs of eyes staring back at me. I watched for a little while trying to determine what they were. Still not 100% sure but we have a few guesses based upon the glow of the eyes.

Wife found this online. She didn’t provide me the original source URL, just emailed me the contents:

Funny to see your post on here tonight. I was just perusing a website about this very topic earlier today. Here’s its link: http://wildlifedamage.unl.edu/handbook/Chapters/html/eyeshines.htm

It mentions that there are things that can affect the color that an animal’s eyes will reflect:

Here are some other factors that also may influence the color of the eye shine:

* Distance of light to the subject
* Intensity of the light
* Line of sight or perspective of the viewer

It also gives the following list, which varies from several accounts mentioned here in this post. But it piqued my interest anyway, so I thought I’d copy/paste it in case someone else might find it interesting. Here it is:

What are the colors of an animal’s eye shine?

The many factors that affect eye shine contribute to the various reports of eye shine color, even within the same species. The following list is a good example of this (The most likely color is listed first.):

* Domestic dog-green, emerald green
* Coyote-bluish green, emerald green
* Domestic cat- yellowish green, green, yellow, reddish
* Bobcat-yellow, bright yellow, emerald green
* Raccoon-emerald green
* Weasels-green
* Opossum-light or bright orange, pink
* Alligator-red
* Deer-greenish white, yellowish white, green, white, orange, bluish green
* Black-tailed deer- brilliant blue
* Flying squirrel-reddish orange
* Birds-red
* Rabbits-red
* Cattle-bluish green, yellowish white

So there you go. Eye glow, and how it can help you identify what you’re looking at.

I went looking for the referenced website, but that page doesn’t exist any more. But what there is now is the Internet Center for Wildlife Damage Management. Looks like a collaborative effort between Cornell, Clemson, University of Nebraska, and Utah State. Poke around that website a bit. It’s quite interesting at how to identify and deal with damage caused by wildlife.