Last week I was walking my dog on the South Platte River Trail which runs through the middle of Denver, and a coyote took down a goose right in front of us. I photographed the same goose fifteen minutes earlier. Two of them were feeding on a hill behind a children’s museum, next to a playground.
On the return leg of my walk the geese were in the same spot, and a coyote was locked onto the them, tiptoeing through the playground. He used a tree and a hill to hide his approach.
He covered the last 20 meters in about two seconds and bit the goose in the thigh.
The camera I had with me was a Canon T6, and I hadn’t used it for video before. I failed miserably with the auto-focus. Here’s a short, blurry clip of the attack:
After a brief struggle the goose was carried off into taller grass, where the coyote chewed through its neck. He saw me and my dog watching from a distance, but he had his dinner right there next to the trail.
The next day the carcass was in the same spot. Having butchered geese before, I was wondering how he would get through all the feathers. There was a hole in the goose’s back. The organs and thigh meat were gone.
I put a trail camera on a tree, thinking it was well hidden. It rained the next two days. When I returned to get the trail cam, it was gone, and so was the goose.