Wolves in Woodbury?

One day in September, Dan Davidson, a resident of Woodlake in Woodbury, took a walk on the grounds.

"There's a path out in the back, in the woods," he said.

It was around 4 p.m. when he saw them.

"I saw four, five, six wolves, just walk across the path," said Davidson. "I just sat there and didn't move or make a sound. They were about 40 to 50 feet away from me."

He described the animals as mostly brown in color, with some grey. They walked in a single file line across the path.

"They didn't even look at me," said Davidson. "They must have known I was there. I kind of stood up really slowly. After 10 or 20 seconds, I turned and ran and didn't look back."

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About a week before the sighting, he said he was taking his two dogs for a walk around midnight.

"I heard howling," said Davidson. "Normally, my dogs would be going nuts and barking back. One of my dogs was trying to run back to the house and the other was crying."

Dan's mom, Judy Davidson, said they listened to videos of wolves and coyotes howling online.

"We spent quite a bit of time online, and especially on Youtube, where we listened to vocalizations of coyotes vs. wolves," she said in an e-mail to Patch. "He clearly identified the sounds he heard as wolves."

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 In January 2012, this Middlebury resident's motion sensor camera caught a pack of coyotes on film. Click here to see the video.

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Judy said they read information online suggesting wolves have returned to New England.

"I also did not know that coyotes interbreed with wolves," she said. "Danny is not sure whether what he saw today were wolf-coyotes or wolves, but they were clearly much larger than coyotes."

According to a fact sheet on coyotes from the Connecticut Department of Energy and Environmental Protection, the eastern coyote's larger size is attributed to coyotes interbreeding with Canadian gray wolves.

Judy Umstead, animal control officer for Bethlehem and Woodbury, said there have been no confirmed sightings of wolves in Woodbury.

Readers, have you seen any wolves or coyotes in town and/or in Connecticut?