Coyotes or Wolves?

Detective work takes time and patience. You can't always solve a small mystery overnight.

Suppose that, one particular week, you've been busy in the evenings and haven't gotten to bed till after 10:00 p.m. For some reason, you keep waking up around 2:00 or 2:30 a.m. How odd. And you even have the windows open and the fan on all night, to keep the room cold for sleeping. Maybe falling asleep after 10 p.m. automatically pulls some magic trigger for a 4-hour alarm, but that's kind of absurd. Maybe the full moon happens to reach the window over your pillow right at 2 p.m., but that is just so mundane. There must be a more interesting cause.

Friday night you don't go to bed till 11:30 p.m. But this time you didn't put the fan on because, frankly, the night air was already freezing by the time you went to bed, and there is no pressure of getting up to require the soothing background sound.

2:00 a.m. comes around and you wake up to hear coyotes howling... or maybe wolves. You lie huddled in your bed after getting up to check the lock on the door, several times.

The next morning it occurs to you that this could have been going on all week, every night, but you never quite heard the sound when you woke up because of the fan. But you're still not sure if those were coyotes or wolves because both howl at the moon.

Conclusion:

Clearly, the herds of deer roaming the neighborhood are disturbing the ecosystem balance and attracting predators, which could be coyotes or wolves due to the howling, but really must be wolves, because it's impossible to imagine coyotes going after deer.