There's a persistent rumor -- call it a rural myth -- about how coyotes arrived in Pennsylvania. The story goes something like this: in a misguided effort to reduce the deer herd, the Game Commission secretly imported coyotes and released them throughout the state, later denying it when their numbers grew.

"That's [bull]," said Game Commission spokesman Jerry Feaser. "How do you continue to fight a false rumor? We even know how the rumor started."

A Wildlife Conservation Officer, said Feaser, was trying to help a farmer who was having trouble with a particular coyote. In an effort to track the animal back to its den, the officer attached a radio collar. With no official coyote tags available, he clipped on Bobcat Tag No. 26.

"Unfortunately," said Feaser, "the coyote shook the collar but it didn't shake the tag. Months later, a hunter or trapper got it, found the tag and assumed it was part of a coyote-stocking program."

The rumor found its way onto the Internet, said Feaser, "And that's where that story came from."

Evidence suggests that Pennsylvania coyotes were not introduced through stocking, intentional or otherwise. While small populations may have existed in parts of the state for millennia, their arrival in larger numbers in the 1940s corresponds with their arrival in neighboring states. Genetic similarities suggest a migration that swept over the East and Northeast.

Stocked animals would carry genetic markers linking them to their regions of origin.