Officials in Burlington, Ont., are reporting a seventh attack on a resident by a wild coyote.
The City of Burlington said the incident took place at a home on Lakeshore Road near Tuck Creek at around midday on Saturday.
The city said a woman was in the back of her yard resting when a coyote bit her knee. She was taken to hospital and treated, officials said.
The coyote attack is the latest in a string of incidents reported in the Burlington area.
On Sept. 11, the city activated a crisis management team to respond to the attacks after a resident was attacked at a long-term care home in the area. That attack took place just after 8 a.m. on Saturday morning when a coyote attacked a resident on a patio at a home on New Street in the Roseland area.
“She was relaxing and awoke to the pain of the coyote biting her in the hip area,” city spokesperson Carla Marshall previously said in a release. “The coyote was startled when she woke up but tried to approach her again. She was able to scare it away.”
Burlington Mayor Marianne Meed Ward said on Sept. 13 that she believed the attacks may be caused by a family of coyotes.
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She said that assessment was made following recent consultations with the Ministry of Natural Resources and Forestry on the previous six coyote encounters in the city.
“They are territorial. One family could take up as much as a 15-kilometre radius, and all of the attacks have occurred well within that,” Meed Ward previously told 900 CHML’s Hamilton Today.
“So the first three, we were able to identify and euthanized that coyote. But there are other members of that same family that we are now tracking with the help of ministry staff.”
The coyote behind the most recent attack is described as having “the same characteristics, a smaller sandy coloured coyote, as the sixth coyote attack on an elderly resident at a local retirement home on Sept. 10.”
Officials are reminding residents to report sighting and telling them not to feed wild animals.
Burlington residents can be docked $300 for hand-feeding or ground-feeding wildlife on private or public property.
“People may feel that they’re well-meaning by feeding wildlife, but they’re actually signing their death warrant,” said Meed Ward.
— with files from Global News’ Don Mitchell
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