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I figured I would start a new thread about coyotes since the one about the loss of Shawn's cat was hijacked and started heading in some unnecessary directions. I think it is safe to say that the coyotes are here to stay and there is very little we can do to significantly lower their numbers in CT. Our government has spent millions of dollars and over 100 years trying to eradicate them only to see the coyotes grow in numbers and expand their range. I just finished reading "American Serengeti" by Dan Flores. Very interesting book about the great plains and the animals that have lived there since the Pleistocene era. He talks about the ones that used to live there along with the wooly mammoths, as well as the more modern ones including bison, antelope, wolves, wild horses, coyotes and grizzly bears. He has a chapter about each animal and the coyote one was pretty enlightening for me. He talks about how the ancient civilizations considered the coyotes to be God-like before we began to see them as pests/competition. Unlike wolves that hunt in packs, coyotes have "fission-fusion societies" that allow them to adapt. They can hunt in packs for large animals or hunt by themselves for rodents, depending on the situation. Once we killed off all the wolves, the coyote population exploded. They can begin to have litters of pups at 1 year of age and while the average litter is 5-7, when they are pressured, they respond to the pressure by having larger litters. The more you kill, the more that come back and the more they expand their range. In the 1920's, our government poisoned an average of 35,000 coyotes each year. We tried shooting them, trapping them, gassing them and putting out poison. Flores claims that in order to wipe out a regional coyote population, you need to kill at least 75%, every year, for 5 straight years. And even that will only have a momentary impact before more move back into the area. Radio collar studies have shown coyotes can roam 100s of miles in a few days. We can't get rid of them. The Denver Metro-area has over a 1000 resident coyotes. It sucks when I get trail camera pictures alternating between fawns and coyotes in June, or when people lose their pets from their yards, etc. but I think the only way we can have any real effect on the situation is by creating more deer/fawn habitat as opposed to thinking we can make a realistic dent in the coyote population by shooting one here and one there.
Turkey season starts this week. When you’re out there....Kill every single coyote you call in. Every. Single. One.
Yup. The most persecuted species of all, and their response was to cross breed with wolves and expand their range to cover southern Canada and the lower 48.
N8, thanks for summarizing, now I don't have to read the book. Although I may.
I'm glad they opened the Coyote season during Turkey season.
ive have had a few opportunities to take a yote, but i dont like the idea of leaving a kill and not makng any attempt to utilize it. what are you guys doing with your yote kills?
My office yotes
My office yotes
I skin the coyotes I kill and have them tanned. They make great pelts to hang in your man room or office.
Make a euro mount of their skull.
I've called in a few during deer season, but never during turkey season. I have called in fisher and a bobcat during spring turkey though. I never pass on a coyote if I can get a shot. I don't care if it's the middle of the rut.
Holepuncher, spring pelts are garbage. Keep the skull or just leave it in the bush. Can always fetch the skull later. Prime dogs get skinned and tanned.
N8tureboy, I've read a lot of similar things about coyotes, though Ive not read that book... sounds good though!
Love that idea of improving fawn habitat! That likely is a great strategy to help deer survival.
That's an interesting point SWK. Up here in MA, MDFW and DCR, the two biggest state groups owning land, go through phases. They will go in and cut 1-5 acre "blocks" in bigger timber, and do several patches like that sort of randomly over a landscape. It looks crazy at first, 2 acre clear cut, 20yds of woods, X 3-10 pending the size of the woods. One area I hunt, it's amazing how that's grown up. You get these channels of more open woods, and literally impenetrable thickets between then. One of those spots, I would see yotes every hunt, but also see a group of 10-15 does (no tag at the time) every hunt. Which, despite being only 5 miles from down town worcester MA, is a LOT of deer for anyplace up here. I'm certain that cover helped.
It's also cool to see how those logging strategies impact other critters. Want to shoot a turkey, look for the most recent clear cutting or selective cutting or patch cut. They love to scratch those spots, and strut in them. The deer love them as well.
It's not every year and I'd guess they cycle around the state, most of the areas I hunt where that's been done, it's been 10~ years I'd estimate. A few spots they have started cutting this year.
Ironically, my favorite 2 stands in a SF in CT are where it was logged probably 15 years ago or so.
Intelligent logging practice really seems to maximize wildlife habitat via that awesome combo of more edges and a highly varied age structure to the plant life.
You "might" be able to pressure coyotes off of your smaller property by killing them but it's not really fixing the problem. A balanced deer herd with a short intense rut allows more fawns to be dropped at the same time, overwhelming the coyotes. The more drawn out the births, the higher percentage of fawns will be eaten. Good fawning over is incredibly important as well. If you can have both of those things, the coyotes have much less of an impact on fawn recruitment
I've had coyotes come in the turkey calls and one was about 10 ft from me before he ran for the hills. Must have smelled the BS on me :)
I have a big bottle of BS that I use when posting with Doc. It seems to attract him and coyotes.
I have had good luck with trapping but it's a limited season with land trapping. Real good early season. Frozen traps late season.
"while the average litter is 5-7, when they are pressured, they respond to the pressure by having larger litters. The more you kill, the more that come back and the more they expand their range. "
That's one of those things that gets repeated over and over and over, but it conveys a false sense of Intentionality. They may have more pups, but they're not doing it on purpose.
Coyotes - and every other species - will increase in numbers in direct proportion to how well fed the females are going into/during ovulation/gestation. If it takes X calories to produce an egg and Y calories to carry a pup to term, then female in a territory which provides 7(X+Y) calories more than she needs to keep herself functioning will drop 7 pups. If she runs short of calories, she'll resorb a couple.
Coyote population goes up; calories available to each individual goes down; litter size drops off. Population comes down, calories available per capita go up, more puppies get born. And here where the living is good because of the high deer population... Well, there are a couple of things...
One is that coyotes tend to live in packs where there are large, readily defensible food sources like roadkills, gutpiles, and other human-provided windfalls. Plenty of food to go around as long as there are enough teeth to defend it against singles and pairs that might wander through, so the Alpha pair can produce more pups, and they are much less likely to run them off... which gives them a larger pack to rely on next winter, and improves survivorship among younger animals that would otherwise be on their own, hunting mice and running from packs.
Then about this time of year when winterkill season is over and roadkills are down because the survivors have wised up and the gutpiles dried up a couple of months ago, and the fawns aren't dropping yet... but maybe the pups have... It's back to a diffuse supply of smaller food items and a more nomadic lifestyle, and there are plenty of young adults that have survived to disperse.
Coyotes are like Frat Boys. If you want them to go away, STOP FEEDING THEM! Between garbage and house cats and pet food and little yappy dogs and a bumper crop ( :p ) of roadkills where there's no hunting allowed and corn-fed whitetails and unrecovered animals and gutpiles where hunting IS allowed... they don't have it this good anywhere else in the world.
I was taught that if one of a pair of breeding coyote is killed in the spring, when they have pups, the remaining adult will abandon the pups.
Not likely. They don't get another chance to breed for a whole year, and life is uncertain. If a lone adult tries to raise a litter of pups alone, probably only half as many will survive as usual. If the lone adult abandons them, none will.... so the "abandon your kids" gene doesn't get passed on, while the more nurturing instincts do.
And around here, where we have high deer density and a protracted rut --> protracted fawn drop and lots of roadkills, a single adult is more likely to be able to bring home enough calories to pull the pups through....
Either way, the pups will suffer and more will die, but around here, it probably matters much less than it would in their native range. Pretty blunt instrument.
I have nothing against taking coyotes for furs; I'd definitely go for it if I had a good, safe shot at one in good condition; and some of them just plain need killing. But eradication efforts are futile, and they're just part of the food chain. Hating them for that is just as irrational as hating fellow hunters, or bowhunters, or ALL hunters, for that matter.
You get the PETA types who hate human hunters and say it's pointless, cruel and stupid when we have other ways of keeping ourselves fed... but they insist that their house-cat has a "natural" (some would even say Divine!) "Right" to kill songbirds & mice, even though there's a perpetual bowl of kitty-nibbles right there in the kitchen. Wolves and Coyotes and Cougars, too, they say, have a Natural Right to be predators, but Humans do not (WTH?)... so Ranchers out West who lose livestock to those predators should just suck it up and realize that it's just part of the cost of doing business... and then they're the first ones to be outraged and call Animal Control when Frisky gets picked off by a coyote.
{"while the average litter is 5-7, when they are pressured, they respond to the pressure by having larger litters. The more you kill, the more that come back and the more they expand their range. " That's one of those things that gets repeated over and over and over, but it conveys a false sense of Intentionality. They may have more pups, but they're not doing it on purpose.}
GF - Good points. The way I understand it though, is that beyond their ability to eat mice or deer, depending on what is available, coyotes have the ability to sense the density of their population based on hearing other coyotes calling. The author of this book made reference to that and how the coyotes can increase or decrease their litter size based on their sense of competition. Makes me wonder if playing electronic coyote calls would keep more from entering an area or lower the litter size of the residents.
https://www.yahoo.com/news/m/af7d905c-fae4-3b2d-a0e0-8ea03ea1111f/ss_coyote-attacking-children-on.html
what is the mayor going to say now ??
Oh boy!! If they're willing to pay for the deer, they should be willing to pay for the coyotes, right?
"The author of this book made reference to that and how the coyotes can increase or decrease their litter size based on their sense of competition."
Hmmmmm....
I hate the way statements like that always make it sound like the coyotes are making a conscious decision about such things....
It does make sense that a high population density might be stressful (over and above competition for calories) and that that might cause a hormonal shift which would result in fewer eggs being produced....
But it would be a really interesting experiment to see if howls alone are enough to produce that effect (assuming that it's there in the first place). Hardest thing would be getting an accurate read on the population density in the first place, so that you could look at the effects of the howls in that context...
But man, if it worked.... That'd be something useful.... at least in certain areas...
GF - This article makes reference to their ability to regulate litter size based on using calls to take a "census" of the area.
Thanks, Bud - always up for Science!
