I think what a lot of people fail to understand - is a lot of us have done all we can realistically do to foster fawn production and habitat conducive to producing more fawns. I did all I reasonably could do without clear cutting my whole place and turning it into a jungle. Still my fawn recruitment numbers hovered around .5. Then I started removing a few coyotes each year- two or three - in May and June. What I found was the removal of two or three coyotes at that time resulted in not hardly getting a picture of one for a month or two. I don’t think that is just a result of the physical removal, but I also think a couple dead coyotes hanging on the fences may make them a little more scarce for awhile - like hanging a couple of crows in the garden. I live on my place - trapping is one the cheapest wildlife management activities I know of. $200 worth of equipment and you are set up for years. I ride around my place pretty much everyday anyway - so other than the time it takes to put a few sets in - labor is almost negligible. Another fact - dead coyotes do NOT eat fawns. If I have ten does on my place and four or five coyotes in the area - if I remove half the coyotes - does it not seem reasonable that one more fawn might live. That is all I am after - one more fawn - to raise fawn recruitment from .5 to .6 - a 20% annual increase in fawn recruitment numbers. So far, since I started trapping coyotes in the spring - that is exactly what I have seen - While tens of thousands of dollars and countless hours of effort spent on other management activities did nothing to improve the number of fawns. I understand that absentee landowners may not be able to spend two weeks in the spring trapping coyotes - but for those of us who can - it is not labor intensive, it is very inexpensive, it is rewarding and can provide results when nothing else might.
My advice - just because someone 500 miles away, who has never been to your place says something won’t work doesn’t necessarily mean it is so. Try it yourself and make your own decisions
I'm not saying it doesn't work. I'm also not suggesting you stop doing it. I'm simply saying that managing coyote populations and the relationship between coyote numbers and fawn recruitment is very complex. We don't currently have enough science to develop and clearly effective management plan for coyotes on a local level. I don't mean to denigrate your efforts at all. Killing coyotes may or may not prove to be effective, ineffective, or even counter productive when it comes to fawn recruitment in general. I know it seem very intuitive that killing coyotes would increase fawn survival, but we simply don't have sufficient science to make that connection. I'm not criticizing your efforts. Where we don't have clear science, it comes down to a judgment call and men of good conscience can draw different conclusions.
Having said that, here is my personal experience. We used to have a trapper we could trust who would trap our property. The cost was zero. He got a place to trap for free and we got a trusted set of local eyes on our property. We also got nest predators for turkey reduced. At that time we had coyotes in the general area but they did not use our farm. With cameras running 24/7/365, or rare occasion I got a nighttime picture of something on the flash fringe that could have been a coyote or a fox. You just couldn't tell. In the fall of 2014 we had a mast crop failure and our food plots were lush and the only game in town (no ag but pasture for 3 mi). We doubled our female harvest that year. That was a hard winter and suddenly, that winter, we started getting clear pictures of coyotes both day an night. Our deer number plunged the following year and recruitment was very low. We had a sudden transition from a harvest strategy of "shoot every female " to limiting the total female harvest to under 6.
Our trusted trapper had some health issues and stopped trapping at our place. One of my partners decided he would try trapping coyotes. He is a very good and experience hunter that had limited trapping experience. But, he is the kind of guy who really digs into something before he starts it. He tried his hand at trapping coyotes the next couple springs with no success. In 2015, we clear-cut 20 acres of low quality hardwoods for bedding and did a commercial thinning of 100 acres of pines. We followed that with controlled burns.
Over the next couple years, our fawning cover improved dramatically and our deer/turkey hunters killed a total of 2 coyotes. Pictures of coyotes declined. They are still using our farm. I still get pictures on a regular basis but most are at night and the volume of pictures is way down. Both our deer numbers and recruitment are rebounding.
So, you and I have very different anecdotal experiences but in both cases they are anecdotal.
The conclusions I've drawn so far:
- While trapping coyotes may be an effective way to eliminate those individuals when done by an experienced trapper, it was (in my case) very ineffective when done by and inexperienced trapper.
- Our habitat improvement (which are never over because there is always another management unit to rotate through), had a significant impact on coyote use of our farm. I'm not sure why but I would speculate that they were drawn in by the easy pickings of deer carcasses and wounded deer. They stayed because does were attracted to our limited thick fawning areas which were easy to hunt. As the large block of cover developed from the controlled burn, fawning was more distributed and coyotes found easier food sources elsewhere.
- In our case, a concerted effort to remove coyotes would have a significant "cost". First, we would need to either find someone or develop the necessary trapping skills. Our nearest member is about 20 minutes away and traps need to be checked daily. That is probably 2 hours per day that could be applied to other projects.
I'm not trying to persuade folks not to trap or hunt coyotes. I'm just saying that it is a complex relationship and it is not clear to me from the science that this is the solution. It might be part of the solution. We will likely know more as science emerges.
Thanks,
jack