I consider them targets of opportunity on my land and instruct my hunters to take any reasonable shot they have at a coyote. I also get five or six 5 gallon buckets of scraps from my local processor and put them out on my land. He cuts deer, hogs and cows. So I might get any and/or all of these scraps in the buckets. I put them on an area of my land that is in a far corner of my property. Everything feeds on them. This includes the coyotes, hawks, eagles, blue jays, turkey vultures and all other carion eaters. I do this almost year round or at least any time I get a call from my processor that he has enough buckets of scraps to make a trip worth while. My theory is that if the coyotes are eating the scraps they will leave the deer population alone. I have no scientific research to back this view. I like feeding birds and do it at home. This is my version of bird feeding on my land.
'yotes - can we make a difference?
- Thread starter John-W-WI
- Start date
Booner21
5 year old buck +
I focus on habitat rather than coyote management. Illinois doesn't allow coyote trapping when it would have as much of an impact or outside of deer season. That being said I have never passed the opportunity to shoot one if presented.
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yoderjac
5 year old buck +
I'm not suggesting that most of the population is transient. My point is that the populations are growing and that when prey or partners become hard to find, they move. So, if we are managing for wildlife, we create the conditions they like and need. If they are in the general area and start to roam, they will find us and set up shop. Yes, we can kill them and I'm not at all oppose to it, but I question if that is really the best solution. My contention is that if killing them is going to be effective, it has to be done across a pretty wide geographic area with significant intensity. I question the cost effectiveness of trying to manage the population on a square mile or less size property. Not that I won't shoot a coyote if I have the opportunity, but is my time and money better spent developing habitat that will be more protective of fawns than hunting or trapping coyotes. Now, if you enjoy hunting or trapping coyotes, that is a completely different story.
Sorry to hear about your close call.
Thanks,
Jack
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
yoderjac
5 year old buck +
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
I will agree right up front - coyotes can be difficult to catch. But I will also say there will never be scientific proof that coyote removal on YOUR property will or will not work - unless someone does a study on that particular parcel of land. There are studies that show removal of coyotes greatly increase fawn production. There are studies that show only moderate improvement of fawn numbers. There are studies that show no improvement of fawn recruitment after removal of coyotes. The reasons that is - every piece of property is different. In our lifetime, there will never be a study that can definitively say removal of coyotes does or does not work on your land. If you are waiting for that - you are wasting your time. I have two pieces of property, eight miles apart, in the same river bottoms - that manage nothing alike. On one piece of property, I would never even consider coyote removal. On the other piece of property - coyote removal is a valuable, proven, management technique. Very little of what I do on one piece of property works on the other piece. And that is on property EIGHT MILES apart. I think as wildlife managers, we can provide valuable information about what works or doesn't work on our land - but we must be very cautious when it comes to thinking we know what will work on someone else's land. That is best left to the person who manages that piece of land.
yoderjac
5 year old buck +
I agree. What I hope the science eventually uncovers is what the relationships are between coyote and deer management. Increased fawn production is not always a goal of deer management. For years, we were trying to reduce deer numbers to match the habitat while improving the habitat. The question becomes how do we manage in general for a healthy population of deer and what role do coyotes play in that. Things clearly work differently in different places. Each study provide another piece of the puzzle. Hopefully in time the interrelationships will become more clear.
Thanks,
Jack
j-bird
Moderator
The key is getting the numbers of participants in the management of them. Just like many of us across the midwest have seen with recent deer number declines...with enough guns you can kill enough to turn the tide on population numbers. However...many deer hunters, are not yote hunters. Many hunters in general will not dedicate the same resources of time, effort and money to managing the yotes. Yotes are not as "prized" so to say. Many don't have the resources to check traps on a daily basis. I am VERY guilty of this myself. There is no realistic value to the meat and the hides take additional effort and there isn't the fur market there once was. I allow hunting of them on my place and see them as a target of opportunity...but I can't go out every day and check traps or hunt them with the intensity I do deer....I would be broke and divorced... I know very few deer hunters that are true yote hunters/trappers. Most simply shoot them as a target of opportunity like I do and some won't even do that in deer season for fear of ruining a hunt. I don't care...a yote shows up he's gett'n it!
I agree - yotes will never be "controlled" over most of their range like they were in the 70's and 80's when southern coyote hides were worth $25-$50. Now, most yotes are incidental kills during deer season. A minute fraction of hunters actually target coyotes. There will never be enough pressure put on coyotes to make a widespread difference when it comes to fawn recruitment and deer management. There will be isolated islands of land where a very few hunters will target coyotes in a meaningful manner - either by killing numbers or the timing of their harvest. Coyotes are smart - they are hard to kill, they are hard to trap, they reproductively respond to reductions in number, they are quick to re-populate areas where numbers have been reduced. It takes someone who lives in the target area to make a difference. In many areas of the country - from what I read on here - coyotes are probably a benefit to the deer population in helping to reduce numbers where hunters have failed. I wouldn't know about that - our problems have always been too few deer - not too many. The term "too many deer" is a foreign concept to me.
But - a little time, a little effort, and a little money and a fair bit of knowledge - applied at the right time - can make a difference on some acreages. Sometimes, it might be your only option left to make a noticeable difference. My efforts are directed at coyotes one month out of the year - just prior to and during fawning season. I like coyotes the rest of the year. We have a large feral hog population - and judging from the amount of hog hair present in coyote scat - coyotes are an important predator on the hog population.
It is much easier to get rid of deer than get them back. The whole point being - don't dismiss attempting coyote removal at the right time of the year just because someone else says it doesn't work. It might work in your area - and unless you try, you will never know.
But - a little time, a little effort, and a little money and a fair bit of knowledge - applied at the right time - can make a difference on some acreages. Sometimes, it might be your only option left to make a noticeable difference. My efforts are directed at coyotes one month out of the year - just prior to and during fawning season. I like coyotes the rest of the year. We have a large feral hog population - and judging from the amount of hog hair present in coyote scat - coyotes are an important predator on the hog population.
It is much easier to get rid of deer than get them back. The whole point being - don't dismiss attempting coyote removal at the right time of the year just because someone else says it doesn't work. It might work in your area - and unless you try, you will never know.
yoderjac
5 year old buck +
I think that last paragraph says it all. We don't today have enough information to say what level of effectiveness removing coyotes has on fawn recruitment and under what conditions. Folks should assess their objectives, resources, and situation and make a judgment call. I wish coyotes had not moved into our area, but the fact is they are here and, given today's society, here to stay. We need to figure out over time the best way to manage deer and other wildlife in their presence. Killing them in some way may be part of an overall management plan. Given where we are today, folks need to use there best judgment.
Thanks,
Jack[/QUOTE]
Catscratch
5 year old buck +
I sure wish fur prices would go back up. Dang feeding hearts!
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Mortenson
5 year old buck +
Yep, too many snowflakes. Need to sell into the Russian fur market. They always look happy and warm.
Mortenson
5 year old buck +
I'm up to 5 in a single pic as my most. Feelings are torn now between getting all rallied up with the neighbors this winter and trying to put a dent in them, but probably push all the remaining deer into the local sanctuary where the dnr sharpshooters await, or keep the pressure down and coyote pop up, just to eat many fawns. Damned either way.
4wanderingeyes
5 year old buck +
Smoke'm if you got'em!
j-bird
Moderator
Yotes are easier to dispose of than trespassers....I don't know if they can truly be controlled but it sure doesn't hurt to kill every one you see.
I shoot them every opportunity I get, also call for them and trap some.....I still think I would rather have a coyote on my property than a trespasser!
When we had $25 coons, $50 yotes, and $125 cats - we also had turkeys, quail, and rabbits.
Catscratch
5 year old buck +
I miss those days!
H20fwler
5 year old buck +
Aint that the truth!
I had a bunch of low life road hunters push through my little woods a few weeks ago. Buddy called me and I went right out calling the warden as I drove, I got there just as they were coming out, three guys walking out of woods and six trucks parked on road two sides...I went flat out nuclear! Every other word I said was F**K... I was so pissed I couldn't even form a complete sentence, warden got there two minutes after I did and told me to leave, I did cussing the low lifes the whole time.
Warden called me an hour later telling me three of them were ticketed, there was snow on the ground showing everything the property is well posted and there was no way for them to lie their way out of it. In Ohio it is a $500 fine first time offence and they didn't get whatever deer they were chasing either.
Yes...I would much rather have a yote on the farm much easier to deal with and at least they are a part of nature!
