Read News: Once considered a nuisance, coyotes are gaining hunters' respect

Once considered a nuisance, coyotes are gaining hunters' respect

For Dave Dunbar of Slippery Rock, coyote hunting is the ultimate challenge.

"Coyotes are the complete package," said Dunbar, who owns a game-calling company and has targeted coyotes all over North America. "Their senses are incredible. They're bright and catch on quickly. If you make a mistake the first time, your chance of calling them in again is next to impossible."

Although Dunbar takes part in organized hunts, such as the Tubb Mill Trout Club Big Dog Hunt slated for March 7- 9, he prefers hunting coyotes alone and said he began targeting them before it became popular.

"Now it's catching on and there are more and more hunters after coyotes because they're spreading out," he said. "It'll be interesting to see if it lasts, because coyotes aren't easy."

The Pennsylvania Game Commission is watching, too, since coyote numbers are on the rise and hunters are its best means of controlling their population.

Although it lacks hard data, agency biologist Matt Lovallo said harvest counts and tracking studies -- often resulting from citizen complaints -- suggest there are roughly 40,000 coyotes statewide, with the largest concentrations in the southwestern and central counties.

With an open season and no bag limits, hunters and trappers harvest 10 to 20 percent of the state's coyotes each year. For many hunters, coyotes no longer are just incidental targets, but a targeted species. Trappers, who account for 50 percent of coyote kills, are finding their pelts increasing in value, fetching up to $45 each, Lovallo said.

Coyotes have long been perceived as posing a serious threat to deer and small game populations. Aside from the challenge, many hunters killed them to protect game animals.

"In spring, fawns are a big part of their diet," said Dunbar. "In fact, most farmers love them -- unless they have sheep -- because they keep down the deer and the groundhogs."

But Lovallo said the Game Commission's reason for encouraging coyote hunting isn't to curb the predator's impact on game species, it's to keep the wily canid out of cities and suburbs.

"We don't want to create fear that coyotes are moving in to attack," he said. "But our concern is they'll become an urban-suburban species."

He said the impact on deer is less of an issue.

"Although hunters often view any predation as too much, there isn't enough density of coyotes to affect deer populations," Lovallo said. "The fact is, deer have evolved over centuries with high levels of predation -- when we didn't have coyotes we had timber wolves -- and deer have always responded to them."

As for small game, he said, habitat loss has had a greater impact on declining numbers of grouse, rabbits and other species than coyotes.

Wildlife biologist Gary San Julian of Penn State University, whose cooperative extension service helps farmers and homeowners, shares Lovallo's perspective.

"In Chicago and Los Angeles, coyotes have habituated to people," he said. "They are finding loose garbage or are being fed by people and losing their fear of man, much as bears do. We don't want that happening in Pennsylvania."

Lovallo calls coyotes one of the animal world's best survivors.

"No other species has endured greater levels of exploitation than coyotes," he said. "The federal government has spent millions trying to eradicate numbers out West. Yet coyotes keep expanding their range."

Different theories abound about the origins of Pennsylvania's Eastern coyote, which is a cross between the smaller Western coyote and the grey wolf. Lovallo believes it migrated from the Northern Plains through Michigan, southern Ontario and Maine, then headed south to Pennsylvania and Maryland. Although wolves once preyed on coyotes, they interbred as the wolf was being eradicated,

"Coyotes began to exploit niches the wolf left behind," Lovallo said.

But unlike wolves, where the alpha male is the only male that breeds, all coyote offspring typically begin reproducing at 1 year of age, Lovallo said.

"Where there are higher levels of mortality, coyotes have the physiologic mechanism to produce larger litters -- instead of four or five pups, as many as nine," he said.

One reason is the availability of more food. As omnivores, coyotes forage on whatever they can find, from grass to berries to other animals. They go where habitat is viable, but aren't choosy.

"It always comes back to habitat," said San Julian. "If you've got good habitat, good cover, prey control predators, predators don't control prey. Coyotes are a pretty resilient species. They're pretty smart."

News Source: Post-Gazette.com

Posted On March 02, 2008 01:46

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