Control Coyotes On Your Deer Property
For one reason or another, the coyote always takes all the heat from conservationists and wildlife managers. Maybe it is because they are carnivores or that they are just low-hanging fruit. Whether it’s reintroductions or figuring out what’s affecting wildlife population declines, the coyote often get most of the bad publicity. Coyotes in an ecosystem have a dramatic impact on the surrounding wildlife. Coyotes need to be managed correctly on your deer property. The question is whether it’s always the right answer? Do you need and is coyote control on your deer property effective?
Many whitetail biologists and hunters have been asking this question about the coyotes that share habitat with whitetails. It seems almost every time a coyote walks under my stand I nock an arrow. I just can’t seem to trust them. Recently, however, many biologists and researchers that understand this relationship better than I do, have given us whitetail hunter’s a reason to pause and take a second look at the predator management on our property. The rest of this article seeks to outline some of the new understandings about coyote population control and what hunters can do to effectively control the coyote populations on their properties.
DO YOU NEED TO CONTROL COYOTES ON YOUR DEER PROPERTY
The first thing a land manger needs to do is find out whether or not coyotes are a problem on their property. Just seeing coyotes on your property doesn’t mean they are a problem. As whitetail managers, we need to determine if the coyote population is hurting our deer herd. There are two ecological definitions that can help explain this, compensatory and additive. Compensatory predation is when the predation doesn’t affect the overall survival rate of the species and additive predation is when the predation decreases the survival rate of the species. With compensatory predation, it is assumed that the predation takes the place of another factor that may have caused the death of an animal. Like a disease, hunting, or poor nutrition. Compensatory predation will not greatly affect the number of species in a population and the population should remain fairly steady. Additive predation, however, will cause the number or species in the population to decrease. This is when you have a coyote population problem and it needs to be controlled.
TRAIL CAMERA SURVEY HELPS WITH COYOTE CONTROL ON YOUR DEER PROPERTY
A great way to determine if the coyote population on your property is compensatory or additive is to perform a trail camera survey. This allows you to get accurate information about the deer on your property and get a fairly good idea of the health and abundance of does on your property. It also allows you to gauge the number of coyotes because they are also going to show up in some of those trail camera pictures. If you follow through with the trail camera survey and see that the deer on your property are healthy and have the appropriate buck-to-doe ratio you may not need to immediately consider controlling your coyote population because having healthy herds allows you take a few losses. These surveys should be done every year and monitored closely. So that if coyotes become a problem, population control can start right away. Based on this trail camera survey, coyote population control needs to be looked at individually. Your friend a couple counties over may be having a problem, but it doesn’t mean you do. That is why the trail camera surveys can be so helpful. If you see a low population of deer you know that every fawn counts. However, if you see a high population of deer your coyote population may not need to be controlled. It can actually be contributing to the health of your deer herd.
Remember, there are numerous other factors that could be causing a decline in your deer herd other than out of control coyote populations. Things like disease, food, and weather can all affect the deer population from year to year.
COYOTE POPULATION CONTROL
If you have determined that predation by coyotes is a problem on your property then you have several options. They include things like cover, nutrition, a scientific approach, hunting, and providing alternative food sources. This is where the fun begins because the strategy, planning, and off-season work can be a deal breaker when it comes to coyote population control.
The first thing you should think about when trying to control coyote populations, is cover for the deer and in particular for the fawns. Coyotes are opportunists and they hunt by scent and need to get fairly close to fawns to find them and if they stumble upon one they will take it. Providing adequate cover will make it harder for the coyotes to locate the fawn. Depending on how many does are using your property for fawning, you may need to provide a lot of fawning cover. The good thing though, is that many aspects of fawning cover are also beneficial during different times of the year. Obviously, does will prefer areas that have thick cover to hide their fawns away from other does.
A way to maximize your cover is to perform some hinge cutting. This creates denser habitat that does prefer for fawning and during the rest of the year. Although it may not be very appealing, adding food plots of grasses instead of clovers or beans is also an option to improve cover. You can either use a few food plots you have to spare or you can take some of the locations on your property that don’t have good winds for hunting or good entry and exit routes and make those into grass plots. As far as the types of grasses, the warm season grasses in your area will work and any type of tall grass species or native grasses. Creating early successional habitat will also provide good cover. Another benefit of creating cover for your deer property is that it provides good nutrition for the does. The added cover can provide nutrition throughout the year and adequate thermal cover to help does make it through the winter in good condition. It is important that does go into spring healthy, which will make fawning success better.
ECOLOGICAL APPROACH TO COYOTE POPULATION CONTROL
You can also look at coyote population control from a scientific and ecological approach. Having a proper doe harvest each year and maintaining a good buck to doe ratio will help ensure that the natural ecological processes work in your favor. Breeding takes place relatively the same time each year. This means that fawns will all drop in the spring at about the same time as well. This isn’t just pure coincidence, but an ecological strategy that deer use instinctively to help ensure the success of their species. It’s known as the saturation principle. There is such a large increase in the population of the deer herd that coyotes can’t respond quick enough.
For example, if all of a sudden you got a year’s worth of candy bars that you had to eat in two weeks, you wouldn’t be able to eat them all, but if you had the whole year to eat them you could more effectively accomplish the goal. The same thing occurs with the coyote population. There are so many fawns released into the environment that coyotes don’t have enough time to get them all. The natural process for coyotes is to increase their population. Biologically they can’t respond quick enough to take advantage of the increased food source. So, it’s important that when we manage whitetails we do whatever we can to help nature to do its thing.
IS HUNTING WORTH IT TO CONTROL COYOTE POPULATIONS
The approach many hunters use to control coyotes on deer properties is by hunting them. Is this an effective strategy? A lot of research has been done on this approach. Most of it suggests it’s not a viable solution to controlling the coyote populations. Coyotes are territorial and certain coyotes that use your property will be dominant while others will just be passing through. Biologist refers to these as residents and transients. Resident coyotes will occupy a much smaller range. They will search harder for fawns because they won’t travel long distances outside their territory to find food. Transients are the exact opposite and will travel continuously through a much larger range. They are more opportunistic than resident coyotes. If you could somehow target residents that search harder for fawns, you might be able to have coyote control on your deer property successfully. However, this is almost impossible to do. The reason hunting coyotes may not be a successful coyote population control strategy lies within the dynamics of the resident and transient relationship. Most transient coyotes are the population founders and territory starters. If something removes a resident coyote from a territory, then a transient will most likely take its place soon after. If you use hunting as a way to remove coyotes you could be opening the door for more to move in. Hunting coyotes opens your property to be quickly filled by transient coyotes. Unless your coyote hunting is fairly constant, you’ll probably only see temporary results. This is not to say that you shouldn’t hunt coyotes as many deer hunters do hunt coyotes a few times a year. It’s a fun hunt and is an exciting hunt, just know that it may not the best method for controlling coyote populations on your deer property.
THE ALTERNATIVE FOOD SOURCE
This method of controlling coyote populations is a fairly new concept. At first glance, it seems like an easy solution to your coyote population problem. Just make it easier for them to get other food sources and it should make them less likely to search out fawns. Right? Maybe not. There are three outcomes that could occur if you implement this management strategy. The first is that managing other species and providing alternative food sources like mice, rabbits, snakes, and grassland birds. This will allow coyotes to prey on other species instead of fawns. However, this strategy will just support and attract more coyotes to your deer hunting property. Coyotes prefer fawns for the nutritional value they get versus the time spent searching. In a broad sense, they would prefer fawns because they get more bang for their buck. The number of studies regarding this topic still remains small. The conclusion thus far is fairly simple, coyotes are opportunists. It was stated earlier that coyotes will eat whatever’s easiest. If that’s fawns in the spring then that’s what they’ll eat. At this point, the alternative food source option remains fairly neutral. It may provide some buffering capabilities that can help fawn survival, but it might also have no impact at all.
CONCLUSION
Coyote control on your deer property remains fairly complicated. There is no doubt that coyotes eat fawns, but to what extent this has on deer on your hunting property is individually based. The key to coyote population control for your deer hunting property is active management. Most hunters today run trail cameras almost year-round. Use those pictures to your advantage. When you’ve created your list of hit list bucks, take a few moments to look at the deer’s health. If you need a way to control coyotes on your deer property these simple steps will help. Don’t harvest as many does and provide better fawning cover can help. As far as other methods, hunting should most likely be replaced by trapping whenever possible. Managing for alternative food sources may not have much of an effect. Predators like coyotes are part of the ecosystem and have an important role in it. The most important coyote management tool is to stay active in the management of the whitetails on your property. If you do this you should be able to have happy and healthy deer for years to come.
Chance Vorderstrasse
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