A Year Thick With ‘Yotes

With hardly a deer or pheasant to be had and more coyotes on the prowl than ever before, it got us to thinking.

After three days in the stand trying to intercept a mature Kansas whitetail, my buddy Ned and I had seen more song dogs than anything else. The tally was 18 whitetail deer, four bobcats and a whopping 26 coyotes…

Pondering what might have caused their boom, I pontificated.

“Maybe the drought and resulting severe lack of cover the last few years, made worse by farmers haying everything in sight, pushed all the birds into what little grass that was left and made them easy pickings for the coyotes?” I mused aloud. 

“I dunno,” Ned said, chewing on a bit of last year’s jerky. “Do they really chase upland birds? I’ve seen them chase deer, turkeys, but I guess I’ve never been witness to them trying to catch a pheasant…”

It made sense that we might not be able to see them doing just that – bunch grass prairie would pretty easily hide such activity. Though I can imagine a covey of quail puts off just the right amount of scent to attract a nocturnal predator like a coyote, and once they flushed and broke out of their protective huddle they might be able to be picked off one-by-one. But that’s the kind of non-scientific theorizing that persists in place of real knowledge. 

It wasn’t until we had hung up our rifles and let our Any Whitetail tags roll over into Whitetail Antlerless that I saw a post pop up on a Facebook group I like to lurk in. One of the most prolific photographers of the Facebook uplands had this to say (photo altered out of respect for his skill with a camera):

A Facebook posting got me curious as to whether or not coyotes are really blameless when it comes to declining upland bird numbers.

The mention of ‘study after study’ made my internet-age-sharpened BSometer start blipping, so to the mighty Google I went. And I’ll be darned. 

Not that I immediately found the studies I was after, but I’ll be darned because of the difficulty with which a reasonable person is met when trying to find peer-reviewed science without monetarily subscribing to umpteen libraries and repositories of these formerly dusty works. 

Sure, I immediately found a pair of Pheasants Forever articles talking about how ‘study says’ and ‘decades of research’ conclude that coyotes aren’t negatively impacting pheasant populations. The kicker? Zero citations. How tough would that have been?

Tough, it turns out.

Enough digging did return research that coyotes largely prey on fauna other than pheasants, even if some of it was from so long ago that the researchers were downright glad to have a typewriter to write with. 

Rodents, rabbits and roadkill make up a good chunk of that ancient (cough, 1955, cough) study, but more modern reports like to say that coyotes have a particular affinity for taking red foxes (said to be the a primary mammalian predator of ground nesting birds) and that the killing of coyotes factors in to their proliferation. ‘Yotes are known to prey on raccoons, skunks and feral cats too – so they might just be a champion of the pheasant and the quail after all. 

Much discussion has been made that coyotes have a greater impact on the predator/prey landscape in the uplands and that removing them alone has a negative impact on game birds. Again, no study cited.

To the contrary, a Utah study showed that a concerted effort to remove predators from research areas returned vastly different results on game bird populations based on the size of the study area itself (4 square miles vs. 16 square miles). Results at the smaller plots would have you thinking that a predator control program had little to no effect, while results at the larger plots indicated the opposite – that bird numbers increased noticeably when predators were taken off the larger tracts of land.

Also, some references point to coyotes having a solid share of quail nest depredation – 36% of said depredation attributed to them in Lehmann’s tracking of 532 bobwhite nests from 1936-1952. Not that we live in the same landscape today…

More troubling was the number of statistics that kept popping up indicating that avian predators likely cause the most harm, at 50% or more of pheasants killed. 

In the end, I really just found myself upset that it’s so hard for normal folks to find real research and that folks who spout off on blogs and social media will mention the ‘results of a 14-year study’ but not bother to cite it for someone who actually wants to dig a little and know that the ‘knowledge’ that’s being shared isn’t just more internet hooplah. 

In all of my looking, this was the most truthful paragraph I came across:

After all that, I think I can tell Ned that the coyotes likely aren’t a major contributor to the low pheasant numbers we’ve been seeing, but that they can be blamed at least in part for neither of us having a trophy deer walk in front of our stands. ***Kicks the hornet’s nest and leaves the room…