 Thank you, everybody, for coming on this a little bit of a crazy night. I really appreciate the turnout. It's more than we expected, I could say. So I'm Kim Royer. I'm a wildlife biologist, actually the Furbearer Project Leader with the Fish and Wildlife Department. I'm going to do a very, very short introduction, and then I'm going to turn it over to Dr. Dave Person. And he's really going to steal the show. So he's going to give you all the biology background. And provide you with the information that I think you're here to hear. I just wanted to mention that if you wouldn't mind filling out these before and after, you'll notice there's a before side in red and an after side in blue. We'd really appreciate your feedback on coyotes in general. And even if you want to write about the presentation or anything else, we'll collect those at the end. Do the befores before we speak and the afters after we speak. So anyway, I'll start with my brief intro here. And again, I'm just basically going to talk about coyotes and the management and conservation challenges that the department faces. And like I said, Dr. Person will then talk more about just sort of the basic biology and predator-prey relationships, which I think you'd all be interested in. So you all probably already know that our mission is the conservation of fish, wildlife, and plants and their habitats for the people of Vermont. What you may not know is that includes over 25,000 species. And we all think of it as the iconic species that we know and love. But there's many, many other species that we're responsible for. Anything from invertebrates to black bears to bobcats. We're the organization that's responsible for maintaining these into the future. As well as the habitats, the natural communities, and the plants that keep those animals alive. And we take this role pretty seriously. But as most of you are aware of, the North American model of wildlife conservation was established in response to the amazing degradation that occurred through the 1800s, through the forest clearing, and the extirpation of many of our wildlife species through that period. And from the ashes rose this process, which allowed all of us to be stewards of these animals. So in the United States and North America, we are all stewards of our wildlife. And as in Europe, the landowner owns the wildlife. And so as a result of that model, and the tax on ammunition and firearms, and hunting and fishing and trapping licenses, many of these species have been recovered. And sometimes now some of these are actually, we have some human wildlife conflicts with some of these species. I refuse to call them pests because they're not pests. It's usually an interaction between humans and them that make a problem. And so coyotes came in on their own, you know, from west of the Mississippi. Dave will go into this a little bit more. Moved into the northeast in the 30s and 40s. And they were replacing the wolf that was extirpated as a result of that land clearing that I talked about. And as a result, many people, because they were a species that came in after 100 years without a large predator, a middle predator like that, there are a lot of feelings of animosity towards this animal. And we feel like the coyote is actually here to stay. It's an animal that actually plays an important role in the system and it deserves some respect. But public attitudes, as you all know, run very high when it comes to coyotes. And people tend to either really love them or really dislike them. And sometimes that dislike depends on where you're coming from. And when you look at these pictures, you can see that if you have domestic animals like sheep and they've been attacked by coyotes, you're probably going to have a different feeling about the animal than if you've never encountered them at all. Or if you perceive that this nice big buck here is getting taken down by coyotes, that's going to influence how you feel about them. Or if the coyotes are hanging out on your front porch and you've got a little dog that you're worried about, that's going to influence how you think about coyotes. So coyotes tend to be an animal that people tend to either love or hate. And we find that there's some very disparate and polarized public attitudes around coyotes. There still remains a deeply rooted perception that coyotes compete with hunters for deer. And on the other end of the spectrum, there's this sort of dignified view of how coyotes operate in the wild, that they love everything and they love each other and they don't ever have to kill anything. So we have these two very polarized views around coyotes. But what we have seen is this animal can become easily habituated. And these are just one month's headlines from newspapers around the country in the month of May, last May. And you can see that coyotes, when they live in areas where they're in close proximity to people, we often start to have coyote-human interactions that make people nervous, to say the least. And what we're worried about is that the public doesn't value or want to conserve pests. So once these animals are considered vermin or pests, then it becomes very much more difficult for us to create a management or conservation policy that's going to keep these animals on the landscape into the future. Yeah, sure. So this one here is Culver City's officials approved $210,000 in a coyote management program. Mother, four-year-old son, attacked by coyote in Park. Watch out for coyotes in West County, police warn. State lawmakers look to help those hunting, climbing, hunting, oh, hunting, help those hunting, climbing Pennsylvania coyote population. So clearly where there are interactions with coyotes that are negative, people start to say we want these animals eliminated. In Vermont, we don't think we have, we have some of these interactions starting, but historically we have not had very many because we think our coyotes are fairly wary because they're heavily hunted and trapped. And so that keeps them wary of people to some degree. That's not the only reason, but to some degree it's enough negative reinforcement in some places that we don't have these interactions as often as some other places. The other thing we have to consider when we're managing for a resilient species like coyote is we've got 16 other fur-bearing species that we are responsible for, two of which are on the threatened and endangered species list, three of which are intensively monitored, Fisher, Bobcat and Otter, and one which requires quite a bit of time dealing with human beaver conflicts. So we have to really be pragmatic about where we put our resources and we have not collected a lot of information on coyotes just because we really haven't had the time to do that and we know the animal is very resilient and responds to hunting in a way that the population can actually grow. And we also are worried about the habitat for these species and trying to conserve the habitats that are going to maintain these animals on the landscape. So one of the things we're concerned about besides all of those is that there's some threats that are coming to many of these animals around habitat loss, climate change, species decline and changing public attitudes. All of these are things that we have to think about going forward and trying to focus on these things is important and we need to focus on these together because public divisiveness will create roadblocks to really good management. And so that's where we're trying to find ways to find common ground around some of these species so that we can move forward and address some of these really negative consequences for the future for many of these species. So our goal for coyotes is to ensure that they're here on the landscape, maintain and protect habitat for all species, maintain public support and respect for all wildlife species and provide opportunities into the future for everybody to enjoy wildlife through hunting, trapping and just bird watching or wildlife watching. And so we want to try to do that through building bridges and figuring out how to bring people together around these animals. And coyotes are not the only species where this is an issue, where we have this clash of public values. There's many, many other species where we're starting to see this happen and we're just worried that future efforts towards conservation management of our species, of our wildlife species are going to be derailed by some of these polarization issues. And so we're looking for ways to bring people together. And one of the ways we're doing that is our next speaker is Dr. David Person. And I've actually known Dr. Person since the 80s when he left New Jersey as the deer project leader and came to Vermont to do the Addison County coyote study. And he got his master's study in coyotes in Vermont in the 80s and then went on to get his PhD in Alaska and then Alaska Fish and Game hired him as their predator prey scientist for 22 years, I think, right? Well, I was there for 22 years, 18 years with Fish and Game. 18 years with Fish and Game. And then he retired and returned in his retirement, came back to Vermont. So we're very lucky to have him here. He's so knowledgeable about predators and coyotes in particular. And I'll turn this over to you, Dave, and thank you so much. Dave is doing this as an independent person with Gratis. Independent. Independent person, no pun intended. Yeah, right, independent Dave person-person. Yeah. And so I really appreciate that he's willing to come and speak to us and partner with us on this. Kim, thanks so much for that introduction. Just to reiterate, I am an ex Fish and Game research biologist, most of my time in the state of Alaska. But I'm retired now and thankfully retired now. And I'm retired and my basic job right now is to build mussel loading guns. And when building mussel loading guns, I have a shop in Braintree, right on Braintree Hill. And I have a porch, a nice shop, and I end up somehow being an attractive magnet for lots of old retired Vermonters, farmers, loggers, and others that come over who want to talk about guns and history. And in those conversations, things like coyotes and bobcats and deer, they always come up. And one of the things that I gleaned from those conversations is that there is certainly a lot of hard opinions, strong opinions. One of the things that is missing is that most the public has never really had any good explanations or any good presentations about predator prey dynamics. They get talks about coyote ecology and biology or deer biology and ecology. But predator prey dynamics are complicated and most of you are probably not exposed to the actual behaviors, the actual mechanisms that go on and a coyote population is in an area and prey populations are in the same area. And what do they mean to each other? Coyotes kills a deer, certainly. But what does that mean? Does it really matter much? And so predator prey dynamics is a missing piece that I think the public is not aware of, hasn't had much exposure to. And that's where I come in. That was the piece that I thought when I was talking to Kim about doing these presentations. Because that was my background. And particularly in the state of Alaska, I was the predator prey biologist for all of Alaska south of Yakutat. It's a pretty big area. And I spent 22 years in that environment studying predator prey dynamics with wolves, deer, bears and people. And don't forget people because even, of course people are important here in terms of harvesting deer, harvesting coyotes, harvesting other furbearers. But in Alaska, sometimes there are people who's the only red meat they ever have in their entire lives. Are deer and maybe caribou and maybe moose. They never see any other kind of meat unless it's red meat, unless it's fish. So the human component is very important in all of this. And it was never far from my research how important that human component was. Just a quick little summary of me. I did work on coyotes in the state of Vermont in the Champlain Valley back in the mid-80s to get my master's degree at the University of Vermont. And that study was basically descriptive looking at the ecology of coyotes, home ranges, food habits, things like that. At that time, not much else was known. There was some work done in Maine. There was some work done in New Hampshire. But nothing in Vermont. And there really wasn't a great deal known about what role these coyotes were playing in the ecosystems. In my case, I chose the Champlain Valley because it was fairly close to the University. So it was relatively convenient. But it also had deer, it also had rabbits, it also had a diverse prey base and a lot of coyotes. So it made a very good study area. So I spent four years there doing that work. And as well as looking at coyotes, we also looked at their interactions with red and gray foxes. Whereas there are a lot of data that suggests that particularly with red foxes, there's lack of coexistence. There is actual direct competition. Coyotes will kill red foxes. But we didn't know much about gray foxes because gray foxes, there's not much research on gray foxes anywhere. And so we included gray foxes with red foxes and one of the interesting things with the fox situation is red foxes, most of the red fox genetics that you have in this country, North America, actually are derived from Europe. And the gray fox is actually our indigenous fox. Not the red fox. The gray fox is actually our indigenous fox. And what's very interesting is when you had the early colonists come over and get well established, and especially those who used to do fox hunting back in England, they found that the little gray fox wasn't much fun because instead of running, it would go down a hole or up a tree. And so they brought red foxes over because they could use them for their fox hunting. Well, it's that going to the ground or up a tree is why gray foxes seem to coexist very nicely with coyotes because they don't run. And if they run, they get killed. If they go up a tree, they survive. So they can actually live in close coexistence with coyotes where red foxes are in competition. Anyway, I left Vermont, went to Alaska to do my PhD work on the Wolves of the Islands of Southeast Alaska. And it's a fascinating place, a fascinating wolf population because this is mostly on islands. So we're talking wolves that are swimming in the ocean in some cases up to two to three miles in the open ocean to go from one island to another. It's a remarkable ecosystem, temperate rainforest, huge trees, a lot of deer, a lot of other animals like black bears and brown bears. It's a fascinating place to be. But it's also a very useful and interesting place to be to study predator-prey dynamics because each of those islands offers slightly different conditions. Therefore, they become an actual natural laboratory, a natural series of experiments. So you can learn a great deal if you can just gut out the bad weather and the other disadvantages of working in Southeast Alaska. When you work on predators, you aren't just interested in the ecology of the predator animal. If you're trying to understand predator-prey dynamics, how they fit into a predator-prey community, you almost always end up studying their prey. By default, you're going to start looking at because that's what drives the system is the prey and how their dynamics go relative to the predator and relative to their habitat. So I always gravitate to the prey. In this case, sick of black-tailed deer and one of the things that we really were very interested in looking at not only is mortality due from coyotes but mortality from black bears. There are very high densities of black bears, perhaps in some areas as much as many as 2 to 3 to 4 per square mile. These bears are subsidized by salmon and in the springtime in June, they prey on neonate fawns and about 35 to 40% of all neonate fawns are killed by black bears in about a month of birth. So it's a huge source of mortality. A big chunk of it is compensatory but I'll talk about that a little bit later. But anyway, so there's a lot more to the system than just wolves and deer. The bears are a complicating factor and people are a complicating factor. I also pioneered using dogs in my wildlife work and I just thought I'd show you this is my dog Bella and I am calling in a doe and Bella will actually decoy the doe and this is a training film. We don't actually do darting in this film but she would actually allow me to get a perfect shot to the rump of the deer without any risk of hurting the deer. I'm just blowing a fawn bleat to bring the doe in. Right there I could have gotten a perfect shot without any and one of the things I learned with working with Bella is I learned to watch her way before I would and you watch her head when this starts she's going to right there she's got the deer she knows where it's coming in I don't even know what's there yet my graduate student Sophie is doing the video and I'm standing right beside that tree that deer doesn't care at all that I'm there it's just focused on the dog and because Bella won't move a muscle the deer just keeps wanting to come in and that would give us an opportunity to get a good safe shot to the rump when we started using Bella as a decoy our mortality capture mortality a deer went to zero it wasn't very high to begin with but it went to zero when we used the dog and we used dogs for other things as well so let's go on to coyotes here just to finish up I retired from the state of Alaska I actually I didn't retire initially I quit I just got sick of the crazy politics involved predator prey and management it just after a while kind of drove me nuts so I could retire I retired came back to Vermont and I've been building muscle and guns and happy ever since it's really nice to work on something that really nobody cares about anyway so just before we started here this nice lady here asked me what do we have here what kind of coyote is it is it a coy wolf is it the infamous labro yody poo what do we have well we really have a coyote and they did come from the west you have the Canadian coyotes coming in from the north you have the southern Texan coyotes coming in from the south and you have an invasion from the midwest as well and this occurred shortly after the period of time when most wolves were decimated and landscapes had been changed dramatically by human development so we sort of created the conditions that allowed this to happen oops sorry this is one of those animated slides and here you go to give you some time frame about 1918 or so there's some evidence of coyotes beginning to move into the northeast into southern Ontario and Quebec and then into the northeast 1940s in New York state and Vermont I believe about late 1940s in Pennsylvania you start seeing them in the 1940s although there was evidence of coyotes in Indiana Ohio back as early as 1919 so they didn't waste a lot of time till after the wolves were decimated they really moved on pretty quickly here and they came in slowly there was a lot of concern about what this animal was certainly there was evidence that some of them were bigger and of course at that early stage there was this idea that they may have made it with dogs it might have been a hybrid with dogs and become a coy dog well the problem with a coy dog is that first off it would have to be a female coyote and a male dog because if it was a female dog dogs are going to come home the puppies are not going to be in the wild so it would have to be a female coyote and a male dog well male dogs don't hang around to help the pups they're usually mating and they're gone kind of like some politicians we know and they're off looking for the next bigger better deal and so mom would be out there with a load of litter of puppies and nobody would help her raise them so the chances of survival would be pretty darn low if it was a mating between a coyote and a dog what we do know is based on genetics it's not a dog it's wolves and the genetics of Canis Canis lupus which are wolves Canis latrans which are coyotes in North America is a mess the total mess because we actually in most of North America we have this mix between coyotes and wolves so out in Minnesota where you have wolves and in Southern Ontario we have wolves they tend to be mostly wolves 75% wolf or so and maybe a quarter coyote when you go east and you get into Vermont and New Hampshire and Maine where you have a coyote it tends to be about 75% coyote with 25% wolf but there's this continuum all throughout North America with very little call it pure strains or pure pedigrees anywhere except in the high Arctic with wolves and the Southwest with coyotes so where the two overlap and particularly anywhere where coyotes and where wolves had been decimated so there was a potential for the behavioral barriers between wolves and coyotes that would break down and allow inter mating anywhere along the interface there's this integration of coyote genes into wolves and wolf genes into coyotes and so we have this sort of mismatch and we have a true coyote but there is wolf blood in those coyotes and they are significantly larger than what you typically will find in Montana they are upwards of 50% larger in some cases and even a little bit bigger than that in the coyotes that I radio collared with the Hawaiian Valley of Vermont they range in size for adults adult males range from about 32 pounds to 47 pounds and I measured one out of New Hampshire I believe that weighed 54 pounds now 54 pounds is getting to be about the size of a juvenile wolf pup in the fall so you're getting a little overlap they are almost in the allometric size the variation you mentioned you were seeing those blonde coyotes well there's one right there from the Champlain Valley the pellage can be incredibly variable for almost black and dark gray to the sort of the classic buff below and gray and black in the back or like this actually gentlemen right there they are incredibly variable in terms of their pellage and the genetics of coyotes are so variable that there isn't really very often do you find any areas that have particularly blonde wolves or particularly dark coyotes or particularly dark light coyotes there's a real mix almost everywhere and part of that is because these animals disperse they don't just stay in their local area when they're looking for their own home ranges their own territories they go long distances so there's an intermingling going on all the time and that intermingling covers a great deal of territory coyotes are territorial they also have what we call home ranges and this slide illustrates what we mean between the difference between a home range and a territory down at the bottom are the home ranges of five coyote groups in Addison County now the first thing to notice there is some overlap between the home ranges between neighboring groups but notice that virtually all the space is occupied so that area when I was working there was pretty darn saturated with coyotes there was not much new space for any any pair to settle in when you look at where they spend most of their time within a home range which is the middle series these are the same groups right here same five coyote groups this is what we call the 75% home range what we're looking at there is simply what we call the core area of activity where they are the most and when you look at that you can see that the overlap is diminished almost to the point of there is no overlap so this is a home range this is what we probably refer to as a territory a territory is a place that is defended actively defended they don't necessarily defend that overlap area but they will defend these core areas and then the smaller 50% home ranges there represent generally spring time and early summer when they're active at their dens and they're concentrating their activity at the densites so that they have a really peak of activity in a much much smaller area the coyotes which were numerous in the fall and let's say in the winter you saw them everywhere all of a sudden they disappear in April May and June and you find concentrated activity in one place and no activity in the places you used to see them in the winter time it's because they're really focusing around the dens we look at the size of those home ranges in Vermont about 30 square kilometers basically a little over a little under 10 miles square miles in the forest of Maine 70 square kilometers which is roughly going to be somewhere in the neighborhood about 19 square miles or so 1920 square miles the significance here is not the size so much the fact that the size of the home range represents the richness of the environment if you're a coyote family you don't want to have to go around a home range that's any larger than you need it to make your living to find your prey to raise your puppies and so in a rich environment you're going to have a smaller home range a smaller territory probably as well in a poorer environment you are going to have more space that you're going to have to occupy the size of the home range oftentimes represents the richness of the environment Addison County was a very rich environment for coyotes they had deer but they had cottontail rabbits woodchucks and even more important they had the carcasses of heifers and cows that died particularly in the fall and winter that got dumped but they couldn't get buried because of frozen ground and that food source was a bonus food source it made for a very very rich environment forests essentially and deer and other small mammals in that forest those are a much poorer environment for predator like coyotes and so their home ranges are much larger the implication is of course that the densities are lower so if you've got a smaller home range you can pack in more coyotes if you've got larger home ranges you're going to have fewer coyotes and coyote family groups call them a pack if you will generally average about 7 or 8 individuals for in the fall which is where they're going to be the most numerous before there's any dispersal so you can see that the richest of the environment the richer the environment the more coyotes you're going to pack in there the more coyote groups you're going to pack in there and of course the implication for that is if you were going to go out and do some sort of predator control like you're going to try to eliminate coyotes from an area you're going to have a much greater problem because you're going to have many more family groups that you're going to have to deal with than in an area that's a poorer environment the coyotes are denning in April and May generally May would be the would begin the peak of the denning season they mate in January or February they are have a 63 day gestation period and they become sexually active at about 22 months about 2 years so it takes a coyote about 2 years before they're off looking for a mate somewhere they mate like I say in February and February, late January they give birth at the end of April early May and the female around April is looking for a densite a densite doesn't necessarily have to be too elaborate it may be just a hole in the ground where there's some loose dirt it might be a hole between the root wads of a tree but it's going to be dry and it's going to be within probably about 100 meters of water because when mom has puppies she's got to drink a lot of water while she's lactating she's not going to travel far from water so you're not going to have a coyote den sitting way up in some dry mountain top somewhere they're going to be in a place where they can get fresh water within a very easy distance this is in contrast these small holes generally I've not seen a coyote den that was more than just a single natal chamber in contrast wolves the biggest wolf den and I've crawled in about 30 these pictures these are actually wolf pups but we actually snaked in the active dens a video camera with a 16 foot flexible shaft lens so it's all like a slung snake and we would snake that down and actually video the puppies and count them all to get an estimate of litter size in that wolf den and of course mom and pop and all the other wolves are running around howling and barking at you it's pretty exciting but the method allowed us to get good estimates of the number of puppies in the dens well one of the wolf dens that I actually went into had 11 entrances and it had tunnels up to 60 feet long it covered almost about a sixth of an acre it was huge in size but coyotes don't do anything like that they concentrate their activity during the denning season this just shows you one wolf group here in Addison County this is showing their home range during the winter months the dotted line is showing the home range during the denning season there's the territory and there's the territory during the denning season they're concentrating their activity during denning these little grid squares just show you when kite was active at that spot so the frequency of activity so the taller the bar the more active they are at that location they're very active at the den sites we would expect that again here's another group here and you have a harmonic mean the territory here and then you have during denning it's really compressed a lot smaller they're really concentrating their activity around the den sites when you look at the breeding pair and their activity at den these are radio locations within 100 meters of an actual active den and you can see in April this breeding female right here the black bar she's of course spending most of her time at the den as you get into May she spends a little less time she's lactating she's going out to get water to drink and when she gets into June she's even spending less time the male is beginning to spend more time so as she goes away from the den he comes to the den basically babysitting the kids and the interesting thing here is you have this juvenile female from the previous year and you can see here she's not anywhere near the den generally in April but in May she shows up and she actually by June is spending more time at the den site babysitting the kids than mom and dad so there is really family cooperation here in terms of raising the lures and pups the thing you need to know about coyote family groups is that they really are mostly a family group meaning that they're a coyote breeding pair and then there are siblings they're young that they produced now typically the young are of the year meaning that the young from the previous year are leaving they're leaving in their first year and definitely at least in their second year to locate their own territories their own basically establish their own family groups if they can but the decision for leaving is largely food based and this is where you start getting larger groups of coyotes family groups those typically are the breeding pair with kids from several years litterers from several years because the kids aren't leaving because there's so much food they're like the millennials they love it in the basement and so they're not leaving because they're getting all the food they need and all the resources they need there's no reason for them to move out until the hormones take over and they want to breed and then it becomes you know a decision do I stay and take the smorgasbord you know take advantage of it or do I leave and mate and actually raise a family on my own and so that becomes the decision based on their reproduction more than food when they get to be two years old but if there isn't much food they tend to then leave in their first year so because there's no reason to hang around going to get well fed in the home range at home so you might as well take off somewhere else and try best somewhere else so the family group is very fluid and it really is a function of food if you're seeing large groups of coyotes in areas that generally means they're well fed the food resources are very rich you won't see that in a place like Maine where in the forest of Maine where the riches of the environment is probably pretty low they're going to be dispersing in their first year when we look at the mortality about 27 this is based on my radio colored animals about 27% of the resident adults die every year so about a quarter of them die every year these are the resident adults they're staying in the pack, they're not leaving they're right there in the pack, home range, pack territory and they have about a quarter of them are going to die every year 20% of juvenile mortality after the neonatal period we don't know what neonatal mortality is now when I say neonate, neonate means birth so neonates, we consider neonate animals basically to be those animals at birth and then up to maybe about a month maybe a month and a half 90 days later so when I say juvenile mortality after 90 neonatal period we're talking basically juveniles from mid-summer on and they have about 20% not statistically different than the other resident coyotes we didn't detect any mortality in resident subadults, those who stayed over they didn't disperse their first year they stayed over in their second year but our sample size was just too small I'm not surprised we didn't detect much mortality there's probably the same mortality here as here if we got a big enough sample we'd see it would be pretty consistent the main point here however is when you leave your mortality goes way up and if you don't settle in an area very quickly you're not going to probably do it at all you're not going to survive to reproduction so annual mortality for dispersers dispersing is a very risky business looking for a mate is a very risky business and your mortality rate goes up considerably it can be as high as 70% for wolves in some areas so coyotes and wolves share the same risk factors when they disperse they're going through different territories they take very well they might get killed by other coyotes or wolves and then they also are at greater risk to hunters and trappings and being hit by vehicles because they're in unfamiliar territory the coyotes that we monitored 10 were shot one was trapped, three were hit by vehicles the key there, not so much the breakdown of the different sources the overwhelming source of mortality in coyotes is human based or coyotes from disease is relatively low compared to sources people kill coyotes and people are the main sources of the death of coyotes now that's not to say that if people didn't kill coyotes that something else wouldn't kill many of those coyotes otherwise either so for example if the risk of disease would go up in a population if it wasn't being harvested the population density for any kind of density dependent disease would place them at greater risk so there's a bit of compensation that's going to be going on there between human mortality and other sources of mortality that are not human based because the human base basically overwhelms that other source and there's a bit of a compensation that may be actually occurring within a population disperseers they travel quite a ways that's what we knew where we got the collars back we had some that just disappeared who knows they could be in Quebec somewhere they might be in Indiana we don't know but they do disperse long distances and only a small fraction of them actually ever get a chance to settle into a territory and establish their own home ranges unfortunately the success of disperseers is pretty big and there's not a lot of good data on dispersal and coyotes in terms of their success rates food habits well it's pretty eclectic they like lots of things they like mice, they like porcupines they love woodchucks, they like deer and when we look at their scats it gives us a pretty good seasonal picture now keep in mind this is the percent occurrence of any kind of evidence of an animal in the scats so in other words it's not volume we're not talking here for example we're not saying 40% of their diet in spring is deer no 40% of scats had deer hair in it so it is an indication of changes through the seasons is not telling you volume in this case we see in the spring and summer deer very much in the spring and that's probably going to be deer either in a weekend state from the winter or carcasses deer that died during the winter time that's probably the biggest source in the spring when it overlaps into this early summer late spring, early summer those would be probably neonate fawns and we know that coyotes can kill a lot of neonate fawns probably the highest percentage that's been recorded is from Georgia near the Savannah River in Georgia and the majority down there I believe coyotes killed about 50% of neonate fawns within one month of birth and they had black bears down there too were also killing fawns so they can take a significant number of fawns in the northeast here in studies that have looked at deer mortality due to any source the predation on neonate fawns seems to be considerably lower but there is definitely evidence of killing adult deer as well there's no doubt that coyotes are capable of taking an adult deer but the primary mortality is going to come to the neonate fawns and there's a reason for that because at that time mom and dad need a nice little package of meat to bring back to the kids and a fawn is a perfect little package of meat plus killing a fawn you don't risk getting killed yourself one of the things that is pretty clear with looking at the physical condition of coyotes and wolves throughout the seasons is that they do best in winter coyotes put on weight wolves put on weight they're healthier they are more active in winter because they actually have more access to food in winter particularly in this case would be deer but also here snowshoe hare would be a huge one in the summertime the pickings are a little thinner a little leaner and so they tend to lose weight based on one, females are lactating they're feeding kids so that's one reason why they're going to be losing weight secondly is they have a little bit harder time finding food and taking down a deer in the middle of the summer they can do it but it's really risky deer are not knockovers I don't know if any of you even for a wolf deer is not a knockover they don't just walk up to a deer and just push it over and kill it deer are dangerous prey beaver are dangerous prey cut and tail rabbits not so much and so there is a real emphasis in the summer on those smaller animals here you have you also see the influence of livestock the blue bars they're picking up in the late summer and into winter and those are those frozen carcasses mainly and then you also have some other mammals thrown in here sheep I didn't find a lot of evidence of sheep in the scats there wasn't a lot of sheep growing in that area so that's probably one explanation for it but in terms of other mammals they kill skunks they kill foxes they kill raccoons I just can't imagine what it would be like to kill a raccoon it would probably be a pretty miserable thing to do but they do kill other larger mammals rodents they take large rodents in the spring and summer specifically well of course in the winter time a lot of those rodents just aren't there in this case that would be beaver and woodchucks small rodents they do take in the summer and winter that is a major staple in their diets they're small bowls and mice and also rabbits and you can see rabbits is a big one in the winter time those are snowshoe hair and as well as cottontails and so coyotes are really effective at killing rabbits and rabbits can be a subsidizing and in this case hair as well is a subsidizing food source meaning that the coyotes can really do well on those rabbits despite for example the density of deer so there are circumstances in which you could have a deer population that's very low and you have coyotes basically subsidized by rabbits they don't really need the deer but they do take deer occasionally and that mortality to those deer may be enough at that point to suppress their numbers because they've been hammered by let's say two or three bad winners so there are circumstances in which the prey base plays a role in how the coyotes might affect let's say deer because they can be subsidized in the west with wolves they get subsidized by salmon salmon can decouple the wolf population their sort of physical condition from the population density of the deer that they mainly prey on they don't need to depend on the deer alone they've got other sources that they can switch to this just shows birds and vegetation, nuts, berries, all kinds of things corn even they're pretty much in all the scats they are very omnivorous kind of like a bear so let's talk about predation because predation is probably one of the dominant themes for most folks who want to talk about coyotes or wolves and certainly I think an important one to discuss here in Vermont of course coyotes are predators on livestock and there are conditions in which they can do a significant amount of damage but I don't believe in Vermont that they are a scourge of livestock in Vermont, I don't think there is any evidence that livestock producers in general except for perhaps some local producers have had really economically devastating effects from coyote predation there are places out west where that has happened but it's not not that common and so livestock predation is significant but it is something that is one generally localized and there is some good evidence that if you have a group of coyotes in your area and they're not preying on your livestock if you wipe them out you risk having a new group come in who learn to kill your sheep or kill your chickens or kill your goats and so it can be a good thing or a bad thing to take out a family group of coyotes that may be adjacent to a farm and you may not know that research out west in California showed very clearly that the major individuals in a coyote population who kill livestock and actually the ones who lead all predation are the breeding pair the other members of the pack are kind of hanging on it's not like everybody's out there with their radios going okay you go right, I'll go left we're going to push these guys over here and we're all going to jump on them all at the same time they're not African wild dogs what it's more like is one coyote says to the other hey Benji you go take that deer down and we'll help you eat it and it's more like hangers on and it's the breeding pair that really do the killing well it's the same thing with livestock and so to prevent livestock predation you've got to get that breeding pair and that's really tough because if you go out and just randomly kill coyotes you don't necessarily going to take out the individuals who are doing the killing so you may not solve your problem the one device that did work very effectively were the what they call the poison collars on sheep these are the collars that the sheep died but the coyote that killed that sheep also died and those methods worked quite well virtually all other methods of eliminating coyotes from an area were not very effective and not very effective in the long term in other words there was something that had to be constantly applied which by default means something that was very expensive so it's a problem yes and there is no easy solution to it but you have to be a little careful about what you do and how you interpret it again coyote family groups might not kill your sheep and they are going to keep out other groups however there are those who buy into that story as well very strongly they say well you don't have to kill any coyotes you know you just make sure you don't want to turn over in the coyote population because you're going to have these coyotes out there protecting your livestock well the reality of that is research has shown that that effect can be seen in certain places under certain circumstances it has happened it's been documented but the effect doesn't last long because in those coyote family groups there's turnover and the fact that that breeding pair is not going to necessarily last for more than two or three years and so eventually they're going to turn over anyway and so any duration any benefit that is going to be fairly short and I'll just give you a little anecdote in Alaska on the Toke River the Toke caribou herd they run in there and as a measure the state of Alaska the Alaska fishing game has had probably as much experience in doing predator control as any organization in North America I mean it's got decades of experience doing this kind of stuff and we run into the same kinds of public issues where people are against it people propose it you know it all depends on their point of view and so we're always looking for alternatives to lethal just because publicly it seems to be more satisfactory to a lot of people well anyway so in one experiment we took an area probably half the size of Vermont and we gave every male coyote every male wolf in that population of asectomy we snipped them all and the effect idea was that you have these territorial males they're not dead they're maintaining their territories but they can't breed, they're sterile and so you're going to see a reduction in wolves because they're going to keep out any dispersers they're going to actually prevent other wolves from coming in and depredating an increasing population level and reducing predation on this case caribou and it worked but it only worked for about two or three years because those wolves die and there is turnover and the other thing you have to do when you do that is you've got to then prohibit hunting and trapping wolves in that area because you don't want your hunters and trappers out there killing those vasectomized males because you're just going to ruin the effect that you just spent millions of dollars trying to achieve and so it is a short term effect it's a very expensive one you hear people talk about these natural controls on predation like on livestock because of the territorial coyotes and not all coyote groups are learning to kill livestock that's true, that is a true effect but it is something that's not going to work everywhere and it's not necessarily going to be an effect that lasts very long there's also the notion that if you go in and kill a bunch of coyotes in an area and kill breeding pairs that you'll end up with kind of a free-for-all going on with dispersers coming in trying to establish new territories and in that free-for-all you may actually end up with more breeding pairs within the same area so instead of having five breeding pairs you might have 15 as they're sort of sorting things out as they're scrambling for space that can create more problems for livestock producers as well but that's another circumstance in which probably if those coyotes were hammered in terms of their population density if that wasn't a continuous process the coyotes that move back in scramble for space in about four or five years it's all going to be sorted out and they're probably back to almost the same way they were before they were removed or heavily harvested and so again another kind of a notion of sort of called a counterintuitive notion of you don't want to go in and necessarily blast away at every coyote in an area because you might actually be worsening your problem it's true for a certain time period in certain places but it doesn't carry for all circumstances by any means well I say coyotes are major predators on neonate fawns so are black bears this is one of the pieces of data that we do not have for much of the northeast is the role that black bears play on mortality of neonate fawns and deer in general we know in my work in Alaska that it could be as high as 40% of the fawns every year are taken by black bears when you generally when you find a dead fawn from a black bear you just you don't see hardly anything except you usually find right down here you'll see the lower jaw of the deer and typically you'll get that lower jaw there because I think it's probably the most massive bone in a deer fawn's body actually and the bears just don't chew it up as well as they do all the other parts so they leave it behind but you don't find much else and of course the predation by bears on neonate fawns and I'll talk in a minute here we need to know whether it's compensatory or additive and the same thing with coyotes you need to know whether it's compensatory or additive to understand what's actually happening in the population how it affects a deer people think of predation predator-prey communities is fairly simple you know in this case you've got your wildlife day shifts you've got your predators coming in and punching the clock on one side and your deer looking very apprehensive punching the clock on the other side doesn't exactly work that way the other one here this is a sort of a common notion of predation I know you missed the Wainwrights Bobby but they were weak and stupid people and that's why we have wolves and other large predators the idea that predators call the weak out of the population and are actually doing a great benefit to the prey population and there's truth to that false it's not true but it doesn't necessarily lead to a balance and this brings me to this point all of you I'm sure have seen some documentary on wildlife in which the end comment is we need to preserve the fragile balance of the coral reef or we need to preserve the fragile balance of the Amazon rainforest or we need to preserve the fragile balance of the grassland ecosystems if those balances were so fragile those systems wouldn't exist and so it isn't a fragile balance and what balance does occur is very short lived because something happens a fire winter flooding a change in animal population due to disease an invasion of an invasive species all these disturbances a road a city all of these disturbances cause a disturbance that upsets that fragile balance of nature and the fragile balance is kind of dictated or illustrated here in this model this is a deer wolf model that I wrote for the Fisher Wildlife Service back a decade or so ago but this shows you here you have a deer population and they're at carrying capacity that dotted line is carrying that's the maximum that the landscape can support and they're at carrying capacity and you introduce your wolves and this could be coyotes and the wolves go up in population very rapidly feeding on those deer the deer go correspondingly down and eventually they sort of oscillate together in synchronicity and they reach some sort of an equilibrium which is shown here by what we call phase plane diagram this is just wolf density or wolf population versus deer population and they're coming around, they're spiraling into a common equilibrium a common point so in other words they're reaching some sort of a balance the problem with this picture is at some point along here a bad winter comes in and K goes down here and all of a sudden this whole thing is no longer synchronous any longer wolf predation and coyote predation has three basic effects and most predators have three basic effects on on any prey population they can have no effect, this is typical of insects and most insect populations that are preyed upon they tend to die because winter comes they don't die because the predator keeps them in balance they reproduce and they're there in great numbers until a frost comes and kills them all the predator is just following suit basically hanging on to its prey source then there's regulation there's a nozzle on a hose so in regulation you're not limiting the prey population to a lower level necessarily than they could actually achieve based on the carrying capacity of the landscape but you're getting rid of the peaks and the troughs you're mitigating them you're smoothing them out that's regulation and in most cases in most studies of coyote predation on deer and particularly on those in the northeast or most of the Midwest large-scale data sets they tend to indicate that coyotes in most cases are regulating deer numbers at best they're either having almost no effect or if they're having any effect at all they're regulating however there are some exceptions to that and one of the studies down in Georgia showed pretty clearly that coyote predation on deer was limiting the prey population and that's the third category here limitation limitation means that the predator is keeping the prey down to a level lower than it could achieve without the predator in place and it is suppressing at that level if the predator population was reduced or eliminated the prey population would rise and grow to its maximum its potential maximum and so in the absence of the predator the population is going to be approaching K in the presence of the predator it's going to be well below K so that's limitation it says nothing about the peaks and troughs it just says that the predator is like a cap and in those kinds of systems if you enhance the habitat for the prey if they're truly limited if you enhance the habitat for the prey so they produce more offspring instead of seeing more prey develop in your habitat it's all siphoned off by the predator by the predators smaller home ranges more breeding pairs that's what true limitation is about and there is not much evidence except for what I mentioned in Georgia of limitation by coyotes but it's not impossible and there are circumstances which could arise that could create that I discussed one in the case of prey switching with snowshoer hair but if you had a situation where that experience a number of severe winners that deer were really hammered in those winners predation by coyotes which might be on a relatively low level in all other circumstances except when that deer population is plummeted and they're doing fine on snowshoe hair and so the incidental killing of any deer in that population by the coyotes is in fact suppressing that deer population to a lower level than it could achieve if the coyotes were removed from the area so that is plausible I don't think anyone's documented anything like that in Vermont but the circumstances are certainly there there could be those circumstances but they're not going to be general it's not something you're going to see all over the states very unlikely that would be the case getting back to this again so this you see the predator is actually mitigating the variation in the prey population smoothing out the curves but the fact that that population of deer is that far below K that's limitation okay that's the difference between those two and you really need to know that before you decide to go in and do predator control sewers because the outcomes based on that are going to be very very different anyway let me get you also need to know about compensatory and additive mortality compensatory mortality is or predation is when an animal prey is killed by a predator but that animal would have died from something else during that year anyway so for example it could be a neonate fawn killed by a coyote or a bear but there's a good chance that a number of those fawns are going to die in winter anyway so those that would have died in winter anyway that's compensatory mortality additive mortality is the mortality taking those fawns or taking adult deer that is additive to what would normally occur the mortality that would normally occur so it is additional mortality to the system as opposed to just substituting substituting sources it's actually adding mortality to the system or additive mortality this is an example of compensatory mortality based on this deer and wolf work in Alaska but it says what I want just pay attention to Prince Wales Island and Hecate Island here and you can see that the biggest sources of mortality for these deer populations these are radio collared deer were humans people killed most of the deer or my radio collared deer that died the biggest percentage of them the biggest source of mortality wolves are right behind at 7 and 11 pretty darn close to between these islands a little bit higher in Hecate a little bit lower on Prince of Wales but here is a big difference bears, black bears the neat thing about working on islands is that you have natural laboratories well in this case my study area here was very close to Hecate Island very similar habitat very similar weather conditions Prince of Wales has wolves and black bears Hecate has only wolves and so the black bears are absence we have a controlled experiment here and what we noticed here is that in this case the bears took a lot of deer but the other sources of mortality which were mainly winter loss because of snow and a severe winter was almost non-existent but in Hecate Island no bears took those deer but look how many died from other sources in this case it was winter loss that's compensatory mortality because at the end of the day the percentage dead in both these populations is not that much different 46%, almost 47% versus about 52% so that's evidence of compensatory mortality if it was additive mortality this bear mortality would inflate this tremendously and you would see a lot more deer being affected by predation in terms of population of deer when a deer population grows it shows a growth curve what we call a ricker curve this is like compound growth compound interest you've got an interest rate and that interest rate is determined by births minus deaths so if births are way beyond deaths you're going to increase if deaths are equal or larger than births so your interest rate is determined by births minus deaths and typically the net annual recruitment these are that's your interest that's what you are building your principal with every year principal is only growing if you have that interest well these are the young of the year they may also be immigrants and migrants but we'll ignore those for the moment think of these as the young of the year that is what is being added to the population that is also the numbers of animals the pool of animals that you can take from hunting, predators, accidental death without causing the principal to go down so the population doesn't decrease so this curve represents the pool of those individuals that can be debited from the population without causing the population to go down and with a deer population moose population, caribou population they tend to grow very rapidly when their density is relative to carrying capacity are very low everybody's got food, everybody's reproducing all the fawns are surviving and they're reproducing and they're increasing very rapidly but as they increase rapidly as they go further along R starts to decline towards carrying capacity in this case births minus deaths is getting smaller, smaller, smaller we're at carrying capacity equal the deaths in animals in which you have a fairly linear shape like this to this reduction, these are animals we call they're very sensitive to density dependence, in other words they're sensitive to their own densities and their own competition for food moose are a good example of this they tend to produce a record curve with a good even parabola shape when you look at white-tailed deer they don't show any of these effects in births minus deaths they start really getting close to K in other words it's delayed that the client is not linear it's actually negative exponential what that produces is this a much bigger arc because the effects of density dependence are being delayed closer to carrying capacity the difference here and the reason I point this out is that this is the evolutionary indications that deer, white-tailed deer are well adapted to predation because their strategy based on their demographics is to out-reproduce whatever is killing them moose on the other hand and caribou on the other hand that is not the case, they're much more sensitive to their environment their carrying capacity deer just blast out fawns and new recruits as fast as they can until they start starving and then they tend to really collapse and that's what's indicated here now the importance of this is that you need to know where your deer population is on that record curve before you can tell what effect you might have if you're going to kill all the predators let me just because if you are going in there to remove predators you want to know whether your deer population is as close to carrying capacity or is it well below carrying capacity as the potential to really grow sustainably or at least healthily and one of the things that happens is in a population if that carrying capacity is diminished the area under this curve which is the pool of recruits is going to decrease in a negative exponential fashion in other words it's going to go to hell in a handbasket really quick as carrying capacity goes down because it's going to reduce this in a non-linear way so that you're not going to be able to have resilience in the system that you had originally with a very rich system where carrying capacity is very high so carrying capacity is a driver of the dynamics as well as the volatility in a predator prey system when you have low K you're tending to see a populations of prey all over North America in which predators have a bigger role in keeping them suppressed in their numbers in actually limiting their numbers and so here you go here you have this rigger curve here showing population growth or net random recruitment in deer and in this situation you have this red line indicates the the portion of this interest that is being removed by the predator and you can see what happens in a situation where you have reduction in carrying capacity you have the predators the predators aren't necessarily declining in synchrony with your deer population which is pressed for food because carrying capacity is declined so they're keeping their numbers they're feeding on snowshoe hair they're feeding on beaver in the case of wolves they're feeding on salmon their numbers don't go down necessarily relative to let's say the deer numbers so as you move carrying capacity down this area here above that red line is quite large here but when you're reducing carrying capacity to here that area is a lot smaller and eventually you go down even further that area might be entirely below that red line so you're looking at a population that's becoming less and less resilient to predation it's going to be much more sensitive to a predator and there certainly could be circumstances in Vermont where these conditions might be in some places like Caledonia County where you typically have heavy snows which might create this kind of position the key thing here though is before you go in and decide you're going to remove your predators out of a population you need to know whether you're here if you draw a straight line across here like here this red line you have two places where net recruitment is the same you have it here if you're here if you were to remove the predator from the population you probably could see that population of prey increase dramatically and actually respond well to that reduction in predators but if you're over here you're going to drive them right to K and then K is going to be diminished because they're going to over browse the range K is going to be diminished and now you're in this death spiral or now you're in this lower curve and maybe you do the same thing again and you mistake the fact that the deer are here and you drive them to K again you run that back down further and eventually you're into a death spiral your system is going to become incredibly volatile and incredibly unresilient so you have to know where you are before you go in and plan some sort of big removal you have to know by looking at the deer so in this situation those deer are going to be healthy everyone's going to be reproducing the fawns are going to be surviving at a fairly high level or they're going to be in good condition at birth they may be being killed by bears and coyotes but at least the condition of the deer are going to look really good so the browsing levels in winter range and summer range are going to be low here you're going to have a different situation they're going to be in worse condition there's going to be higher browsing levels so you have to have those kinds of data to be able to tell you where you are relative to carrying capacity otherwise you're not going to really be able to predict where you're going to be if you go in and try to manage that situation with a predator removal so when we talk about predator removal again I came from an agency that did a lot of it when you go in and do a predator removal project you don't go in with a coyote derby you don't even just liberalize your trapping laws, your bag limits and seasons or your hunting bag limits or seasons you go in with probably paid people but in some ways compensated people who do nothing but kill the predator and they kill every predator that they can find with the hope of almost eliminating the predators entirely from the region of interest it's not recreation it's a dirty ugly business but that's the only way you end up getting to the point where you may see an effect on the prey population secondly one of the worst things you can do one of the worst decisions you can make as a public agency is to go into something like that a program of predator control and not one no for a fact that it's going to respond the way you think it's going to respond two, not reduce enough of the predator to show a difference and three, not to have a monitoring program in place so you can detect those differences so if you say you're going to increase buck harvest on deer that you can show that you are increasing buck harvest on deer because if you can't go there if you can't provide those data you cannot show that your program worked and it becomes a political nightmare a public and political nightmare because these programs are always controversial so when you go into a program like this you go in with the idea that you're going to go and you're going to clobber that predator population and you're going to set it up in such a way that you're going to see an effect if in fact you've made the right decision about where those deer are relative to K you're going to be able to detect it the worst thing you can do is not be able to do that detection to have a program going on and nobody can really tell if it's working publicly that's a nightmare that's a death sentence publicly and so you prepare for these with data and you prepare for these with a real effort by having a coyote derby that really I have no issues with that so much that I don't think it's hurting coyote populations anywhere but it's not a predator control program it's not really probably going to achieve the goal that you might think it is and it might actually not be worse it might create a worse situation so anyway predator control is a serious business and we did a lot of it even involved killing bears which is wolves we were actually out there knocking off brown bears and black bears killing cubs in the dens killing pups in the dens doing whatever was necessary efficiently to essentially eliminate predators from the landscape and we had to do that before you could see really any major effect on the population of in this case moose and caribou so when we talk about predation of course you think about the predator and its direct interaction with the animal killing the animal taking it down but there are a lot of landscape features that are important to the risk factors involved between predator and prey deer on a slope have hope deer on a flat and the wolves and coyotes are fat when you when a deer has an opportunity to get on a slope and in fact 10 degrees or more reduces risk of predation by 50% so terrain terrain matters it really matters a lot on a flat it's much tougher because you have less probability of detection of the predator and two you don't have as much escape terrain a hillside especially a forested rugged hillside is a way for a deer to escape predation so the topography is important in terms of creating risk landscape so when you create a deer yard or you preserve a deer yard winter habitat for deer man the most important places you want to be thinking about are the hillsides there certainly are going to be lowland thickets that might be very important but those hillsides are going to be prime especially those hillsides on east south or west facing slopes those should be the prime areas of concern for conserving deer winter range and because they're also probably the least risky for them in terms of predation by coyotes the other thing to consider on landscape level is that edge matters deer respond well to a greater degree of edge the more edge there is they tend to not only find more food they don't have to go as far to find it they also have available escape cover to escape predation so finer more edge leads to lower risk of predation and this is true with wolves it would be true with coyotes it would be true with red wolves in the southeast the coarser areas more big blocks of land that are chopped up as opposed to small patches you're going to have higher risk of predation and in terms of cost of locomotion for deer in winter time with snow on the ground lower cost of locomotion here because you're closer to food you also have interception of the tree canopy to reduce the amount of snow that's on the ground and I'm not talking necessarily about deer yards this kind of habitat is really good in summer as well as winter but in winter in early winter before they're really yarded up they're still feeding pretty heavily and be able to go close to an area where they can get food pretty relatively easily without having to wade through deep snow is a real benefit so cost of locomotion is a lot lower where edge is finer there's greater edge the bigger the blocks, the coarser the landscape the cost of locomotion is going to be generally higher unless you're all in forest but if you have big blocks of open ground that cost of locomotion can be a lot harder so in your landscapes finer and more edge is probably not only going to provide a better landscape for food for deer but it's also going to provide a bit of risk reduction from predation and so finally tonight I'm just going to mention the ball in the box this is a meme I used to try to get this idea of how the landscapes and caring capacity really define the behaviors and drive these predatory prey systems as much or more so than the actual interactions between the predator and prey so if you can think of this box as representing all the resources the coyotes, the bears and people and deer need to make for a sustainable deer population and harvesting and predation this ball here represents all those dynamics everything it's a super ball so if it hits something it bounces really erratically and as long as that box is really big that super ball has a lot of space to wander around and a super ball this is the balance of nature right there well it never exists it's always going to be disturbed in some way so it's going to move around in reality it's not going to sit in the middle it's going to move around and if the box is big enough that ball never touches the side the behavior can vary from year to year decade to decade but it never collapses it never finds a volatility that causes it to become extremely variable to collapse one species perhaps becoming very very rare in terms of population density very very low population density but now when you reduce that box now you're making the situation a lot more difficult to maintain itself with any kind of resilience because now that ball could hit the sides of that box and you end up with a lot of erratic chaotic behavior and so the size of that box really matters but the other lesson here is that we tend to think in our management scenarios and our management ideas about creating stability in our game populations, our furbearer populations trying to maintain stability in any of those populations is a red herring and it's also a pipe dream there is just no way that you can control enough of the parameters that control any of those populations whether it's the weather, the landscape the dynamics between the animals you can't control that enough to have stability stability is really a red herring as I said it's a pipe dream what you really want to manage for is resilience you want that system to be able to bounce around to be disturbed to be changed in some way but still have enough space so it can move around wherever it goes and it's not going to crash and when I crash I mean one species becomes very sparse and low density or maybe it completely disappears or that the goals for those populations like harvest goals collapse on you so resilience is really the key here not stability stability you'll lose your mind here you at least have a chance of actually accomplishing a goal and of course resilience then would lead to persistence the more resilient a system is the more persistent it's going to last longer and this is going to be critical in the future here in Vermont as well as all over northeast because there are dramatic changes that are coming that are going to challenge that resilience but if you maintain the habitats for deer the critical habitats for deer as much and as rich as you can you're probably going to do the most you can to make sure that you have a sustainable deer population in the presence of coyotes which would be extremely expensive and probably infeasible to get rid of to any real extent that would be meaningful your really own choice you have is going to be to maintain resilient ecosystems that keep that box as big as possible anyway that is it I'm done it's enough no no John yep nope and you might be able to on a small area but on a statewide basis it would be really tough to do yep we tried in Alaska I know we tried in Alaska but the one thing in Alaska is an interior Alaska because it's mostly open mix heart well actually tundra as well as a boreal forest you can see things so you can fly and you can count moose and wolves and can't do that here very well yeah yes yeah it has a low presence throughout the entire year but the rate of dispersal really picks up around the mating season particularly when the juveniles are reaching sexual maturity and they're really getting the urge to mate and that's a real inducement to get out of the basement I don't think we know the latter part of that question anybody knows that in terms of beginning dispersal we know for coyotes that they will they will disperse in their first year if food drives them to do it and then they will disperse in their second year because of sexual maturity there are not a lot of evidence I believe for coyote family groups to have members that are older than two years other than the breeding pair it's not like a wolf pack this is where they differ from wolf packs the one thing that I'm a little tentative if you notice I'm a little tentative I'm answering this the one thing that's conceivable is that if they're adapting more to larger prey over time they might form more of the structure you see in wolves than you typically see with the fluid coyote family groups year to year so it could change and they are plastic they can change they're very adaptable Patty Mauman has a great paper from Yellowstone about that plasticity the answer to your question is what I gave you was probably the 75-80% solution but there's another 20% out there that they just don't fit the model well they could potentially live as long as a dog but in the wild it's probably four or five years at most they do live longer where they're not heavily persecuted by people but generally they're going to be three to four years probably where they are and maybe an average of five if you look at areas where they're not heavily harvested versus adjacent ones that are probably about five would be a pretty good guess the males dying first females probably living a little longer but no and so five years would be probably the maximum that you could actually have one of those effects I was talking about about a coyote group forming that's not killing livestock for example that effect is not going to last probably more than about two, three, maybe four years and then something's going to kill the breeding pair and we for years we've never had coyote problems last year one came killed off almost our entire flock I like chickens too one of the things our neighbor had and we actually were outside like two o'clock in the afternoon and saw the coyotes walk into our yard and took one of our birds and ate it in the chicken pen and our neighbor freaked out because he assumed it was ill because one animal would walk onto your yard at two o'clock and kill it and eat it in the chicken pen a hungry coyote and that's kind of what I assumed and he was sure it was like ill of some sort and tried to hunt it down I would assume that it does not mean that they're ill because they were and then took the afternoon to have a snack and my friend came a coyote do tend and I showed this with the data from Vermont that they do tend to spend more time active at night where they're heavily persecuted by people, hunted and trapped or actually hunted, more has the effect on them and wolves are the same way they tend to become more nocturnal but they can be active at any time, they're actually a daytime hunter mostly and yeah if they had their druthers that's when they would hunt it because it's easier and at night time they do it because they're trying to be more cryptic because they're getting killed are they getting first of them and I think they kind of just broke what they thought that and they are that story though that bothers me a little bit because obviously he had no fear of you guys yeah, no, it had to be in your African lab in the sand and walked back into the woods I mean it does I can't quite get a sense of just how habituated that animal might have seemed does worry me when they become habituated there's ways of doing that too with dog food and with bird feeders that are close to the ground there's a number of ways you can get coyotes coming in and chickens would be another one and that worried most about her dog because she's old and she thinks that she's a freaking animal and so she likes to go down up the lawn yeah, I I hope it doesn't become a regular thing it could also be a disperser that just found a way to get an easy meal they are and they're easy I mean you don't risk much killing a chicken and my question is how one dog is 60 pounds and one is 60 how worried do I have to be about those coyotes who are definitely coming through my dog through my yard, bothering my dogs now they're actually bothering the dogs I mean are they but the dogs are registering that they're there and getting bothered by the fact so the dogs only have a certain area they can be in and sometimes they're barking like crazy I went out and there were two coyotes so I took a jacket and put it over my head and said get out and ran toward them and they just turned around and looked at me what is your problem they were not afraid so I am afraid of them being so comfortable and would they hurt my dogs if I had a 50 pounds I kind of doubt your dogs of that size a little wiener dog that might that might be a different story 50, 60 pound dog is probably going to be able to do okay the only thing is I mean it's not it would not be impossible that coyotes would attack and even dogs of that size I mean I have the same thing going on I have coyotes around me all the time my dog goes out and she doesn't chase them barks then does the whole perimeter and I'm not particularly worried that they're going to attack but we said that before there was a big notion for years that wolves would never kill people in North America maybe in Europe there were stories about wolves attacking people but we dismissed it for years, for decades until in Alaska about five years ago teachers walking home pack of wolves came along and killed an aider and so I'm hesitant to say that there's no issue there for you I just don't know I obviously don't encourage them in any way to be nearby but I wouldn't be overly concerned about your dogs really I don't think there's the likelihood is that they're going to be bothered by them but it is I don't think it's not impossible I mean I realize that's unsatisfactory but that's I can't give you no guarantees of course at night I can't see them so what I do is I go out with the dogs with a headlamp on because I think they're not going to like that light do you think that is true or not all coyotes come to the light and the light's on your head so it's the worst spot you could have it no it's it's the no I mean I don't think you're at any real great risk you don't think so I don't need to do that no I don't think so I don't think I mean the reason I say that I've done this kind of stuff myself quite a bit and I I go and play with the coyotes around my place all the time I howl with them and let them know that the boss is there because my howl is not a coyote howl it's a wolf howl and it's a little bit more intimidating for them so I've been fairly close to a lot of them in my adjacent area around where I live in Braintree and I never feel threatened I never feel like I get nervous about but I have to say that you know they're a wild animal and the one thing that changes everything is they look to people for food so in other words they can be curious about you and they can be maybe not worried by you but it's when they change from that to being your source of food that's when the problem and that's where I worry about I'm not sure how you know that you understand what I'm saying yeah I'm not sure how you know that that's the case so I they're going to be there even if they were eliminated there's going to be other coyotes coming in so it's going to be one of those things where you're just going to have to see for yourself I just don't want them to get my dog I don't want them to get my dog either so for example I don't just let Willow out running free she's confined you've got an underground invisible fence so they're confined so right there you've taken a big effort to safety wise if they wandered off like some people's dogs do they could be toast you I think you had your hand up for a while right they would kill a cat in an instant especially one that's just wandering out like that oh they just love that I mean that would just that would just be a they just get their tooth hooked on that collar the cat comes right with them well I'm not sure what you mean by personality of them yeah I mean they're very much like wolves and you know foxes are a bit more cat like they're a bit more edgy coyotes are not nearly as edgy they're more curious they're more again like I said wolves they're very intelligent they're fascinating to be around and watch because they are so smart that there you can watch them solving problems and it's really fascinating to watch that so their personalities are very much like wolves and you know if you can kind of think a bit an extension of that would be like dogs they're going to show very much the same sort of natural behaviors dogs do they're not going to show the behaviors that we bred into dogs in other words the difference between coyotes and wolves and your domestic dog and remember your domestic dog is a wolf it's all the same species it's Canis lupus but the difference is it's had 15,000 years of direct selection by human beings to get rid of any wolf like traits like attacking your kid because you are the alpha male and the family and your kid is a threat you know that's that's what we bred out of dogs and it took we didn't do that in a year it took 15,000 years so it's a case where they are they're going to be very dog like in a lot of those features facial recognition the signals the cues you know wagging in the tail barking howling all of those things there are expressions on their faces I'll tell you a little quick story and I mean coyotes are going to be the same way so I was darting deer it was a heck of an island and I was concealed by a logging road and I'm blowing a fawn bleat and a big male wolf comes by trotting down the road and we had radio collars on some of these wolves on heck of an island and we knew where the den was because we actually counted the puppies on the den but this is in August when they are banding the dens and they're going to meet with pups at what they call rendezvous points and so this this male just went trucking down the road and I just watched it and listened it went off into a muskeg and I heard a lot of barking or a lot of howling and yipping and you know it was a very joyful sound because it was coming together for food he's bringing food to the pups at this rendezvous site so I said great now I know where the rendezvous site is so it was a perfect day it was drizzly a little bit wind blowing in the right direction so I went down the road and I was in this big open heath area called a muskeg and I was able to approach the wolves from the downwind side from a slightly slower a lower slope so I could come up hidden from them and when I came over the little little ridge where I could see them and there were some stunted hemlock trees I was really close I was like they were like from me to you basically and so so I'm watching them they had no idea I was there and I'm watching them and so this there's pups and the pups are playing and there's one I think it must have been a male pup because it was the biggest of the pups the biggest of the litter and it was playing with the alpha male the big male wolf and it would nuzzle around and then it would bite his tail and the wolf would just shake him off and you know he'd get really irritated and the little guy would run away a little bit and then you know no more than about 30 seconds later he was right over there sniffing around well finally this big male got fed up with this and he gets up and he walks and he walks right into me so I'm behind this little hemlock tree and this big male comes trotting down and he looks up and he finally sees me and if there is an emotion of confusion that a dog can portray this was perfect this animal looked at me like what the hell are you doing here and he just he looked wide eyed and he trotted away he didn't make any noise he trotted away from me he turned around and looked again he was like are you still here and then he walks around he made no sound but just the way he carried himself his tail his back was tense he was all tense every animal in that little group knew something was wrong and they all ran away they melted away disappeared into the forest so the games up I walk out and out of the woods edge of the woods comes the alpha female comes mom and she's barking and howling and barking and howling at me so what she's doing is she's pushing me along right and then what she would do is she would run past me to the direction she wanted me to go and she would just kind of sit there and act kind of fun she actually would lie down and what she was doing is just trying to get my attention so I would walk towards her and then she would get behind me barking howl barking howl and then she would go past me again lie down and do us and she was just basically doing like a broken wing or whatever was trying to get me to get out of there and lead away and you know she followed me about a quarter mile down the road doing this so they are very much like dogs they really are in a lot of ways coyotes would be the same way yeah wolves go on killing sprees go ahead no not that I've seen no I have not if I've ever seen a carcass of a deer and that's been taken down by coyotes it's just been one deer there hasn't been like a bunch of them like they get into a wintering area or something and you've got deer everywhere that are dead the let me just answer two parts of it there's a lot of kills one thing you do have to be careful and this is something all of you to know is when you see a dead carcass out there a deer carcass out there doesn't necessarily mean it's predation even if there's a coyote tracks around it doesn't necessarily mean it's predation that could have been an animal that was dead for some other reason hit by a car, lost from a hunter died of the winter and it's being scavenged by coyotes and you can tell the difference usually if it was a kill parts are going to be scattered around big area and generally if you're there early enough there's going to be blood everywhere there's going to be sign of a struggle it's not going to be like this curled up animal lying there that's being torn apart by whatever is feeding on it right there because when an animal dies from starvation all of its blood pools in its body cavity so there's not this big splash of blood in the area so it's usually pretty clear to be able to tell the difference between what's predation and what isn't and of course coyotes are going to kill or they're going to feed on carcasses they're going to scavenge as much as they're going to kill now getting back to your killing sprees I don't really like that term because it's not really accurate for what the animal is doing they do surplus kill the term is surplus kill which means they're killing more at the moment and I'm talking about wolves now I've been documented that they will surplus kill the thing is it's not like blood sport it's because they have an advantage on their prey they've got a chance to kill a lot of food and they just go ahead and do it in other words they don't just say oh we'll just take two we'll just take one and save the rest for later no they have the advantage at that moment they have the opportunity that they're going to kill as much as they can because they're making their living on their feet there's nobody feeding them they have to go out and get it so if you were in that circumstance you'd probably do the same damn thing so yes they can surplus kill yes they can kill more than they can eat at any one moment and it doesn't always follow that they come back and clean up the rest and scavenge them they do sometimes but sometimes they just leave them and and we of course would think well that's a big waste well one of the really important things in the arctic is that those kinds of kills and even the ones in which we're not a surplus kill which is just a single animal but they didn't consume the entire carcasses that's what keeps arctic foxes alive that's what keeps ravens alive some places that's what keeps polar bears alive and so it doesn't necessarily have a you know we might look on it as a problem it's not necessarily ecologically a problem but it's what I would turn is surplus killing not killing sprees you had to ask the right tools anyhow another question my second question was wolves eliminated from the northeast lady T. Hunter so we became the ultimate predator to replace the wolf I submit so now you have a pile which is an invasive species which infiltrates from the west comes to the east why isn't an invasive species treated like zebra mussels or Eurasian milk foil or something like that by all the while why do they not consider them in the same tone Eurasian milk foil or zebra mussels why are they treated differently is that because they're like doggies no because they don't consider them an invasive species they don't consider them an invasive species yeah but they moved around north america they didn't come from overseas they came from the western us you have turkey vultures they're indigenous to north america they're indigenous to north america but they're just not indigenous to vermont what turkey vultures should we call turkey vultures invasive species because they were not indigenous to vermont they moved up basically following the roads so first off they answered the question they're not considered invasive species they're considered a natural component of the north american ecosystems sure sure wolves putting wolves let's say back into yellowstone are they invasive they were extirpated from yellowstone we put the wolves back in was that an invasive species I don't think so some people might not like the idea but still it's not what you call an invasive species the wolves were there before the coyotes were here before but certainly wolves were here before I understand I'm talking about coyotes still it's not like they're coming over from china some place or not like they're coming over from europe where they have no connections with the ecosystems in north america they have very well connections with the ecosystem something like zebra mussels will zebra mussels come into an environment and exploit it because they have no natural predators we have plenty we have the same predators that kill wolves are still alive today you're one of them it's not quite the same circumstance as what you would call zebra mussels or some other invasive species like that so you don't want to have it do you take one more question and wrap up there's a variety of things if it's like a single howl so yippie there could be a number of things one, it could be the group coming together they've been separated hunting and now they come together depending on the time of year it could be the breeding pair coming back with food in their bellies in their guts that they're going to then regurgitate to the puppies and they oftentimes will make especially in july and early august you'll hear this crazy yipping howling oftentimes that's the breeding pair and sometimes they do it even when food isn't involved just because they've been apart and they come together again there's a certain amount of exuberance from that and then you have howling and sometimes howling actually means what you think it sounds like it sounds like a really lonely sound it can mean in fact that you've got a lonely coyote out there can mean just that