The elusive survey

I won't mention names or any specific info to identify the school.
But, there was a study, not long ago, conducted on a military installation in Alabama.
This concluded that 70% of our newborn fawns were killed by coyotes.
I had some questions that went unanswered.
First of all, there was 11 pregnant female whitetails abducted by a group of college students who implanted a GPS tracker in the fetus. Then they tracked the births and found 7 of them dead, with coyotes eating 6 of the carcasses.
They then proclaimed that 70% of fawns are being killed by coyotes.
My questions were,:
1. How many was stillborn due to the trauma of being abducted and molested by a gang of graduate students?
2. How do we determine the fawns we're killed by coyotes? I mean coyotes are scavengers, they're happy to eat a dead carcass anytime they find one.
3. What evidence was used to determine how the fawns died?
I spend most of my time in the woods and on the farm. I don't find evidence that coyotes are killing deer, not in any great number.
I'm not stupid, I know the Coyote is a predator, but he's also a scavenger, very eager to partake of any dead animal he finds.
So, I say all this, to say that the elusive deer survey was just as much bullschit as this bogus coyote predation study.

I was at our hunting club when we had the snow and super cold weather this past winter. I got up the morning after the snow and rode down the main road looking for hog tracks. I noticed something interesting while doing so. The first 16 deer tracks I crossed ALL had coyotes tracks trailing them. I doubt the deer were trailing the coyotes.

We keep an observation log at our club. The first full season of hunting indicated that we had 4 fawns for every 10 doe. After that season we trapped and shot 53 coyotes off of our 4,000 acres. The next season our ratio increased to 8.4 fawns per 10 doe.

I've managed three commercial hunting lodges.
Observation logs tell me more about hunters, than about deer.

1. there is almost no trauma associated with implants, not a factor in still born fawns. In my experience ( a lot) very few fawns are still born. Some don't survive for long. I have seen yotes kill EVERY DAMN FAWN on a high fence place of 500 acres. ZERO fawn survival to four weeks. ZERO.

A pen vs open range.
Very different.
I roam around nearly 500 acres (free range) every damn day.
Including several acres of cattle range, with newborn calves in the fall.
I rarely ever see evidence of a Coyote kill.

I could see that happening in certain areas. Years ago I hunted Bankhead. On the first visit I heard a pack of coyotes start howling near night fall. Just surprised me someone had not killed them out. Of course their deer numbers were low. Let the population go for a few years on a tract of land you will find out quick what wild dogs and coyotes will do. I have never seen coyotes on a tract of land like I have the last five years. Seems like on the certain large tract it is like op said, see a deer track you will see a coyote track right behind it. Never seen it like that before. At some point when the predators preferred food choice runs out something else has to take their place. If deer are all that is left deer numbers will plummet. They got to eat!

I have seen numerous signs of fawn kills by coyotes and bears. If you’re not count yourself lucky. I have also personally watched two coyotes chasing a fawn during bow season.

Like I said, coyotes are predators. I know they kill "some" deer and I'm certain they have killed "some" calves. My issue is the 70% claim. No way on earth that is anywhere close to accurate.

Never got a survey. Got my first hunting license in 1980.

We average 4 fawns to 6-8 does at the house. I have one doe that keeps her fawns within 100 yds of the house most of the time. The other does very rarely have fawns.

I would agree that it's a leap to make such a projection from just 11 subjects; their conclusions could not have been statistically significant.

But the survey got back around 3000; that was enough to be statistically significant within the standard error. It usually ran less than 4% for the state, but would be a much higher number when looking at it per county. It's a lot like Yahoo research - we just need more subjects.

GC would give them much better data for each county if everyone would just report their deer. The thing that bothered me was that so many of us knew they would have reporting issues, and the dcnr brass wouldn't believe it. He does now.

Eventually, GC will be accepted and produce good numbers. But I'm afraid that's gonna take decades.

I would love to know how many fawns coyotes take each year. Outback, like you, I know they take some. I would guess that habitat would have a lot to do with it. Poor fawning habitat would lead to more fawn deaths. Fawns need a place to hide, without it they're doomed.

I agree they are different in lack of as much ground cover.

I prolly found 3-4 fresh killed half eaten fawns that year. We did not see a fawn at the start of fall, not a one thru winter. Killed every damn one of them. Unbelieveable.

I trapped and shot several yotes that fall and winter, including one huge male. We saw fawns the next summer/fall like normal.

I believe fawn recruitment is actually one thing that's pretty accurately estimated from hunter observation logs......

We have a 5400 acre lease. I am on it a LOT. It is infested with coyotes. One guy started trapping last summer. He caught over 40 coyotes and 5 bobcats. He sent pictures as they were caught so it was hard to throw the BS flag. We had a noticeable increase in fawns this past fall. That being said during turkey season they are right back. I believe it's the timing of when your does are fawning and when you remove your "resident yotes".

#coyotelivesdon'tmatter#

#coyotelivesdon'tmatter#....

If you are so deadset against coyotes having an impact on your deer herd, run your own experiment. Do camera surveys this year heavily and set a baseline for fawn recruitment on your property. During the offseason remove as many coyotes as you can and then do the same camera survey and see if fawn recruitment changes. I am betting a pretty penny that your fawn recruitment will tremendously improve just by removing x amount of coyotes. Don't take our word for it though, try it.

Because coyotes are so quick to reproduce or move to fill a vacuum, it is probably best to do your trapping no earlier than 45 days prior to fawn drop. That way the bastages don't have time to repopulate your area. And while shooting yotes may be satisfying, a bunch of traps will cover more area, and will be on the job 24/7. If you have never used traps, it is best to get some training from an old hand.

I have. And it's nowhere near 70%.
I might believe 30%.
One thing working in our favor, around here, we have no hog problem.
I could see where the fawn mortality rate could be much higher in areas with a significant Coyote and hog population. Hogs are probably worse predators than bobcats and coyotes combined.

I am pretty sure that around Montgomery County that the coyotes kill at least 30-40% of the fawns as a minimum.

Please understand that is only one project. Several have been conducted across the whit-tails range and vary from the low teens to 70% predation rates. Too much at play to take much from any one study. Just understand that coyotes impact deer numbers. Sometimes greatly, sometimes very little.

I have gotten two, my wife has gotten one, and my SIL got one.

I think the biggest thing is people with Life Time licenses move a few times and don't update their address and email with the DCNR. I have asked them about this and they tell me that they get tons of return mail each year when they mail out these surveys. You dang sure won't get one if they can't find you. AND yes I know, some of you haven't moved in 400 years and you still haven't gotten one. I also know from dealing with the public that some folks think the items are junk mail and trash them.

We have had 11 members in our club since it started. They are all experienced hunters. They know what a fawn is.

I don’t really question the survey participants being randomly selected….Wouldn’t they be selected by a computer using something like a random number generator??? Surely they're not hand selected or anything......The one thing I could see that may not be completely random is the segment of the hunting public that chooses to mail them back. That really doesn’t matter though as long as that bias is relatively constant from year to year……We’re just looking at the trends over time to change in that group and signal to us that something may be changing amongst the entire group. I don't think it would matter a whole lot anyways though because the variance in what we kill is so small between hunters. Pretty much 90% of respondents in our mock draft picked 0, 1, or 2 for an answer.....

I can't argue with that.
My experience, with hunter logs, has mostly been pay hunters.
Their observations really told me more about their habits.

I believe you…..but even if they weren’t experienced y’all would still likely estimate changes in fawn recruitment fairly accurately. They become the most easily visible deer in the group as the season progress. You’re also not trying to count any kind of real total but rather just get an average. You’re really just taking a sample similar to the hunter survey we’re talking about. You don’t have to count them all to get an idea of that seasons fawn recruitment. Y’all could only see and count say 50% and still be pretty accurate. That’s a lot when talking about sampling.

If the survey was really that accurate, all these years, then you must believe that the GC compliance is closer to 8% than 30%.

We report observations by these categories. Branch Antlered bucks, spikes, doe, fawn, and unknown. We don't estimate or record %. At the end of the season, I compile all the data at the end of the season in a spreadsheet. We also record data like did the hunter hunt on a food plot or the woods. Turkeys, hogs, predators, area hunted and morning or afternoon are also collected.

We have been very aggressive in our hog and predator controls. We are letting tons of young bucks walk.

All of it combined paints a pretty good picture of what is going on.

I might have seen 3 people last season fill out their harvest sheet after we found their deer. One of them I specifically remember was the dog hunters recording theirs. I thought that was funny since they get called out as the biggest outlaws most of the time. Now many hunters may have very well recorded it later at home and called it in to GC……but that being said, I don’t have a hard time believing that participation in GC is very low.

Bingo, it isn't the poor, the illiterate, the children, the older people, the dog hunters that alone are not reporting. It is spread across the hunting community as a majority thinks it serves no valid purpose that could not be handled in easier ways.

The last survey they released, for 2015-16, estimated 295,000 killed. GC is running roughly 25% of survey estimates. However, since GC attempts to record every deer, including those by unlicensed hunters, the GC figure should be considerably higher than the survey estimates. I don't think anyone has any idea of how many unlicensed hunters we have, so there is no way to tell from those figures what the true GC participation level might be.

But I agree with you that it is likely lower than the dcnr estimated %.

One thing that the survey definitely showed is that the trend is down. We went from pre buck limit estimates of over 400,000, to estimates 10 years later that are under 300,000. I think the low GC numbers are probably a combination of a low % of hunters reporting, and also a constantly declining harvest.

The buck limit, along with so much encouragement for hunters to kill does, are the biggest factors in the decline of our deer hunting. GC is insignificant compared to those factors.

Outback, you fail to realize the thousands upon thousands upon thousands of hours AU, MSU, OM, UGA, etc... and other universities put into studies. Whether it's human or medical studies or biology or wildlife, it's all done with very much considered variables!!

I $%%^& hated my class in statistics but I'm here to tell you that studies are done with a VERY stringent awareness of... well, everything. To think that any university study is conducted without appropriate guidelines is ridiculous. I promise you that Dr. Stephen Ditchkoff or Dr. Karl Miller or any other university sponsored study had it ducks in a row and they if they assume something, the assumption is labeled an assumption.

In this case, what you don't know causes you to question but wildlife mgmt is WHAT THESE FOLKS DO and they're not dumb. It's what they do for a livin'!