I had one more idea on the coyotes but I’m gonna start a new thread for it. For the sake of not making this first post too long to read….i’m just gonna throw some initial thoughts out there and then I’ll explain the thinking behind it in later posts as I get raked over the coals…..

BSK eluded to this years ago but I didn’t understand what he meant at the time…I think I do now. We humans have likely created a interstate highway system for coyotes that may exacerbate the problem is certain areas for certain properties. Have you ever noticed how some properties will constantly have coyotes on them while others close by don’t seem to ever have an issue or it be a rarity to see some??? I believe coyotes aren’t utilizing the landscape anywhere near evenly as you look across the bigger picture of things. They’re heavily focused on certain travel routes and dismissing areas that don’t provide the same ease of travel. Yes, food likely plays a role in it but I think what likely sets the stage for the way it all plays out are long…for the most part straight… runs of interior, firebreak, gas line, etc that link together in a chain to move the coyote efficiently across a large area….north to south….east to west…etc…Places with more fragmented chains or very few of these long clean runs will likely see less of an issue. Don’t misunderstand what I’m saying here….you very well may have firebreaks or an interior road….but if its fragmented off from anything linking it to a chain on either side when looking at the bigger picture then its not as efficient to them….especially the transient ones…..Keep in mind now that I’m not talking about a firebreak that links together in a square….Look at as if you’re just wanting to head north and link one clean run to another to another that way and you’ll get the idea.

Now what I’m about to say may not be simple but I think the theory may hold true and be very possible to accomplish. I think some folks could likely heavily reduce the impact they see from coyotes by redesigning the layout of their property or possibly creating some type of barriers in order to fragment any “interstate” that may be running through their place….breaking up the links in the chain and the long efficient runs. I’ll stop there for now

Aint much u can do for a big farm tho...other than kill em when u see em or trap

My neighbor to the north says he has more coyotes than deer. I rarely see a track. Not sure why that is, but you could be right. No interstates around though

Not sure what all that meant but I typically see more yotes the same place I see more animals of all kinds.

The coyote interstate is the power grid.

Let me give a quick example of something I’ve seen that’s pointing me in this direction and then I’m gonna call it until tomorrow. I’ve got more examples coming but this is just one slice of the pie.

In 14 years I’ve never had much a of coyote issue here at my place. I’ve always said that they just don’t pass through here for some reason and I don’t know why…Yet you can hear them all the time across the road. One side note I’ll get to more later is that I’ve also always had a chit load of does….Well, I have this old road from back whenever that runs through my place and it was grown over with crap to begin with. As I hinge cut and laid trees down when I first started making improvement… I just made it that much more of a clutter. A few years ago a lot of the trees and such were rotten and I decided I was gonna take my front end loader and clean it all to make a lane you could see down and what not. So I did. I’ve just now started realizing what happened but long story short….suddenly in the last few years I’ve started seeing many more coyotes utilizing my place than in the past….and this year I also saw a big decrease in does. Where would you guess I usually see the most coyote sign??

Yep….the old road I cleaned out. All I did was open up a closed off link that suddenly hooked it up to my neighbors land and paved the interstate to pass through my place. Due to some other variables about the landscape, I was fragmented off from it back when the old road was closed over with trees and growth. The only thing yotes could have done then would have been to weave there way through all kinds of hinge cuttings and undergrowth or through a yard…etc….A very inconvenient and inefficient mode of travel and hunting for them. I opened up the coyote express and I did it to myself….I’m about to see I can’t reverse that situation with some chainsaw work to close it back off. Luckily I'm still not in the greatest of situations for them because the chain doesn't link up to anything on the other side of my place much . It does link me to the end a long stretch through the neighbors place I referred to though and then some..... but fortunately it becomes a little inconvenient for them to pass on through my place to link up to the system across the road or anything else on my side or I'd have them much worse I believe. They still come through but not like I've seen in other situations I'll describe in more examples to come. If the chainsaw work is a succes then that tell me that the theory holds true….now how we apply that to other situations is where the brain storming comes in. There’s different possibilities here and likely some different approaches….I’m not saying they are all simple or feasible….but maybe possible. Coyote trapping isn’t an easy solution either and if you have one of these main routes across your place then it may not be a solution at all…..more on that later as well…..

Maybe I’m misunderstanding here, but your saying if you have road beds and fire breaks, then that’s why you have coyotes on your property?? You do realize that they are coyotes? They are like democrats on food stamps. They want Easy housing and food. Rats, rodents, rabbits and other stuff make up there main diet. They are easy and plentiful, deer fall in where ever they can. Guess your gonna gonna day coyotes kill healthy calves next.... I’m sure you have a lot of points in your reasoning, but roads and fire breaks isn’t one. Just my opinion

I think they know better than the deer when humans are hunting. I didn't see a coyote from the stand one time this year. I got about 1 on camera during hunting season proper.

Two weeks of the season being out and I am covered up in coyotes. Best I can tell they are hunting rabbits all through the night on my food plots. Just about every other night they show up, a group of 3, and they appear to be running all through a clear cut and around a large food plot all night. I don't get any deer being run around on camera, so I really think they are just focused on rabbits and possums.

Fawning season is when I think they focus on deer. I've found enough fawn bones and kill sites to know that.

I think I have read a study hypothesizing the idea that raptor species follow interstate systems on annual migrations because the fresh roadkill is abundant and easy to get to. If the study’s idea wasn’t out right proven, I think it still managed to show very strong correlations and patterns.

Path of least resistance.

This is actually where I planned on going to next with this anyways so this worked out well…..

In order to better understand what I’m talking about let’s look at how coyotes are using the interstate system to hunt and in doing so I’ll talk about a couple more example of properties I’ve seen that point me toward the original point I made. Now I’m not saying that this the only way coyotes obtain food but I think this is likely one of the big ones for many of them in our area. This is gonna be how I perceive to be happening….

I lease a few hundred acre property with a couple folks from my family. It’s a little more odd shaped than this but lets just call it a long rectangle running north to south. Starting at the southern end of the property there’s one main road that runs through the center of it all the way to the north end that’s probably a mile or more in length. It takes a few gradual “S” turns along the way but for the most part it’s a pretty clean and direct line running north to south. When we first got the land I went in during late summer to do some coyote trapping and see if couldn’t thin them down some because the main road was full of scat and tracks. It was a few days after some big rain had come through and went down to do some looking around to see where I might want to set traps. The road was still wet and you could easily follow tracks down it for pretty much the entire mile.

Well, I immediately picked up on a fresh set of tracks at the south end and just for curiosity sake I started following them down the road to see where the went to. It stayed on the road 500-600 yards kind of wandering back and forth from one side to the other and then suddenly I came to a spot where he stopped, slightly back-tracked himself, and then turned as if to go out a deer trail. He made it just inside the edge the cutover before turning back and continuing on down the road again….“Hmmm…what the heck was that about?” I thought to myself….and then I realized what he had done. From working my tracking dogs I recognized it…..He went back to check a scent that perked his interest.

As continued to follow his tracks all the way through our property and on out the other side it dawned on me what he doing from on a bigger scale. He’s simply running a long clean run across the landscape that’s taking him through prey rich areas and that crosses lots and lots of game trails along the way. He covered the better part of our property in one swoop. He’s playing a numbers game…..He’s hoping that if he crosses 100 game trails then maybe 1 or 2 will provide him with a meal. He’s not after the healthy rabbit or the healthy mouse…..he’s looking for the weak, the wounded, and the recently deceased.

So I went ahead and set up traps on the property and ended catching several coyotes off of it. The crazy thing about it was I caught 90% of them in one location. I trapped out the entire property from one spot on the far south end where the interstate started through our property. Now here’s the sucky part….I trapped until all sign was gone and still left the traps out for 3 or 4 days after all the sign was gone. However, when we came back 2-3 weeks later….the road was already filling back up with coyote sign.

Let me jump around a little right here and go to another property for comparison. I was tracking for a guy earlier this and we started having a conversation about coyotes and he was telling me that they had their property trapped for the first time back in August. I told him about trapping on our property and how it sucked the way filled right back in. This is in January keep in mind….he tells me that he has only seen or caught on camera one coyote on their property the entire deer season and there was pretty much no sign of them either. That was odd to me because I figured they would just fill back in at least somewhat similar to how they had done on our place. This made me start pondering over why there was such a difference and it became another slice in the pie that’s pointing me toward the difference being the coyote interstate running through our place. The hunter was likely fragmented off from such a system and the dogs they caught off of his place were likely the home range dogs that had taken residence over time. With no interstate running through his place….he didn’t have transient dogs constantly passing through to fill back in and take up residence as quickly.

Not only that but if you look at studies they show that roughly 25% of the dogs are transient all the time and roughly another 25% show signs of being both transient and home range. So if you have such a highway through your place then not only would you likely get the immigrants quickly filling back in….but you’re also likely to continually get the purely transient dogs continually coming through….a double whammy.

I’ll stop there and continue on later……..

I believe this one is a stretch, coyotes dont need roads.

This is not an “all or nothing” type scenario I’m presenting……I’m making the case that these runs make the situation worse and that it likely wouldn't be nearly as bad if you could shut them down somehow.

[quote=jwalker77]I believe this one is a stretch, coyotes dont need roads.[/quote
But it's the path of least resistance. That's the nut shell.

Exactly….but its even a little deeper than that…..it’s path of least resistance moving across the bigger landscape. Look at the numbers from the study I talked about. If that’s the case then it means that one third to one half of the population are constantly moving across the landscape….What are they using as means of travel?.....

I've always thought that yotes followed
the rabbit population.
And killing a coyote just makes room for another
one.

Before road systems I'm sure they traveled river and creek systems. May have even followed the indian trails when theys were following migratory animals.

Shutting down a yote travel route is near impossible without building a fence...they got trails thru the thickest cutovers u can imagine cuz that's where the food is

One thing to keep in mind in all of this is that we can’t just simply refer to it as “coyote” and look at them all with the same generalized concepts. You’ll have think deeper into it and look at how the coyote population itself is broken down into groups. Studies are showing us that part of the pop is transient, part are home range, and part show both. I figure the ones that show both really want to be a home range dog but are getting kicked on the road or dispering to a new home, etc…..Just look at the situation with the guy I tracked for. He likely had home range dogs on his place that likely used his roads, and field edges, and things we would expect within his area. However, his property likely didn’t layout in a way that linked it long range travel routes like I’m referring to. He was bordered by interstate on one side, main highway in another direction, and big river on a third side….so he was somewhat fragmented off from any long runs. That’s different than lets say a timber lease in sout Bullock Co where a dog might be able to link up to one road and firebreak after another for 20 miles. The guy who is fragmented off probably wont see the same influx of new coyotes like the guy who's linked into a 20+ mile chain. Also he likely won't see nearly as many coyotes even when he does have home range dogs on his place because he probably doesn't have the transient ones passing through very often either
This is just a guess....not saying its definite or anything.

Gonna have to go deeper than generalizations to understand whe

Yep and they gonna take a easy route traveling. That’s just common sense, not to “deep physiological thought”. But you have to have food for the coyotes to live and thrive. Dead animals is number 1 on there list hence the abundance on farms. Cattle, chicken, hogs and any other kind of farm, they smell dead flesh and it’s a dinner bell. Look at the lure and bait you use in traps... it’s dead stinking animal parts, not deer blood. I would agree they’ll trail up wounded deer if getting the chance, Easy meal that they can track easily. 90% of coyotes I kill on the farm are when we are calving, not because they wanna eat baby calves, but eat there chit! That nasty, stinking, protein filled, yellow colostrum chit. They love it and it’s easy to eat.

Last thing I’ll say on this subject, no matter what kind of “spin or deep thought” process you put on it. Coyotes are wild animals that eat easy meals, and/or eat what they have to in order to survive. All this roads and interstate talk on how they pick the places they stay and live because of the road system is horsechit. A coyote will live wherever and however he needs to to survive. It’s that simple. All this is my opinion not facts, I’m just a dumb ole farmer. So......