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……..