I saw one of Mark Buxton's post showing the habitat he works toward with his customers, and he says if you have the understory done right, your fawn recruitment goes way up and yotes become less of an issue.
I would love to have some big clover fields like he shows pic's of.
We typically picture this as simply creating a bunch of thick understory for the deer to hide fawns in but coyotes don’t hunt at night through their vision……Its gonna be through scent on the air and you really cant hide from that through visual obstruction……If you notice something about all of the understory pics Buxton show they are all heavily forb dominated with low amounts of grass……These properties likely have a fraction of the rodent population that a heavily grass dominated property produces…..Without as much of the easy to catch meat and potatoes prey source...it's likely that resident yotes have larger range sizes on average and smaller litters…..
I bet its through this avenue that pressure on fawns is likely reduced and not as much through what we look at and visually think of as the reason………It probably end up being more about the number of pups per sq mile that have to be fed……Just to put some numbers on it as am example…..It may be that you have a forb dominated property supporting 1 mating pair territory for every 600 acres that produces 2 pups to feed while a heavily grass dominated property may support 1 mating pair every 300 acres that produce 4 pups on average……The difference is 2 pups per sq mile versus 8 that have to be fed......That's just the general concept anyways....
