There’s a moment in that episode where the guy from Ft Bragg mentions that they were achieving 60-70% nest success and Dr. Gulsby comments how great that was and then kinda speculates on what might be possibly causing it……..
It’s likely a couple of things playing into that success….
1) The timing of their burning in April/May keeping the predators occupied with plenty of easy to catch prey during nesting……
2) The ecotone between the uplands and lowlands where the majority of the hens nested…..If I’m not mistaken he said that ecotone was created by allowing the fire to just back into the lowlands and peter out……which likely means there was no fire break for the predators to exploit along that ecotone…..The random nature of a fire petering out into a bottom like that would also help prevent really defined linear lines from forming
3) This one may or may not be happening but burning at such a large scale may be temporarily manipulating landscape level movement and usage patterns of coyotes…..Meaning that you may have the broader population shifting to the current burns to take advantage of the food availability and completely abandoning other areas of the landscape during that time period
