I do know Harper has been saying lately with the current trends we need great habitat and we need to be trapping.
The problem with trapping is a lot of us don't live near our property, so it's tough to run a trap line consistently. I'd love to hear ideas on what absentee landowners could be doing to knock the predators back.
If hens are being flushed off of the nest at anywhere close to a 60-80% disturbance rate……then that means that there are a lot of opportunities or occurrences for coyotes to learn from…..For any coyote that has made it through a couple nesting seasons these are likely not random hunting events anymore and instead much more calculated pursuits ……Its almost a certainty that they would know which areas to return to and target……I wonder if any are smart enough to hang by a group of eggs waiting on the hen to return….. or if they learn to come back to that same spot again later to check for her being there knowing that eggs = turkey……I would think probably so……They’re smart critters that don’t require a lot of repetition to learn…..
That being said……something that I would think we probably would have to start focusing more on with trapping for folks that are in your situation would be what I guess you could call “precision trapping”……..Instead of just trying to indiscriminately trap a volume of coyotes at any given time…..the goal would be to go in during Feb/March with the intent of just removing enough that you know you got the resident dogs on your property…….basically insuring that the coyote age structure on your property is always young each nesting season with new adolescents moving in that haven’t yet “learned” how to hunt turkeys more efficiently….I don’t think you want to let the same mating pair hunt multiple seasons on your property because they will surely get better at it
