Coyotes in Pennsylvania and New York are mostly coyote-wolf hybrids

By AD CRABLE, Intelligencer Journal, link to original post

Perhaps no critter in Pennsylvania has been the subject of more rumor, notoriety and speculation than the eastern coyote. Remember the stories that persist to this day that the Pennsylvania Game Commission, or insurance companies or foresters secretly released coyotes into the state to trim the deer herd?

Now, the wily predator is being reviled anew as a key figure in the latest brouhaha over how deer are managed in the state. There are those, several Pennsylvania game commissioners among them, who fear coyotes are making a considerable dent in the deer population, already intentionally whacked down by hunters.

The contention is that growing numbers of coyotes are taking deer, especially fawns, and will stymie attempts to let deer rebound. The Game Commission should factor in such considerable predation in determining deer quotas, but is not, according to critics.

A recent study using DNA testing to show that coyotes in Pennsylvania and New York are mostly coyote-wolf hybrids — and thus bigger, more effective hunters than their western coyote counterparts — fuels the fire.

Reports of coyotes surfaced in the 1930s and the first documented coyote was killed in Tioga County in 1940. By 1990, an estimated 1,810 were being trapped and shot. The take rose to 11,652 in 1998 and 23,699 in 2008.

Coyotes have been found in very Pennsylvania County, including Philadelphia. Given their secretive nature, there’s no way of know just how many are in the state.

Matt Lovallo, the Game Commission’s furbearer biologist, has said 50,000 to 60,000 may be a good guess with the population still growing in southwestern and southeastern parts of the state. Ha. Try 200,000 to 250,000 says Randy Santucci, a Pittsburgh businessman who’s launched his own research into the issue.

He says in talking to biologists and reading studies in such other states as West Virginia, South Carolina, Virginia, Maine and Alabama that it’s becoming clear that “the predation factor of these coyotes is a big issue.”

He says, for example, that West Virginia had zero reports of livestock damage from coyotes in 1991. In 2005, there were claims filed for 1,300 calves and 2,300 sheep. He says more people are coming forward in Pennsylvania to relate stories of adult deer being killed by coyotes.

“It shows these animals are pack hunting and killing adult deer,” says Santucci, whose current effort is trying to line up a presentation of his research and message to the state House and Senate game and fisheries committees.

“I think the concern that many people have is we have drawn our deer numbers on public lands down dramatically to less than 5 deer per square mile. If there are lower numbers, and we have fawn predation, there’s more impact.” But Game Commission biologists and a Penn State researcher remain adamant that coyotes are not taking an inordinate number of deer.

“I have no information to suggest that coyote predation is a problem,” says Duane Diefenbach, an adjunct professor of wildlife ecology at Penn State, who performed the seminal study of fawn mortality in Pennsylvania from 2000-2002.

His research involved radio telemetry tracking of more than 200 fawns in the Quehanna Wild Area in northern-tier counties and Penns Valley near State College.

The study found that nearly 70 percent of fawns died within a year in forested settings. About 22 percent was from predation, with about two-thirds of that coming about equally between coyotes and bears.

But, and this is the important part, according to the Game Commission, about 40 percent of antlerless deer killed each year by hunters are fawns.

That’s been monitored for decades. If more coyotes were killing more fawns, that 40 percent rate in the fawn-to-doe ratio would go down. It hasn’t, not in a single wildlife management unit, according to the Game Commission.

“From a management standpoint, we are achieving our management objectives of keeping most Wildlife Management Unit deer population trends stable,” says Jerry Feaser, Game Commission spokesman.

“Those trends are remaining stable with hunting as a primary mortality cause, as well as predation of bears, coyotes, bobcats and vehicles — not to mention poaching.”

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Predators Were Not Their Friends

By JOHN PITARRESI, Observer-Dispatch link to original article

In today’s world, or at least much of it, predators are glamour animals. Bears, mountain lions, wolves – they are seen as noble animals, symbols of the wild by a great many people. They fill that role quite well.

In the early days of New York state, and most of the East, however, they were despised, and the early settlers did their best to do away with them. In most cases, they succeeded.

Today, we do have plenty of bears, and coyotes, too, but wolves and mountain lions, even considering reported sightings here and there, aren’t likely to make a comeback any time soon.

Wolves were particularly hated by the pioneers. You can argue that they had over-the-top responses to the animal, but they had very concrete reasons to find the creatures less than endearing. If you lived on the frontier, wolves – there is some thought that our present coyotes were misidentified by settlers and were referred to by that name – were far more than dramatic symbols of hard times. They had a real impact on quality of life, and it wasn’t good.

I recently read Paul Schneider’s excellent book, “The Adirondacks: A History of America’s First Wilderness,” a fascinating look at life in the mountains from the earliest days of European contact to the 1990s. I was especially struck by a passage concerning Mrs. Adolphus Sheldon, a pioneering woman who lived in Essex County early in the 19th century.

In those days, trying to survive in the mountains was called “toughing it,” and you’d better believe Mrs. Sheldon toughed it. Life was hard growing up at her father’s homestead, and it didn’t get any easier for her as a young adult. “After I married, we moved across the valley westward where we had to tough it,” Mrs. Sheldon said.

The Sheldons lived on a barely cleared half-acre in a cabin that had no stove or fireplace for the first five years. Mrs. Sheldon recalled going to the grist mill, sweeping up waste flour, picking the worms out of it and baking bread. Life was no picnic. You didn’t need bears and wolves eating your crops and killing your livestock.

Sheldon told of the time she and her husband went out to the cornfield in the middle of the night, and she held a torch so Adolphus could shoot the bear that regularly fed there.

No bear, though, was as wearying as the wolves. “You could have no sheep,” she said. “The wolves would tear you right down. You could hear them way off in the night. One would howl, then another answer – howl, howl, howl, then another way off, howl, howl, howl, till they got up such a roar that it would almost tear you down.”

Wolves, as handsome and wild and independent as they might be, held no glamour or nobility for Mrs. Sheldon. It might have been bad science or insensitive, but bounties paid by the state and local governments for predator hides and skulls for a century or more made sense to her.

I don’t mean to suggest that whatever predators and nuisance animals we have now should be done away with, even if I would like to see fewer skunks tearing up lawns in my neighborhood, but maybe you have to appreciate the point of view of Mrs. Sheldon and other early Americans just a little bit.

Yes, they hated predators, maybe a bit too much, but they had their reasons.

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