Good article on Eastern coyotes and PA deer herd

[Sandcut]

An interesting article. Worthy of discussion.


https://extension.psu.edu/the-effect...kGODg.facebook

[northny]

Well I do agree with one comment in the article. The best thing you can do to improve thee deer herd is habitat improvement. Bigger healthier deer handle hard times better. The does have bigger fawns and the post rut bucks we kill are still carrying plenty of fat on them. I co own 225 acres in NY near the Canadian border, and we saw results of habitat work within a few years of starting.

The rest of it seems to be a justification of *don*t shoot coyotes because they don*t impact deer numbers* using some strained logic. Maybe they are correct for Pennsylvania ( I just got here and don*t have experience in PA), but they don*t hold in NNY.

Let*s look at the statement that if you have two coyotes and they kill two fawns it doesn*t impact herd because the deer would have died of disease or car accident or other reasons. First a coyote that kills only one fawn is going to be an awful hungry coyote so I don*t buy the one per coyote number. Second you don*t have one or two coyotes. Near dusk howling we had a dozen or more before we starting hunting them hard. I often saw two or three at a time and early on we had years we saw more coyote than deer.

We started killing every coyote we could. Coyote numbers went down and deer numbers went up. We still kill them when we can in deer season and will take two or three each year. If we think coyote numbers are increasing we will do a post deer season coyote hunt.

Just my two cents

[wamba]

I am always skeptical of articles by experts. " two deer die a year from starvation or disease " . I imagine that somewhere in this state there are deer that starve. Likely in housing developments. Back in the 1980s when the game commission was telling us there were too many deer, I hunted in a lot of places and never saw these starving deer, or saw where the woods were over browsed.

[Sandcut]

I am always skeptical of articles by experts. " two deer die a year from starvation or disease " . I imagine that somewhere in this state there are deer that starve. Likely in housing developments. Back in the 1980s when the game commission was telling us there were too many deer, I hunted in a lot of places and never saw these starving deer, or saw where the woods were over browsed.

Shit! You only needed to drive 20 minutes up onto the Plateau in Monroe county. When I moved back up this way in 2000, if you went anywhere from Effort to Scranton and from the northeast extension to the Delaware, you could kneel down and see almost 100 yards because the vegetation was browsed so damn hard from the ground to about 4 feet up. In February 2001, I was cooking steaks on the grill one day. I had 27 deer standing in my yard walking back and forth, following me as I walked between the house and the grill. They were all sniffing the smoke from the grill. All of them were bony and skinny.and underfed. They wouldn't leave when I yelled at them. I even made ice/slush balls and pegged a couple right in their side with them, only to have the dopey bastards try to eat the slush balls.

In the 10 years alter the game commission increased the number of doe tags one could get, we actually have a healthy forest growing again with good seedling/saplimg survival. We have thick underbrush omce again.

[Gunplummer]

I mostly agree with Sandcut, but not completely. Just like the deer density B/S from the early '70s, you can't cherry pick areas of a state to do a study. I remember coming down the Turnpike at night from Scranton and there were hundreds(Literally) of deer feeding along the turnpike. They planted something there I call "Deer grass". As you drove south the deer became fewer until you saw none. More feed around the farm areas.
On the other hand, I remember the Game Commission "Bounty" on foxes and owls. Years ago there were rabbits and game birds all over the place. Almost every fox I caught had some pellets in it's ass from small game season. I was recently down below the Blue Mountain and had not been back there in years. I drove the back roads looking for a place and I saw no hit animals on the road. Large farm fields and woodlots with no small road kill.
I used to hunt in three different states on public land and watched all three get beat up by over hunting. You cannot blame the coyotes for that.

[wamba]

Shit! You only needed to drive 20 minutes up onto the Plateau in Monroe county. When I moved back up this way in 2000, if you went anywhere from Effort to Scranton and from the northeast extension to the Delaware, you could kneel down and see almost 100 yards because the vegetation was browsed so damn hard from the ground to about 4 feet up. In February 2001, I was cooking steaks on the grill one day. I had 27 deer standing in my yard walking back and forth, following me as I walked between the house and the grill. They were all sniffing the smoke from the grill. All of them were bony and skinny.and underfed. They wouldn't leave when I yelled at them. I even made ice/slush balls and pegged a couple right in their side with them, only to have the dopey bastards try to eat the slush balls.

In the 10 years alter the game commission increased the number of doe tags one could get, we actually have a healthy forest growing again with good seedling/saplimg survival. We have thick underbrush omce again.

I disagree with everything you say. Let me ask you, where all these deer that you are speaking of, was this in a huntable area? I do not want to hear about your zoo deer in housing developments ! What happened to the hunting in the huntable areas I know is a crime. For the last 30-40 years I can walk in game lands and find zero deer. There is more animal life on the moon than there is in Pa where it is legal to hunt.

[Sandcut]

I disagree with everything you say. Let me ask you, where all these deer that you are speaking of, was this in a huntable area? I do not want to hear about your zoo deer in housing developments ! What happened to the hunting in the huntable areas I know is a crime. For the last 30-40 years I can walk in game lands and find zero deer. There is more animal life on the moon than there is in Pa where it is legal to hunt.

Where are all the deer? The majority were shot and eaten. Back in the early 2000s, when the deer herd was artificially kept too large due to restrictions on shooting does, when the first attempts to reduce the number of does was in full swing, most of the guys that I know were taking between 2 and 5 does/season for their freezer because it was allowed and not that hard to do. IN THIS AREA. I have no idea what hunting is like down in Palmerton. But, understand, deer are not evenly distributed across the state. Just because you have land nearby that is "huntable" doesn't mean that it is good for hunting a particular species.

As to where they are now...they're out there. It's just that the herd is at a healthy level when compared to the ability of the habitat to support them. At this current population, one actually has to HUNT to be successful. Gone are the days of walking into the woods 50 yards and having 5 deer walk past within the first 2 hours of daylight. You gotta work for it. Which is also, subsequently, why I haven't tagged a deer in years. In short, I'm not a very good deer hunter. I don't have the patience to sit still long enough and I'm too lazy (and a bit crippled) to hump it back into the boonies where the nice bucks lurk. But, it isn't difficult. It just takes discipline and perserverence and I'm not willing or able to make that commitment. The converse is, the daughter of one of my coworkers has taken a doe, a 10 point, and two 8 points in the last 4 years of hunting. She's even done better than both her dad and her brother. Because she earns it the hard way!

But, I have a suspicion that you are firmly entrenched and that nothing that I say to you will sway you in the least.

Either way, good luck to you if you do go hunting. And if everything that you do results in constant failure to take meat, perhaps you need to alter your habits.

[Palerider]

Thanks for posting, I enjoyed the read.

It*s the ecosystem that drives deer numbers. Of course there are individual contributing factors and everything needs to be considered to manage the herd. Some, like doe tags are easier than others such a cutting, replanting and fencing off for several years old growth forest. Another factor for the north woods deer is mast production. My oaks dropped TONS of acorns this year, one of the trees literally had a carpet of them on the ground. Last year, there wasn*t hardly any. And last year had a rough, snow covered winter, put those 2 together and I bet that had a far larger contribution on deer survival than coyotes or any 1 individual factor.

[ar15jules]

This turned quickly into a debate over deer heard numbers.

[Sandcut]

This turned quickly into a debate over deer heard numbers.

It pretty much always was. At least from the perspective of providing evidence that the coyote population (at least in PA) isn't having a negative impact on the deer herd size ON AVERAGE across the state. It is possible that individual packs have more influence in some areas than in others in the same way as different vegetation communities influence herd size.