July 18, 2025 • 29 mins
Brent took a trip back to college on this episode! After his Kansas coyote hunt with decoy dogs, he sat down with Kansas State University professor and Kansas Extension Service Wildlife Control Specialist, Dr. Drew Ricketts, to correct Brent on some coyote facts.
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Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:05):
Welcome to this Country Life. I'm your host, Brent Reeves.
From coon hunting to trot lining and just general country living.
I want you to stay a while as I share
my experiences and life lessons. This Country Life is presented
by Case Knives on Meat Eaters Podcast Network, bringing you
the best outdoor podcast the airwaves had off. All right, friends,
(00:28):
grab a chair or drop that tail gate. I've got
some stories to share. Welcome to this country Life podcast.
This one's kind of different. You can see me on here,
and you can see my guest on here. Today we're
doing an audio and a video version of this. And
(00:49):
I am in at Kansas State University in Manhattan, Kansas,
and I'm talking with my friend, doctor Drew Ricketts. Drew
is with the Extension Wildlife Specialists or he is an
Extension Wildlife Specialist here and he works in the Hortor,
Culture and Natural Resources Department here and as a professor. Drew,
thank you for being here.
Speaker 2 (01:10):
Oh absolutely, thanks for having me on your show.
Speaker 1 (01:13):
Brent.
Speaker 2 (01:13):
This is a pretty big honor for me.
Speaker 1 (01:15):
Well, you know, we met I guess a month ago
and we were decoy dog hunting with my friend Jeff Ryder,
who you met on that hunt and that's that is
a video that will come out sometime in twenty twenty
six and Decoy Dogs give a brief history of that.
Folks that's familiar with it, or maybe I did an
(01:35):
episode on this a few several months back about decoy
dog hunting and hunting with Jeff. But I tried to
explain how it all works, which is the interaction between
two different canines is. It's pretty cool. But it's always
brought up a you know, references are it's brought up
(01:58):
thoughts about how couts or coutes, however you want to
pronounce it, affect the environment. And surprising to me a
kid that grew up my father was a longtime cout
hunter and he was just running coats with dogs, you know,
they chasing it. Listened to the dogs and the cout
gets away. You know. It was never usually the cout
(02:21):
never lost and was never killed or caught by the
dogs or whatever. It was just a sport where you
listened to the dogs running. Whoever's dog was in front
was the winner, you know, and that was the end
of it. So someone who from a small child up
until a large adult, now I had a wrong view
(02:43):
of how couts really affect the landscape. And when once
I got to talking to Jeff Ryder and seeing the
different things and seeing things for myself, and then especially
when you came in and started adding the facts to
what the figures just didn't add up, it's been very
intriguing for me. And we're gonna get into all of that, sure.
(03:04):
The first I want to give give me a little
a bio about yourself, Drew, and how you wound up
being here where you are today.
Speaker 2 (03:10):
Well, I grew up in Southeast Kansas. I've lived in
Kansas my whole life. Grew up fishing, hunting, trapping. When
I was a toddler, dad was trapping for a living
and writing trapping books really, and so my daycare was
riding on his shoulders checking a trap line basically during
(03:31):
during that season of the year. And and you know,
lots of fishing when I was young, hunting as I
grew up, and I kind of quit trapping for a while,
got into coon hunting real big for a time when
I was in college, and then got out of college,
came back to doing a lot of trapping, started doing
a lot of fur trapping for coyotes, and during I
(03:55):
guess I got a degree at what at k State
and wildlife management in between in there, had a brief
stint in South Dakota studying some badgers and stuff like that,
putting radio colors on those kind of critters. Came back
to Kansas and started a habitat management business, doing a
lot of pasture clearing and that kind of stuff too,
(04:17):
And that's when I really got into coyota trapping. And
then I really I beat up my body pretty bad
doing that stuff for a living, and I got bored,
and so I just decided I wanted to come back
to school and pursue some kind of path that had
let me fool with animals a little bit more for
my job. Got a degree a PhD from Case State
(04:41):
in in biology with a focus in wildlife management, studying
small mammals. So I trapped like two thousand mice and
rats about five thousand times over four years.
Speaker 1 (04:55):
And Jesus you mentioned now there's no difference in mice rats.
Let me go and correct you. There's only a big rats,
a little rags. Yeah, And I don't like none of yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 2 (05:06):
But during that time I had to figure out how
to keep myself saying, because fooling was with mice is
my favorite thing either. Really, So I've got some funding
to put GPS callers on coyotes during that time and
kind of studied how they moved around, looked at what
killed them and that sort of thing, and that turned
into part of my PhD degree, and then after that
I just kind of rolled into this job.
Speaker 1 (05:27):
So, yeah, let me ask you a question before we
get started on the on the on the stuff here.
Did you learn more about coats trapping them or did
you learn more about coats in school.
Speaker 2 (05:39):
All of the above. Yeah, but the school part of
it isn't something that I learned in class. It's what
I learned from putting GPS callers on coyotes and tracking
them around, and then learning how to trap coyotes during
the summertime is a totally different ballgame than trapping coyotes
during during the fall when they're easy to get.
Speaker 1 (05:59):
My brother there is a a as a trapper, as
a coat trapper, and a good one, and he's he's
catching a lot of them for these fox pens and
stuff like that, and for you know, to control them
my own places where there's too many coats. If the
landowners want to thind out and he'll tell you quick
there is there's two different seasons to trapping codes. So
(06:23):
it's and I probably phrased that question wrong. As far
as did you learn more, let me let me ask
you this. After you started with the radio callers, did
you learn things that relearned things you thought you knew
about how colds act or move across the landscape?
Speaker 2 (06:44):
Oh?
Speaker 1 (06:45):
Yeah, something, What was probably the most surprising thing that
you learned?
Speaker 2 (06:48):
Well, you know, I had I had read about some
of the differences in the social structure of coyotes. And
to keep it simple, there's there's residents and there's train
and residents are going to be the pairs that are
breeding some of their offspring from last year that we
would call helpers that they allowed to stay around and
(07:09):
not disperse, and then the pups from this year if
it's during a time of the year when they would
have had pups already. And then the transients are these
nomadic coyotes that aren't really tied to a home range.
And when I got those GPS callers on the coyotes,
just realizing how big of an area those transients cover,
that was very interesting to me. Another thing that was
(07:33):
really surprising is how often and how many times, even
way into the future they are, not into the future,
but long time after a cow or a buffalo has died.
How many times they come back to that carcass, even
when there's nothing left to eat, that remains an important
part of their territory for six months or a year
(07:54):
after that food's gone.
Speaker 1 (07:55):
Wow. Yeah, well, I'm going to mess around and learn
something today. Let's get started, man, from from your point
of view, when we got a list here stuff kyot
biology and our historical kyote distribution. You know, a lot
(08:16):
of people and me being included, have learned recently that
kyotes haven't always been where colotes are. And I mean
you see the stuff. You see the post on social media.
You see the news reports of somebody's cat getting snatched
in the middle of the chair by kydi, you know,
because they saw it on the security camera or whatever.
(08:36):
But that ain't always been the case. They haven't always
been there. How did they get to where coyotes are now? Sure?
Speaker 2 (08:44):
So you know, there's been several different changes that have
allowed them to expand their range Historically. You got that
picture in front of you, and we can make that
available on the on the YouTube stream when you put
that up. But it's there's there's a big red area
and now that's where coyotes were. That's their historic distribution
prior to nineteen hundred.
Speaker 1 (09:04):
And if you're listening to this and not seeing the
graft that's up, it's covering like two thirds of the
United States from westward, like up to I assume that's
like right along the Mississippi.
Speaker 2 (09:17):
River, Mississippi and Ohio. Okay, so that's that boundary on
the eastern side.
Speaker 1 (09:21):
And on all the way down to the Yucatan.
Speaker 2 (09:23):
Yeah, yeah, yeah. And so if you're east of that
that boundary basically in Mississippi, I'm sure it's not a
solid boundary because kyotes could swim across the sure, right,
But that was basically the eastern extent of their range.
And since nineteen hundred they've expanded to occupy all that
area east of there. They've also gotten up into you know,
(09:45):
Nova Scotia. They're further into Alaska than they ever were
historically and further down into Central America. And so when
we think about coyotes having an impact on critters in places,
you know, a lot of the places where we hear
about coyotes having the most impact on species like deer
(10:05):
end up being places where there's only been coyotes for
maybe one hundred years, but in some instances it's thirty
years or sixty years, and so they're kind of a
new predator in some of those places now they've replaced
a predator. You know, the southeast would have been home
to the red red wolves, right, and so coyotes have
(10:26):
kind of expanded to occupy that niche that red wolves
previously occupied. When we're thinking about what led to them expanding,
the changes that people have made to the landscape, coyotes
aren't really good at making a living in just totally
forced dominated areas. So when we cleared the forest and
started farming, and those sorts of things that made it
(10:47):
easier for coyotes to make a living there, killing the
large predators that were there or extirpating them, removing them
from the landscape, gray wolves, red wolves, mountain lions, you know,
all the different species that sometimes kill coyotes and prey
on them or kill them because they don't like them.
You know, those all those things together are kind of
(11:10):
what's allowed them to expand. You mentioned the interactions in cities,
and that's kind of an interesting one because there's a
lot of evidence from from the southwestern US that coyotes
in the very large Native American cities that existed prior
to European settlement in North America. It looks like coyotes
(11:30):
were probably incorporated into those cities just like they are
into our modern cities really, and so it's just taking
them time to figure out how to deal with modern
humans a little bit better. And then the other thing
along with that too is you know, coyotes are small
enough that a lot of people are willing to tolerate
them in town and close to where they live. We
(11:51):
don't see them as a threat the same way that
we do gray wolves, you know, and so they're tolerated
more than the larger predators are, and that's why we
see more coyotes in cities than we would the larger predators.
Speaker 1 (12:05):
Has that been you think the increase in sightings in
urban areas is because of technology now like cameras, security
cameras and stuff, or is the population growing or expanded
into urban areas more.
Speaker 2 (12:20):
It's growing and expanding into urban areas more, for sure,
you know, going back into the seventies is when there
started to be reports of attacks on people in cities
in California. So it's just as coyotes have become more
and more abundant further east, they've started occupying some of
these cities that are further and further east and having
more interactions with people.
Speaker 1 (12:41):
Okay, any fatal Has there been any fatal reports or
fatalities from a couple The.
Speaker 2 (12:50):
Most recent one, I'm going to get the date wrong.
It was in the early two thousands, and it was
in Alaska as a woman who I believe was a
reporter and she was out for a jog and she
got attacked by a pack of coyotes.
Speaker 1 (13:03):
And killed wow.
Speaker 2 (13:05):
And some after that happened, they did some research on
that group of coyotes and figured out that there was
a really hard winner, or a series of hard winners,
and those coyotes had figured out how to prey on moose,
which is way way out of the normal prey range
(13:26):
for coyotes, right, But they figured out how to hunt
more like wolves. They figured out how to chase those
moose down in the snow, and so they became predators
of larger critters and it was that group of coyotes
that they believe attacked this woman.
Speaker 1 (13:41):
So that behavior, yeah, yeah, we're still not helping with
a villain, no label that they've got.
Speaker 2 (13:49):
No no, And that's okay. I mean, you know, all
critters have positive and negative values, sure right, I mean
recreational value, monetary value, and all those sorts of things.
But at the same time, we can have negative interactions
with critters that we love. You know what, white tailed
deer one of the most popular critters in the US, right,
but they're responsible for more dollars in property damage and
(14:12):
more of human fatalities than most of the critters that
we have.
Speaker 1 (14:15):
Yeah, and to thin those down, I mean the object
when you say, you know, kill a coyote, save a deer,
I think, really how that goes?
Speaker 2 (14:25):
Is it?
Speaker 1 (14:25):
Well?
Speaker 2 (14:26):
You know, it really depends on where you are how
much of an impact coyotes have on deer. So one
of the things that goes along with that range expansion
is as coyotes expanded into the east, there was some
hybridization that occurred with wolves and with domestic dogs and sot.
(14:46):
The next graph I brought to show you shows that
in dark gray, all the coyotes in that area in
dark gray are basically one hundred percent coyote, and all.
Speaker 1 (14:59):
That pretty close to the historic range of them is.
Speaker 2 (15:03):
That it's very close to the extoric range, but it
includes the areas to the north and west that coyotes
have expanded to beyond that historic range. In the eastern US,
then most of those coyotes have some dog or some
wolf in them, and they've documented that, you know, with
the longer legs, a more a little bit more of
(15:27):
a complex social structure where they might hunt in packs
more than Western coyotes do, and those sorts of things
that they're able to be better predators of larger animals.
Speaker 1 (15:37):
So there's a site there's a physical difference in Western
and Eastern.
Speaker 2 (15:43):
They tend to be a little larger, they tend to
have lankier legs, a skull structure that's not wolf like
but more more robust than a Western coyote, and that
translates into some of their behaviors too.
Speaker 1 (15:59):
Yeah, well, I know that there's and forgive me if
I pronounced it's wrong, but I think it is not
called Bergman's rule or Bergsman's rule. Where animal or mammals
get larger, the further north, you go, yeah, in latitude,
So I didn't. I had no idea there would be
a difference going east and west instead of the north
(16:19):
and south.
Speaker 2 (16:20):
There is, but it's more associated with their genetics than
it is with their physical environment. So that tendency for
critters to be smaller towards the equator and larger towards
the poles has to do with heat dissipation and heat retention,
whereas this other difference is because of that introgression of
(16:41):
wolf and dog DNA.
Speaker 1 (16:43):
Well, tell me what's an old coyote? What's a lifespan
with Kyovida?
Speaker 2 (16:46):
Well, a really old coyote, you know, in the wild,
is going to be like ten years the maximum known
age based on age teeth that I know of in
the literature. There may be something newer than this, but
fourteen years. Oh yeah, And in captivity they can live
to be over twenty. So basically, when we think about
(17:06):
their life span and that sort of thing, it's kind
of like a dog's yeah yeah, yeah.
Speaker 1 (17:11):
Well, and you think about it too, at fourteen regardless
of how you correlate that to human years, because I
think seven has been kicked out. The one to hear
as of lately from K and nine are dogs to humans.
But I mean that dude's getting up and he's got
to make a living every day and find something to
eat right every day, and want in captivity somebody's bringing
(17:33):
him yeah, you know, a chicken leg or whatever, which
is kind of like the way I like to go
through life. It's I'm more successful. I wouldn't be as
big as I am if I had to rustle it
up every day. But there's so many things working against
these these these things out there just like it is
all wild animals, sure, but they have become quite a
depth that had adapted the difference surround us, which is
(17:56):
why you see them in urban areas and s and
making a living. But you've got a list here, stuff
to go through. You've got mortality listed up here. Yeah,
tell me what? Why? Why? This is why you've got
this listen to here? What's the points there that you
wanted to talk about?
Speaker 2 (18:14):
Well, you know, I mean just thinking about how it's
different in different places. So one of the things that
we talked about with their expansion is the fact that
we released them from predation by bigger predators in a
lot of places, and that allowed them to expand. So
historically that would have been important in a lot of
the range. Now human cause mortality has taken the place
of that. So in many populations, human cause mortality is
(18:40):
the majority of mortality, and sometimes that's mostly harvest, sometimes
it's mostly vehicle collisions, and in a lot of places
it's probably going to be somewhere, you know, some combination
of that. But there's a recent study in Wisconsin that
found that that you know, human cause mortality would the
(19:00):
majority of their mortality, and harvest was like ninety some
percent of that, which was interesting to me because I
wouldn't think it would be that high. But then we've
got natural mortality, so they're they're susceptible to basically all
the diseases and parasites that we treat our dogs for.
So canine distemprovirus is a really important one, parvovirus would
(19:23):
be an important one, heartworm, hookworm, tapeworms, all those sorts
of yeah, all of that, yeah, yeah, and then mange
of course, oh yeah, I've seen that. You know where
that came from. No, if you if you do a
Google search or whatever internet deal you like to use,
you can find a court document from nineteen oh six,
where it might have been nineteen oh five. But anyway,
(19:46):
the state of Montana hired some biologists to go out
and catch coyotes and wolves and bring them into a
lab and infect them with scabies and turn them back
loose because they figured that would be cheaper, a cheaper
way to control coyotes and wolves then paying bounties would be.
And so that's how we got mange in our in
our wild cans.
Speaker 1 (20:06):
Really. Yeah, well thanks a lot, Montown. I'm gonna blame
Garrett Long for that. I hope he's watching that is Uh,
that is so interesting. So and that brings up like
the bounty thing. Yeah, they've been vilified for so long.
You know, if you're paying a bounty on something just
(20:27):
to shoot it, sure, you know, was that was it
deserved when that when that came about? Or were they
or were they getting blamed for a lot of stuff
that they weren't actually doing.
Speaker 2 (20:39):
Sure, it's I think it's probably all the above, right,
I Mean, the vast majority of coyotes don't fool with livestock. Uh,
And that's surprising to a lot of people. That's that's
basically an individual behavior.
Speaker 1 (20:55):
It tends sorry I'm gonna get I'm gonna get in
a lot of trouble for doing that, right there.
Speaker 2 (21:02):
Coyot coyotes praying on livestock. It tends to be dominated
by pair or family groups that have pups, uh, and
that also have territories that overlap mostly sheep and goats,
but but some some cattle as well. And when they
have those pups, and especially that period around whelping time
(21:27):
up until those pups can start getting out and hunting
a little bit, uh, that's when we see the most
large prey items being important to those coyotes. Most of
the time, coyotes are eating rabbits and voles and insects
and mice.
Speaker 1 (21:44):
And now you tell me how you know that, because
somebody right now is looking at that radio that they're
listening to and saying doctor Drew has lost his month. Yeah, yeah,
tell me how you know that.
Speaker 2 (21:55):
So, so here's here's the studies from Kansas we can
look at. Really, so I just I summarized one that
is from nineteen sixty eight, so it's really old. But
the cool thing about this study is it's based on
stomach contents, so it's back during the bounty period and
(22:15):
Professor by the last name of Guyer here at k
State had folks that were bringing in coyotes, and he
was looking at the reproductive tracks, looking at their stomach contents,
aging them, and doing all.
Speaker 1 (22:26):
Kinds of at the universe.
Speaker 2 (22:28):
Oh yeah, yeah, And he was a physiologist, so he
got into a lot of detail. But it's like twenty
three hundred coyotes, okay, so it's not a small sample size.
It's a really good sample size. Forty percent of the
stomachs had rabbits thirty one or sorry, this is actually
percentage of stomach contents. So forty percent rabbit, thirty one
(22:49):
percent roding, and twenty eight percent carrying. So eaton did
that stuff would regardless of But here's the deal. When
a coyotes got a belly full of meat, that's big meat.
We can't tell if it's from a calf that they
killed or a calf that they scavened. They found it,
and so that's all lumped into that bucket right there.
(23:12):
The thing about this one, though, is that we didn't
have all that many deer in Kansas when that study
was taking place. Our first modern deer season was nineteen
sixty five in the state of Kansas.
Speaker 1 (23:24):
So that's just three years into that.
Speaker 2 (23:26):
Yep, yep, and the study was actually done before then.
So if we look at some of the more modern studies,
these are based on scat contents. One of them a
little bit further west in Kansas, seventy six percent of
the scats had cotton rats, twenty nine percent voles, nineteen
percent cotton tails, four percent had deer in them, two
(23:48):
percent had cattle and this is hair, right, nineteen percent
had insects, nine percent had fruits, and so on. Another
one that was done by those same researchers about the
same time here really close to Manhattan, on a site
that had a lot higher deer densities. They found similar
results for the small mammals and critters like that, but
(24:10):
twenty percent of them had deer in them. So their
main prey is small mammals and insects and fruit and
stuff like that. But when deer are really abundant, they're
going to eat some deer. That doesn't mean that they
killed all the deer that they ate right.
Speaker 1 (24:27):
Right exactly, Because I mean a mice mice or a
vole or a gopher or something's going to be a
whole lot easier to catch than a deer. Yeah, and
would you have a guess as to or is there
any data that supports how much of that is carrying
and how much is is our deer that they killed.
Speaker 2 (24:52):
So the data that you could look at to think
about that is data from fond survival studies. So so
we did a study way out in western Kansas, put
GPS callers on a whole bunch of deer, both mule
deer and whitetails, and we on average, you know, fawn
survival in that study across three years was around thirty percent, okay,
(25:19):
of the of the fawns that were killed, thirty to
forty percent of those fawns were attributed to a loss
to a predator, and a majority of those predator losses
were coyotes. A fawn that dies out in the landscape
but wasn't killed by cote, a lot of those fawns
(25:39):
are still going to get scavenged by coyotes.
Speaker 1 (25:42):
Okay.
Speaker 2 (25:42):
So if you applied that same percentage to the scats
that had deer hair in them, and then about forty percent,
thirty to forty percent of those scats that had deer
hair in them were probably fawns that they killed.
Speaker 1 (25:59):
Now, when you.
Speaker 2 (26:00):
Look at other areas in Kansas, we haven't seen a
deer decline as coyotes have become more abundant through time
in the eastern US, the areas that they've expanded into.
Part of the reason that they're doing so much coyote
research related to coyote impact on deer is because as
(26:21):
coyotes increase, they did see a decline in deer numbers.
South Carolina, Georgia, some of those states are very good
examples of that. And if you look at this map,
which is this is these studies here are included in
these results, but they looked at a whole bunch of
different studies that looked at scat coyote scatt throughout the
(26:45):
US Okay, and the bars on these going from left
to right are small mammals, fruit, rabbits, and then ungulates,
which would be deer, caribou, anything we're going to think
about that's in the deer family, oh and also pronghorn.
(27:06):
So what you can see on this really clearly is
that in the Great Plains where coyotes are native, ungulates
are a small percentage of their diet. In the Southwest,
in those desert communities, ungulates are almost non existent in
their diet. Their diet is dominated by rabbits and small
(27:27):
mammals and a little bit of fruit. But as you
go further east, so in that dark green area in
the east, in the light green area in the northeast,
ungulates are a much larger percentage of the diet. And
ungulates actually dominate the diet in those studies in the southeast, okay.
Speaker 1 (27:47):
Just because the sheer number of them being there.
Speaker 2 (27:50):
Well, not just that, but other things too. Right, those
coyotes are the coyotes that have some wolf and doggedy
in a and them, so they're they're more apt to
be able to prey on those larger prey at thems
so and maybe it's something that they've had to figure
out as they moved in too.
Speaker 1 (28:11):
But they.
Speaker 2 (28:14):
I think that the broad answer to your question is
it really depends on where you are, So they there's
never a wherever you are with this species, it's always
this way in biology, and that's that's one of the
really big challenges that's associated with, you know, some of
(28:34):
these things like one of you we talked before about
that that meme from Facebook, let.
Speaker 1 (28:40):
Me stuff you're out there, Yeah, because we I'm I'm
as bad as Clayton Newton. I'm gonna do a little
foreshadow because we're going to stop right here, and this
is going to be part one of my talk with
doctor Drew right here, and we're going to get into
the meat and the potatoes of what everybody is wanting
to know about, and that's the deer and cold relationship,
(29:03):
we'll call it, and whether or not we're doing the
Lord's work when we're killing colds to save our dear leases.
We'll be back next week for the next week. Thank you, doctor,
Thank you sir. Y' all be careful.
Welcome to this Country Life. I'm your host, Brent Reeves.
From coon hunting to trot lining and just general country living.
I want you to stay a while as I share
my experiences and life lessons. This Country Life is presented
by Case Knives on Meat Eaters Podcast Network, bringing you
the best outdoor podcast the airwaves had off. All right, friends,
(00:28):
grab a chair or drop that tail gate. I've got
some stories to share. Welcome to this country Life podcast.
This one's kind of different. You can see me on here,
and you can see my guest on here. Today we're
doing an audio and a video version of this. And
(00:49):
I am in at Kansas State University in Manhattan, Kansas,
and I'm talking with my friend, doctor Drew Ricketts. Drew
is with the Extension Wildlife Specialists or he is an
Extension Wildlife Specialist here and he works in the Hortor,
Culture and Natural Resources Department here and as a professor. Drew,
thank you for being here.
Speaker 2 (01:10):
Oh absolutely, thanks for having me on your show.
Speaker 1 (01:13):
Brent.
Speaker 2 (01:13):
This is a pretty big honor for me.
Speaker 1 (01:15):
Well, you know, we met I guess a month ago
and we were decoy dog hunting with my friend Jeff Ryder,
who you met on that hunt and that's that is
a video that will come out sometime in twenty twenty
six and Decoy Dogs give a brief history of that.
Folks that's familiar with it, or maybe I did an
(01:35):
episode on this a few several months back about decoy
dog hunting and hunting with Jeff. But I tried to
explain how it all works, which is the interaction between
two different canines is. It's pretty cool. But it's always
brought up a you know, references are it's brought up
(01:58):
thoughts about how couts or coutes, however you want to
pronounce it, affect the environment. And surprising to me a
kid that grew up my father was a longtime cout
hunter and he was just running coats with dogs, you know,
they chasing it. Listened to the dogs and the cout
gets away. You know. It was never usually the cout
(02:21):
never lost and was never killed or caught by the
dogs or whatever. It was just a sport where you
listened to the dogs running. Whoever's dog was in front
was the winner, you know, and that was the end
of it. So someone who from a small child up
until a large adult, now I had a wrong view
(02:43):
of how couts really affect the landscape. And when once
I got to talking to Jeff Ryder and seeing the
different things and seeing things for myself, and then especially
when you came in and started adding the facts to
what the figures just didn't add up, it's been very
intriguing for me. And we're gonna get into all of that, sure.
(03:04):
The first I want to give give me a little
a bio about yourself, Drew, and how you wound up
being here where you are today.
Speaker 2 (03:10):
Well, I grew up in Southeast Kansas. I've lived in
Kansas my whole life. Grew up fishing, hunting, trapping. When
I was a toddler, dad was trapping for a living
and writing trapping books really, and so my daycare was
riding on his shoulders checking a trap line basically during
(03:31):
during that season of the year. And and you know,
lots of fishing when I was young, hunting as I
grew up, and I kind of quit trapping for a while,
got into coon hunting real big for a time when
I was in college, and then got out of college,
came back to doing a lot of trapping, started doing
a lot of fur trapping for coyotes, and during I
(03:55):
guess I got a degree at what at k State
and wildlife management in between in there, had a brief
stint in South Dakota studying some badgers and stuff like that,
putting radio colors on those kind of critters. Came back
to Kansas and started a habitat management business, doing a
lot of pasture clearing and that kind of stuff too,
(04:17):
And that's when I really got into coyota trapping. And
then I really I beat up my body pretty bad
doing that stuff for a living, and I got bored,
and so I just decided I wanted to come back
to school and pursue some kind of path that had
let me fool with animals a little bit more for
my job. Got a degree a PhD from Case State
(04:41):
in in biology with a focus in wildlife management, studying
small mammals. So I trapped like two thousand mice and
rats about five thousand times over four years.
Speaker 1 (04:55):
And Jesus you mentioned now there's no difference in mice rats.
Let me go and correct you. There's only a big rats,
a little rags. Yeah, And I don't like none of yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 2 (05:06):
But during that time I had to figure out how
to keep myself saying, because fooling was with mice is
my favorite thing either. Really, So I've got some funding
to put GPS callers on coyotes during that time and
kind of studied how they moved around, looked at what
killed them and that sort of thing, and that turned
into part of my PhD degree, and then after that
I just kind of rolled into this job.
Speaker 1 (05:27):
So, yeah, let me ask you a question before we
get started on the on the on the stuff here.
Did you learn more about coats trapping them or did
you learn more about coats in school.
Speaker 2 (05:39):
All of the above. Yeah, but the school part of
it isn't something that I learned in class. It's what
I learned from putting GPS callers on coyotes and tracking
them around, and then learning how to trap coyotes during
the summertime is a totally different ballgame than trapping coyotes
during during the fall when they're easy to get.
Speaker 1 (05:59):
My brother there is a a as a trapper, as
a coat trapper, and a good one, and he's he's
catching a lot of them for these fox pens and
stuff like that, and for you know, to control them
my own places where there's too many coats. If the
landowners want to thind out and he'll tell you quick
there is there's two different seasons to trapping codes. So
(06:23):
it's and I probably phrased that question wrong. As far
as did you learn more, let me let me ask
you this. After you started with the radio callers, did
you learn things that relearned things you thought you knew
about how colds act or move across the landscape?
Speaker 2 (06:44):
Oh?
Speaker 1 (06:45):
Yeah, something, What was probably the most surprising thing that
you learned?
Speaker 2 (06:48):
Well, you know, I had I had read about some
of the differences in the social structure of coyotes. And
to keep it simple, there's there's residents and there's train
and residents are going to be the pairs that are
breeding some of their offspring from last year that we
would call helpers that they allowed to stay around and
(07:09):
not disperse, and then the pups from this year if
it's during a time of the year when they would
have had pups already. And then the transients are these
nomadic coyotes that aren't really tied to a home range.
And when I got those GPS callers on the coyotes,
just realizing how big of an area those transients cover,
that was very interesting to me. Another thing that was
(07:33):
really surprising is how often and how many times, even
way into the future they are, not into the future,
but long time after a cow or a buffalo has died.
How many times they come back to that carcass, even
when there's nothing left to eat, that remains an important
part of their territory for six months or a year
(07:54):
after that food's gone.
Speaker 1 (07:55):
Wow. Yeah, well, I'm going to mess around and learn
something today. Let's get started, man, from from your point
of view, when we got a list here stuff kyot
biology and our historical kyote distribution. You know, a lot
(08:16):
of people and me being included, have learned recently that
kyotes haven't always been where colotes are. And I mean
you see the stuff. You see the post on social media.
You see the news reports of somebody's cat getting snatched
in the middle of the chair by kydi, you know,
because they saw it on the security camera or whatever.
(08:36):
But that ain't always been the case. They haven't always
been there. How did they get to where coyotes are now? Sure?
Speaker 2 (08:44):
So you know, there's been several different changes that have
allowed them to expand their range Historically. You got that
picture in front of you, and we can make that
available on the on the YouTube stream when you put
that up. But it's there's there's a big red area
and now that's where coyotes were. That's their historic distribution
prior to nineteen hundred.
Speaker 1 (09:04):
And if you're listening to this and not seeing the
graft that's up, it's covering like two thirds of the
United States from westward, like up to I assume that's
like right along the Mississippi.
Speaker 2 (09:17):
River, Mississippi and Ohio. Okay, so that's that boundary on
the eastern side.
Speaker 1 (09:21):
And on all the way down to the Yucatan.
Speaker 2 (09:23):
Yeah, yeah, yeah. And so if you're east of that
that boundary basically in Mississippi, I'm sure it's not a
solid boundary because kyotes could swim across the sure, right,
But that was basically the eastern extent of their range.
And since nineteen hundred they've expanded to occupy all that
area east of there. They've also gotten up into you know,
(09:45):
Nova Scotia. They're further into Alaska than they ever were
historically and further down into Central America. And so when
we think about coyotes having an impact on critters in places,
you know, a lot of the places where we hear
about coyotes having the most impact on species like deer
(10:05):
end up being places where there's only been coyotes for
maybe one hundred years, but in some instances it's thirty
years or sixty years, and so they're kind of a
new predator in some of those places now they've replaced
a predator. You know, the southeast would have been home
to the red red wolves, right, and so coyotes have
(10:26):
kind of expanded to occupy that niche that red wolves
previously occupied. When we're thinking about what led to them expanding,
the changes that people have made to the landscape, coyotes
aren't really good at making a living in just totally
forced dominated areas. So when we cleared the forest and
started farming, and those sorts of things that made it
(10:47):
easier for coyotes to make a living there, killing the
large predators that were there or extirpating them, removing them
from the landscape, gray wolves, red wolves, mountain lions, you know,
all the different species that sometimes kill coyotes and prey
on them or kill them because they don't like them.
You know, those all those things together are kind of
(11:10):
what's allowed them to expand. You mentioned the interactions in cities,
and that's kind of an interesting one because there's a
lot of evidence from from the southwestern US that coyotes
in the very large Native American cities that existed prior
to European settlement in North America. It looks like coyotes
(11:30):
were probably incorporated into those cities just like they are
into our modern cities really, and so it's just taking
them time to figure out how to deal with modern
humans a little bit better. And then the other thing
along with that too is you know, coyotes are small
enough that a lot of people are willing to tolerate
them in town and close to where they live. We
(11:51):
don't see them as a threat the same way that
we do gray wolves, you know, and so they're tolerated
more than the larger predators are, and that's why we
see more coyotes in cities than we would the larger predators.
Speaker 1 (12:05):
Has that been you think the increase in sightings in
urban areas is because of technology now like cameras, security
cameras and stuff, or is the population growing or expanded
into urban areas more.
Speaker 2 (12:20):
It's growing and expanding into urban areas more, for sure,
you know, going back into the seventies is when there
started to be reports of attacks on people in cities
in California. So it's just as coyotes have become more
and more abundant further east, they've started occupying some of
these cities that are further and further east and having
more interactions with people.
Speaker 1 (12:41):
Okay, any fatal Has there been any fatal reports or
fatalities from a couple The.
Speaker 2 (12:50):
Most recent one, I'm going to get the date wrong.
It was in the early two thousands, and it was
in Alaska as a woman who I believe was a
reporter and she was out for a jog and she
got attacked by a pack of coyotes.
Speaker 1 (13:03):
And killed wow.
Speaker 2 (13:05):
And some after that happened, they did some research on
that group of coyotes and figured out that there was
a really hard winner, or a series of hard winners,
and those coyotes had figured out how to prey on moose,
which is way way out of the normal prey range
(13:26):
for coyotes, right, But they figured out how to hunt
more like wolves. They figured out how to chase those
moose down in the snow, and so they became predators
of larger critters and it was that group of coyotes
that they believe attacked this woman.
Speaker 1 (13:41):
So that behavior, yeah, yeah, we're still not helping with
a villain, no label that they've got.
Speaker 2 (13:49):
No no, And that's okay. I mean, you know, all
critters have positive and negative values, sure right, I mean
recreational value, monetary value, and all those sorts of things.
But at the same time, we can have negative interactions
with critters that we love. You know what, white tailed
deer one of the most popular critters in the US, right,
but they're responsible for more dollars in property damage and
(14:12):
more of human fatalities than most of the critters that
we have.
Speaker 1 (14:15):
Yeah, and to thin those down, I mean the object
when you say, you know, kill a coyote, save a deer,
I think, really how that goes?
Speaker 2 (14:25):
Is it?
Speaker 1 (14:25):
Well?
Speaker 2 (14:26):
You know, it really depends on where you are how
much of an impact coyotes have on deer. So one
of the things that goes along with that range expansion
is as coyotes expanded into the east, there was some
hybridization that occurred with wolves and with domestic dogs and sot.
(14:46):
The next graph I brought to show you shows that
in dark gray, all the coyotes in that area in
dark gray are basically one hundred percent coyote, and all.
Speaker 1 (14:59):
That pretty close to the historic range of them is.
Speaker 2 (15:03):
That it's very close to the extoric range, but it
includes the areas to the north and west that coyotes
have expanded to beyond that historic range. In the eastern US,
then most of those coyotes have some dog or some
wolf in them, and they've documented that, you know, with
the longer legs, a more a little bit more of
(15:27):
a complex social structure where they might hunt in packs
more than Western coyotes do, and those sorts of things
that they're able to be better predators of larger animals.
Speaker 1 (15:37):
So there's a site there's a physical difference in Western
and Eastern.
Speaker 2 (15:43):
They tend to be a little larger, they tend to
have lankier legs, a skull structure that's not wolf like
but more more robust than a Western coyote, and that
translates into some of their behaviors too.
Speaker 1 (15:59):
Yeah, well, I know that there's and forgive me if
I pronounced it's wrong, but I think it is not
called Bergman's rule or Bergsman's rule. Where animal or mammals
get larger, the further north, you go, yeah, in latitude,
So I didn't. I had no idea there would be
a difference going east and west instead of the north
(16:19):
and south.
Speaker 2 (16:20):
There is, but it's more associated with their genetics than
it is with their physical environment. So that tendency for
critters to be smaller towards the equator and larger towards
the poles has to do with heat dissipation and heat retention,
whereas this other difference is because of that introgression of
(16:41):
wolf and dog DNA.
Speaker 1 (16:43):
Well, tell me what's an old coyote? What's a lifespan
with Kyovida?
Speaker 2 (16:46):
Well, a really old coyote, you know, in the wild,
is going to be like ten years the maximum known
age based on age teeth that I know of in
the literature. There may be something newer than this, but
fourteen years. Oh yeah, And in captivity they can live
to be over twenty. So basically, when we think about
(17:06):
their life span and that sort of thing, it's kind
of like a dog's yeah yeah, yeah.
Speaker 1 (17:11):
Well, and you think about it too, at fourteen regardless
of how you correlate that to human years, because I
think seven has been kicked out. The one to hear
as of lately from K and nine are dogs to humans.
But I mean that dude's getting up and he's got
to make a living every day and find something to
eat right every day, and want in captivity somebody's bringing
(17:33):
him yeah, you know, a chicken leg or whatever, which
is kind of like the way I like to go
through life. It's I'm more successful. I wouldn't be as
big as I am if I had to rustle it
up every day. But there's so many things working against
these these these things out there just like it is
all wild animals, sure, but they have become quite a
depth that had adapted the difference surround us, which is
(17:56):
why you see them in urban areas and s and
making a living. But you've got a list here, stuff
to go through. You've got mortality listed up here. Yeah,
tell me what? Why? Why? This is why you've got
this listen to here? What's the points there that you
wanted to talk about?
Speaker 2 (18:14):
Well, you know, I mean just thinking about how it's
different in different places. So one of the things that
we talked about with their expansion is the fact that
we released them from predation by bigger predators in a
lot of places, and that allowed them to expand. So
historically that would have been important in a lot of
the range. Now human cause mortality has taken the place
of that. So in many populations, human cause mortality is
(18:40):
the majority of mortality, and sometimes that's mostly harvest, sometimes
it's mostly vehicle collisions, and in a lot of places
it's probably going to be somewhere, you know, some combination
of that. But there's a recent study in Wisconsin that
found that that you know, human cause mortality would the
(19:00):
majority of their mortality, and harvest was like ninety some
percent of that, which was interesting to me because I
wouldn't think it would be that high. But then we've
got natural mortality, so they're they're susceptible to basically all
the diseases and parasites that we treat our dogs for.
So canine distemprovirus is a really important one, parvovirus would
(19:23):
be an important one, heartworm, hookworm, tapeworms, all those sorts
of yeah, all of that, yeah, yeah, and then mange
of course, oh yeah, I've seen that. You know where
that came from. No, if you if you do a
Google search or whatever internet deal you like to use,
you can find a court document from nineteen oh six,
where it might have been nineteen oh five. But anyway,
(19:46):
the state of Montana hired some biologists to go out
and catch coyotes and wolves and bring them into a
lab and infect them with scabies and turn them back
loose because they figured that would be cheaper, a cheaper
way to control coyotes and wolves then paying bounties would be.
And so that's how we got mange in our in
our wild cans.
Speaker 1 (20:06):
Really. Yeah, well thanks a lot, Montown. I'm gonna blame
Garrett Long for that. I hope he's watching that is Uh,
that is so interesting. So and that brings up like
the bounty thing. Yeah, they've been vilified for so long.
You know, if you're paying a bounty on something just
(20:27):
to shoot it, sure, you know, was that was it
deserved when that when that came about? Or were they
or were they getting blamed for a lot of stuff
that they weren't actually doing.
Speaker 2 (20:39):
Sure, it's I think it's probably all the above, right,
I Mean, the vast majority of coyotes don't fool with livestock. Uh,
And that's surprising to a lot of people. That's that's
basically an individual behavior.
Speaker 1 (20:55):
It tends sorry I'm gonna get I'm gonna get in
a lot of trouble for doing that, right there.
Speaker 2 (21:02):
Coyot coyotes praying on livestock. It tends to be dominated
by pair or family groups that have pups, uh, and
that also have territories that overlap mostly sheep and goats,
but but some some cattle as well. And when they
have those pups, and especially that period around whelping time
(21:27):
up until those pups can start getting out and hunting
a little bit, uh, that's when we see the most
large prey items being important to those coyotes. Most of
the time, coyotes are eating rabbits and voles and insects
and mice.
Speaker 1 (21:44):
And now you tell me how you know that, because
somebody right now is looking at that radio that they're
listening to and saying doctor Drew has lost his month. Yeah, yeah,
tell me how you know that.
Speaker 2 (21:55):
So, so here's here's the studies from Kansas we can
look at. Really, so I just I summarized one that
is from nineteen sixty eight, so it's really old. But
the cool thing about this study is it's based on
stomach contents, so it's back during the bounty period and
(22:15):
Professor by the last name of Guyer here at k
State had folks that were bringing in coyotes, and he
was looking at the reproductive tracks, looking at their stomach contents,
aging them, and doing all.
Speaker 1 (22:26):
Kinds of at the universe.
Speaker 2 (22:28):
Oh yeah, yeah, And he was a physiologist, so he
got into a lot of detail. But it's like twenty
three hundred coyotes, okay, so it's not a small sample size.
It's a really good sample size. Forty percent of the
stomachs had rabbits thirty one or sorry, this is actually
percentage of stomach contents. So forty percent rabbit, thirty one
(22:49):
percent roding, and twenty eight percent carrying. So eaton did
that stuff would regardless of But here's the deal. When
a coyotes got a belly full of meat, that's big meat.
We can't tell if it's from a calf that they
killed or a calf that they scavened. They found it,
and so that's all lumped into that bucket right there.
(23:12):
The thing about this one, though, is that we didn't
have all that many deer in Kansas when that study
was taking place. Our first modern deer season was nineteen
sixty five in the state of Kansas.
Speaker 1 (23:24):
So that's just three years into that.
Speaker 2 (23:26):
Yep, yep, and the study was actually done before then.
So if we look at some of the more modern studies,
these are based on scat contents. One of them a
little bit further west in Kansas, seventy six percent of
the scats had cotton rats, twenty nine percent voles, nineteen
percent cotton tails, four percent had deer in them, two
(23:48):
percent had cattle and this is hair, right, nineteen percent
had insects, nine percent had fruits, and so on. Another
one that was done by those same researchers about the
same time here really close to Manhattan, on a site
that had a lot higher deer densities. They found similar
results for the small mammals and critters like that, but
(24:10):
twenty percent of them had deer in them. So their
main prey is small mammals and insects and fruit and
stuff like that. But when deer are really abundant, they're
going to eat some deer. That doesn't mean that they
killed all the deer that they ate right.
Speaker 1 (24:27):
Right exactly, Because I mean a mice mice or a
vole or a gopher or something's going to be a
whole lot easier to catch than a deer. Yeah, and
would you have a guess as to or is there
any data that supports how much of that is carrying
and how much is is our deer that they killed.
Speaker 2 (24:52):
So the data that you could look at to think
about that is data from fond survival studies. So so
we did a study way out in western Kansas, put
GPS callers on a whole bunch of deer, both mule
deer and whitetails, and we on average, you know, fawn
survival in that study across three years was around thirty percent, okay,
(25:19):
of the of the fawns that were killed, thirty to
forty percent of those fawns were attributed to a loss
to a predator, and a majority of those predator losses
were coyotes. A fawn that dies out in the landscape
but wasn't killed by cote, a lot of those fawns
(25:39):
are still going to get scavenged by coyotes.
Speaker 1 (25:42):
Okay.
Speaker 2 (25:42):
So if you applied that same percentage to the scats
that had deer hair in them, and then about forty percent,
thirty to forty percent of those scats that had deer
hair in them were probably fawns that they killed.
Speaker 1 (25:59):
Now, when you.
Speaker 2 (26:00):
Look at other areas in Kansas, we haven't seen a
deer decline as coyotes have become more abundant through time
in the eastern US, the areas that they've expanded into.
Part of the reason that they're doing so much coyote
research related to coyote impact on deer is because as
(26:21):
coyotes increase, they did see a decline in deer numbers.
South Carolina, Georgia, some of those states are very good
examples of that. And if you look at this map,
which is this is these studies here are included in
these results, but they looked at a whole bunch of
different studies that looked at scat coyote scatt throughout the
(26:45):
US Okay, and the bars on these going from left
to right are small mammals, fruit, rabbits, and then ungulates,
which would be deer, caribou, anything we're going to think
about that's in the deer family, oh and also pronghorn.
(27:06):
So what you can see on this really clearly is
that in the Great Plains where coyotes are native, ungulates
are a small percentage of their diet. In the Southwest,
in those desert communities, ungulates are almost non existent in
their diet. Their diet is dominated by rabbits and small
(27:27):
mammals and a little bit of fruit. But as you
go further east, so in that dark green area in
the east, in the light green area in the northeast,
ungulates are a much larger percentage of the diet. And
ungulates actually dominate the diet in those studies in the southeast, okay.
Speaker 1 (27:47):
Just because the sheer number of them being there.
Speaker 2 (27:50):
Well, not just that, but other things too. Right, those
coyotes are the coyotes that have some wolf and doggedy
in a and them, so they're they're more apt to
be able to prey on those larger prey at thems
so and maybe it's something that they've had to figure
out as they moved in too.
Speaker 1 (28:11):
But they.
Speaker 2 (28:14):
I think that the broad answer to your question is
it really depends on where you are, So they there's
never a wherever you are with this species, it's always
this way in biology, and that's that's one of the
really big challenges that's associated with, you know, some of
(28:34):
these things like one of you we talked before about
that that meme from Facebook, let.
Speaker 1 (28:40):
Me stuff you're out there, Yeah, because we I'm I'm
as bad as Clayton Newton. I'm gonna do a little
foreshadow because we're going to stop right here, and this
is going to be part one of my talk with
doctor Drew right here, and we're going to get into
the meat and the potatoes of what everybody is wanting
to know about, and that's the deer and cold relationship,
(29:03):
we'll call it, and whether or not we're doing the
Lord's work when we're killing colds to save our dear leases.
We'll be back next week for the next week. Thank you, doctor,
Thank you sir. Y' all be careful.
Host
Clay Newcomb
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