The High Cost of Coyotes

AzWill

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WORLD-HERALD STAFF WRITER

Callaway, Neb. - Coyotes are winning the war at the ranch of Gale and Renee Henry on the South Dakota-Nebraska border near Harrison.

"It's terrible out here," said Renee Henry from the remote region south of the Black Hills, where at night only the moon lights the landscape and a coyote howling can wake you from a deep sleep.
"It used to be you would hardly ever see a coyote," said Gale Henry, 63. But a few weeks ago, coyotes killed 56 of the Henrys' 500 lambs before the Henrys moved the flock to a pasture less dominated by the crafty and resilient predators.

The coyotes' feast cost the Henrys $5,000 in livestock value.

The ravaging of flocks and herds by coyotes is all too common in the Midlands, prompting cattle and sheep ranchers to seek more government help in controlling predators.

At the same time, conservation groups have increased their objections to a government program that spends millions of dollars each year to kill wildlife that infringe on civilization.

Coyotes turned more and more to livestock for their meals during the recent harsh winter that made other prey scarce.

"When they start having a difficult time gathering food, they resort to the easiest things, and that is usually calves," said John Hobbs, assistant director of the Nebraska office for the U.S. Department of Agriculture's Wildlife Services Division.

The Nebraska Legislature will carry over until next year a proposal - Legislative Bill 591 - to raise the state's allocation for predator control from $50,000 to $150,000.

The money would be added to the $630,000 in county, state and federal funds being spent to control the damage caused by predators such as coyotes, fox, bobcats and badgers. Coyotes cause the most damage to agriculture.

"It is a continuous war with the coyotes," said Renee Henry, "and you can't beat them."
Of the 85,000 coyotes killed by government hunters in 1999, nearly 3,000 were taken in Nebraska.
Although lambs are the most vulnerable livestock on the range, coyotes also prey on cattle, taking the most defenseless in the herd. Coyotes eat calves as they are being born, mutilating the mother in the process.

Last year, predators, mostly coyotes, killed $51 million worth of cattle and calves nationwide, an increase of 30percent from 1995. About $700,000 worth of the losses were in Nebraska and $370,000 were in Iowa, where fewer cattle roam the range.

Last winter, on Harold Brohman's ranch near Callaway in Nebraska's Sand Hills, coyotes killed four calves worth a total of $1,400. "They are getting bolder all the time," Brohman said. "I've seen coyotes here in the yard on two or three occasions. It's hard to keep cats around. The first thing you know, you don't have any cats."

By some estimates, predators kill seven times more sheep and lambs than they do cattle and calves.
Scott Hengstrom, a predator control specialist at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, said that while coyote problems might be like a nagging cold to a cattle rancher, they are more like a life-threatening disease to a sheep rancher.

Chuck Pitkin, 51, whose ranch also is near Callaway, for 13 years has used Great Pyrenees to keep his sheep from becoming easy pickings for coyotes.
"If we didn't have the guard dogs," Pitkin said, "we wouldn't have any sheep at all."
But the 100-pound, fearless Pyrenees are no match when 30-pound coyotes work in pairs, distracting the dogs at one end of the herd while snatching lambs at the other.
"If we had 100 lambs out there for 30 days, we would have a 30 percent loss at least, even with the dogs," Pitkin said. He tries to control the losses by keeping sheep close to the house during lambing season and by calling in government hunters.

Two years ago, the trappers killed 58 coyotes on his ranch in a three-month period.
"We have them now just as thick as we had them then," Pitkin said. "It's nothing to go out and see one or two."

Ranchers and conservationists agree that coyotes are a wildlife phenomenon because they adjust so well to the environment. When mankind tries to kill them off, they hunker down and start producing larger litters. When coyote numbers increase, the size of their litters decreases.

"We have tried to kill coyotes for 100 years, but they have never been so numerous and so widespread," said David Gaillard, a conservationist with the Predator Conservation Alliance in Bozeman, Mont.
Coyotes are omnivores, meaning they eat both meat and plants, and are most active at night and early in the morning. Both male and female coyotes hunt. They overeat when they make a kill and then return to dens, where they regurgitate their dinner to feed their pups.

In recent years, coyotes have appeared in Eastern states. Increasingly, they adapt to urban settings. Last December, coyotes were blamed in the death of a rare swan at Wyuka Cemetery in central Lincoln.
Many sportsmen think coyotes are responsible for reduced numbers of pheasants, quail and wild turkeys.
Gaillard's conservation group encourages ranchers to control livestock losses without killing coyotes - by using guard animals, such as llamas, burros and dogs. "Simply killing them is not the solution," Gaillard said.

Various conservation and animal-rights groups have lobbied for an end to the killing of predators as a means of controlling damage. Six months ago, voters in Washington state adopted a trapping ban, and voters in Oregon rejected a similar ban.

"Wildlife should be given the right to be there first," said Stephanie Boyles, a wildlife biologist for People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals, a group that opposes the raising of livestock for food or other products, such as wool.

The lightning rod in the dispute over how to deal with coyotes and other predators is the USDA Wildlife Services Division. The division was known as Animal Damage Control until administrators decided on a more politically correct name.

The agency has become sensitive to public campaigns by critics, now steering all press inquiries to publicists in Washington, D.C., who screen requests before clearing staff members to talk to reporters.
Wildlife Services employs government hunters and trappers, who respond to citizens' requests for protection of their property against predators.

The government hunters kill the coyotes by shooting them from airplanes (the most common method), trapping them in snares or poisoning them with baited sodium-cyanide traps. They also protect livestock by using poison on collars to shield the throats of livestock.

Wildlife Services spokesmen say the agency does not attempt to eradicate coyotes but merely responds to requests for assistance.

"I'm always amazed at the people who are opposed to our damage control, until something happens to them," said Hobbs of Wildlife Services. "Once a coyote begins taking their house cats, then they call us."
Wildlife Services spends $630,000 a year in Nebraska on predator control, $50,000 of that from the State Treasury, nearly $250,000 from participating counties and the rest from the federal budget. In nonparticipating counties, Wildlife Services offers education and advice on predator control but does not respond with hunters. Thirty-eight of Nebraska's 93 counties, mostly in the western and southwestern parts of the state, participate in the program.

Nebraska's spending pales in comparison with the $8.8 million spent each year in Texas to control predators. Even so, Texas ranchers lost $8.7million worth of cattle, including 22,000 calves, to predators in 2000. Coyotes were responsible for more than three-fourths of the losses in Texas.

The Predator Conservation Alliance and other conservation groups are seeking an end to $12.9 million in federal spending on predator control. The alliance recommends that ranchers use a combination of methods, including guard animals, more vigilance, noise diversion, night lighting and fencing.
"The reality is that the predators are here to stay, and the only solution is to figure out a way to co-exist with them," said Gaillard, of the conservation alliance.

Becky Weed, who has a small sheep ranch near Belgrade, Mont., has gained a national reputation for marketing "predator-friendly" wool. After first asking government trappers to kill coyotes on her ranch, she decided that didn't make sense. "We find that the less we harass the coyotes, the less they harass us," Weed said. She now has two llamas that stay with the sheep, chasing away coyotes.
"They have pretty much been 100percent successful," Weed said. "We lost one lamb to a coyote and lost several others to either a black bear or a mountain lion, we're not sure."
But even Weed says that guard animals are not the complete answer: "They are a management tool, not a cure-all."

Her 260-acre sheep ranch, about one-third of a square mile, hardly offers the same challenge as the 15 square miles of pasture grazed by the Henrys' cattle and sheep.

"The airplane thing is the only salvation we have," said Gale Henry, referring to the hunting method that includes a person on the ground simulating coyote calls while a shooter from an airplane picks off the predators.

Private hunting of coyotes is virtually unrestricted in Nebraska and most Western states, but hunters and trappers have lost interest as the price of coyotes' pelts has nose-dived.

"Coyote pelts put my son through college," said Callaway rancher Brohman. In the 1970s, coyote pelts sold for $75. Now they are worth $5. His son, Mark Brohman, an administrator at the Nebraska Game and Parks Commission, said the availability of artificial furs and the conservation stigma attached to wearing real furs have changed the market.

"It's not as popular as it once was," he said. For Henry, government hunters hold the key to whether he will continue to raise sheep on his ranch near Harrison. If the hunters can't reduce the coyote threat, he will stick to cattle, like his grandfather did when he settled on the ranch in 1886.

But Henry knows that coyotes are a fact of life on the ranch.

"When the people are all gone from this earth," Henry said, "there will still be a coyote chasing the sheep around."




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