Parvo ????

BOBTAILS

Active member
When parvo gets into a good area and decimates the coyote population. On average how long will/ can it take before coyote population is back to way it was before?? I am not sure if there is a concrete answer for this. Is it 3 years, 5 years or 10 years plus. Anybody have any first hand knowledge on this that they can share. Thanks in advance
 
I had a dog that survived parvo without treatment. The vet told me what he had and the success rate, so we did nothing. He then told me the virus could last a year in the manure scattered in corrals.
Immunity can be passed down to offspring.
Parvovirus is not thought to have any population level effects in wildlife, except in small populations that are isolated from sources of immigration, such as on islands.

http://wildlifedisease.unbc.ca/parvovirus.htm
 
Originally Posted By: tripod3I had a dog that survived parvo without treatment. The vet told me what he had and the success rate, so we did nothing. He then told me the virus could last a year in the manure scattered in corrals.
Immunity can be passed down to offspring.
Parvovirus is not thought to have any population level effects in wildlife, except in small populations that are isolated from sources of immigration, such as on islands.

http://wildlifedisease.unbc.ca/parvovirus.htm


So when your hear people saying parvo came through a area a wiped the coyotes out is simply never happened then??
 
Quote:So when your hear people saying parvo came through a area a wiped the coyotes out is simply never happened then??

Always wonder who's doing the saying and what is the size of the area.
Documentation shows parvo isn't 100% fatal, my findings show 85-90% mortality rate if untreated. 5-20% mortality if treated.
Common sense tells me that not all coyotes in a region come into contact.
And then the elusive factor of how many coyotes are present that you don't see.
 
Originally Posted By: tripod3
And then the elusive factor of how many coyotes are present that you don't see.


Pups can't keep their mouths shut for awhile though. May not see them (but then again, you might) but it ain't hard to look at the sign on the ground and do some locating and quickly get a handle on the approximate population density. I feel like I can usually get a pretty good handle on that, pretty quickly. Easier some times of year than others and in some places than others, but over all, I depend pretty heavily on being able to figure that out as I roll a lot of new country every year.

When the population falls right off a cliff from one year to the next and there's no habitat or control factors that appear to offer an explanation you have to wonder.

Parvo was offered as a possible explanation by a WS supervisor I talked to for one area seven or eight years ago. Took two years to fill back in.

Lots of variables could effect the time it takes. But if the rabbbitat is still prime I think two years is probably about right.

I don't really know anything though. Whether it was really parvo or something else. And predicting the time to fill back in is obviously dicey.

- DAA
 
I often wonder why parvo is offered as a possible explanation.
When my dog got it I was living in a pretty remote area with wildlife all over showing no signs of infection or death from it.
Yes elusive coyotes is very relative to who you ask. A couple landowners in recent years had not seen any coyotes while working their land and were shocked at how many I harvested right behind their houses.
It's kinda like mice, didn't know you had them until problems arise.
One year coyotes completely disappeared in a radius of about 10 miles sagebrush/developing farm ground. After some investigating a hired hand ratted on his supervisor for spreading poison hay to kill off jackrabbits on several parcels
It worked up the food chain and got him in federal trouble.
 
I don't know anything about coyotes dying off from Parvo but after 3 or 4 years of drought our coyote numbers get very low.

After we get some rain and good ground cover and feed it just takes two years and the coyote population is peaking again.
 
Originally Posted By: tripod3Quote:So when your hear people saying parvo came through a area a wiped the coyotes out is simply never happened then??

Always wonder who's doing the saying and what is the size of the area.
Documentation shows parvo isn't 100% fatal, my findings show 85-90% mortality rate if untreated. 5-20% mortality if treated.
Common sense tells me that not all coyotes in a region come into contact.
And then the elusive factor of how many coyotes are present that you don't see.

I have read studies that found that as much as 25% of the coyote population tested were positive for parvo. The majority of treatments for parvo are "supportive," that is IV fluids until the dog can build up an immunity to the virus family. That being the case, it is possible that coyotes could contract it and survive on their own.

I would tend to agree with Tripod that there could be any number of causes for coyotes to "disappear" from an area. First off, I wonder if they really "disappeared" or that people just weren't seeing them. If food and water are abundant, then there would be no reason to see them around people. Usually sightings seem to increase around breeding and pupping times and during droughts, when food and water are scarce. Hence the reason that I hunt within a mile or two of water during the heat of summer in AZ. Water tends to concentrate them. When we have rains, they seem to disperse more, probably because they can find food and water in other areas with less pressure.

I think that a lot of people WANT to find the ONE reason that something is happening, when in reality, it might be just a perfect storm of things. Kind of like new coyote hunters wondering what is the ONE thing that they can do to find coyotes.
 
I think I'm more than capable of determining with reasonable certainty when the population has plummeted in an area from one year to the next.

It just ain't that hard to get a feel for the population density and it's something I spend a lot of time paying a lot of attention to. Kind of places I hunt you can burn up a weekend on unproductive ground if you don't.

- DAA
 
Maybe I should clarify a bit too...

I'm not saying I've seen a bunch of extirpations I blame on parvo. I'm saying I did see coyotes "disappear" from an area once. I don't know what caused it. Parvo maybe.

I'm also saying, yes, I sure as heck could tell. When an area goes from spoor all over and coyotes howling in every direction and four or five killed a day on average for four or five years to virtually no spoor and absolutely no howling and no calling success the next year, it seems pretty obvious. Rabbitat did not look any the worse either. And it wasn't from concentrated control efforts, I know both the WS techs for that county and they'd have told me. It was their boss that offered parvo as a guess. Just a guess though.

But in a much more general and practical sense, I roll new country cold all the time, I'm constantly trying to assess coyote population density and I don't think it's very hard to get a pretty good handle on it. Even seasonally, it's important to make that assessment, else you can end up trolling some long stretches of low productivity water. I try and concentrate my efforts in high population density ground. I spend more time and money trying to find that, than anything else involved with calling.

First fundamental of calling. Call where there are callable coyotes. Single most important variable to success.

The callable part being a separate variable from numbers present
laugh.gif
. I know tons of places with lots of coyotes that are pizz poor calling. Callability completely separate subject though!

- DAA
 
DAA, I don't think anyone has questioned your ability to find coyotes but there are a busload of folks that don't see any and therefore in their minds they don't exist in that area. Some guys don't succeed hunting for years when trying on their own.
I agree it's pretty basic but not to all and that's why some are doctors and I'm not.
I've seen a few mystery voids of coyotes in my life that get mystery guesses as to why.
A few years back coyote hunting locally was bleak with little or no answers in known good spots. The guesses got bigger and more far reaching with every beer. Then one day in a special spot while calling a wolf came in. Ah ha. Then a few camera sightings of others and the question was answered.
When the wolves were out of the picture, coyote hunting returned to normal.
I have only knowingly seen parvo twice in my life and have never seen a shred of evidence otherwise. A friend is a federal veterinarian that goes all over the world and I forgot to ask him yesterday, I'll do my best to remember next time.
 
Stopped by a friends who is a federal vet and attends to major outbreaks nation and worldwide.
He went over the standard info about parvo and how it would be passed between coyotes. It is possible to be passed by fluids, not face to face. He then went over the expenses of treatment and low survival rate.
Having never heard of or seen a widespread parvo outbreak among coyotes or any similar susceptible wildlife, he could not contribute to the likelihood of the theory.
He has seen and heard of distemper and plague outbreaks in wildlife, even wiping out entire prairie dog towns and killing coyotes, which had no known origin. This was a strong suspect in his opinion.
There is a whole host of diseases among coyotes including heartworm and plague making it very difficult to put a finger on which one may be a culpret in each situation.
 
Back
Top