blake
Life Member
Predators & Whitetail Fawn Recruitment
As many of you know, whitetail hunting is my passion; and predator hunting is a close second.
The topic of this post is Fawn Recruitment: simply put the number of fawns that survive 6 months and live long enough to enter the fall hunting population.
Since 1997 I have been reading up on and doing my own non-scientific research re: the impact of coyotes on whitetail fawn recruitment. My methods are simple; I spend a lot of time in the deer woods shed hunting, spring turkey hunting, and hunting for morels. I come across a good deal of coyote scat and I check all the coyote scat that I come across. I tear it apart see what the content of the scat is, simply put, what the coyote are eating.
Often during the months of May and June I find deer hair in the scat. I have actually twice witnessed coyotes pulling down young fawns. Therefore I hunt coyote’s year around and actually do post mortem checks of their stomach contents.
My scat checking in late summer and early fall show very little deer hair and more rodent bones, hair, and mast food.
Coyote numbers appear to be very high right now here in Southwest Iowa. Several reasons for this are relatively mild winters in the past, low fur prices thus very few trappers, and with the high price of gasoline fewer coyote hunting groups are pursuing the song dogs.
One only needs to drive the roads in the early morning or evening and turn on the electronic coyote locater. The howls will come back at you from every direction from the local coyote packs. They are everywhere!
Shotgun groups that I have talked with the last two years tell me they are seeing more coyotes that every before. However when I ask them if they are shooting these coyotes when driving the deer the standard answer is no…..no one wants to fire a shot at a coyote and perhaps scare off the big buck.
I believe that coyotes are impacting fawn recruitment on a number of properties that I hunt in here in Southwest Iowa. Many of these properties lack quality fawning cover, therefore even low numbers of predators will find it easy to catch, kill, and eat the fawns.
These properties need dense, low-growing vegetation found in area of native warm season grasses, clear-cuts, and “brushy” fields. Quality fawning cover must be distributed throughout the property as mature does are very territorial during the fawning season and will not tolerate lower-ranking does establishing fawning territories in the immediate proximity of the mature does and their fawns.
These quality fawning areas must provide alternative food sources such as small mammals, mice, rabbits, birds and soft fruity mast crops so the coyotes have other alternative food sources.
Coyotes prefer these easy meals when available. From what I have read and observed; outside of the fawning season, coyotes rarely dine on venison. The exception being during the hunting season, when coyotes seek out and find severely injured or dead deer.
So, from a deer management standpoint, protecting fawns rather than adult deer is the key. If providing quality fawning habitat on your hunting property is not possible, will killing every coyote you can while hunting make a difference?
My experience is NO, since occasional harvest by hunters rarely impacts predator populations.
However, there are a number of dedicated deer hunters down this way and we are determined to make a serous attempt to significantly reduce the predator population this year. We already have a number of dead deer caress located, we know were some hunting groups have dumped their butchered caresses, we have some dead deer spotted and we will be making bait sickles to harvest coyotes over.
In closing, predator control is a big part of having acceptable numbers of pheasant, quail, deer, and turkey. I also wonder what impact the Bobcat and the Red Fox has in reducing our games species in Iowa.
I don’t think the Iowa DNR has a clue re: the impact of these predators on Iowa’s game species.
So after January 10th when the Late Muzzleloading season ends, the gray ghost of Iowa had better watch out.
I do not pretend to be an expert on this topic, however I want to Thank You for listening!
I would appreciate you thoughts, comments, and experiences on this topic.
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