25 May
2015

Posted in: Uncategorized
By Hugh    No Comments

Coyotes are back in town and it’s our fault

Checking Bonnie’s teeth.

Note: Last time, we looked at the increasing coyote population and a study that is currently underway to determine their habits as a way of controlling them. This is the second of two stories in the series.

“All of a sudden my dog stopped and when I looked behind me, there was a coyote larger than a German shepherd.” A woman is being interviewed on a local TV station after a sunset walk with her dog was interrupted by a coyote. Eventually the coyote was shooed away by neighbors, but the woman was upset by the incident. In the same report, Dr. Numi Mitchell, Lead Scientist and Project Director of the Narragansett Bay Coyote Study puts it bluntly: “We have a GPS collar on a coyote right now in Middletown, and that animal has shown us where’s it’s being fed 300 feet from that neighborhood.”

While you were sleeping

Bonnie, a coyote Dr. Mitchell has been tracking through telemetry for about five years on Aquidneck Island, lies under a blanket while the effects of a tranquilizer nudges her toward coyote dreams. She was trapped using woodchuck for bait, and a team from Narragansett Bay Coyote Study has recently arrived on the scene.

At 36 pounds, Bonnie is a healthy weight.

After about fifteen minutes, veterinarian Dr. Ralph Pratt determines that Bonnie is out cold, and the data gathering begins. Scales, telemetry equipment, and an assortment of other supplies have been carefully laid out so that the team may work quickly and efficiently once the animal is unconscious. Mitchell places a kind of muzzle around Bonnie’s nose and jaws, and a noose around her neck, both designed to immobilize her in the event of an unexpected awakening. She sets to work removing the collar that the coyote has around her neck. “It’s been five years almost to the day since we put this on her,” Mitchell says.

Pratt draws a blood sample while Mitchell measures her. She’s 120 centimeters from nose to tail, or roughly 47 inches. Mitchell takes a quick look at her teeth, and then two team members lift her up in the net to quickly weigh her: 37 pounds, far below the average German shepherd weight of 75 pounds. Still, it’s not necessarily an animal one wants to have chasing after its pet. What was it doing there?

“We’re creating habituation monsters”

Since she began her study in 1996, Dr. Numi Mitchell has noticed a pattern. While the normal pack of coyotes restricts their movement to a specific territory, her tracking of them revealed several places where many coyotes seemed to congregate. When she used the data gathered through the radio collars to create a 3-D image, some locations rose from the map like a tall stack of checkers. Why was this?

Dr. Numi Mitchell removing the old radio collar.

When Mitchell visited the sites reflecting abnormal levels of coyote activity, they each had one thing in common: human created feeding stations. Sometimes a sheep farmer, unable to bury the sheep that had died over the winter because the ground was frozen, would stack the animals across the street from his house. This was like a coyote magnet, attracting the predators and giving them a taste for sheep. Another cluster point was road kill deer. “There were 130,000 pounds of meat available,” Mitchell says. “DEM takes them and, because there’s no central pit to bury them, they leave them in cul-de-sacs. These turn into coyote restaurants.”

Still another problem Mitchell discovered was that people were feeding the local feral cat population. This produced a double bonus for the coyotes, since they will feed on both the cats and the food left for them. “Coyotes will modify their territory to concentrate on this type of ‘subsidized’ feeding.” The latter is why Mitchell teamed up with Dr. David Gregg, Director of the Rhode Island Natural History Survey, to create ordinances making it illegal to feed wild animals. It is also why coyotes began to edge further into neighborhoods: people would feed cats near their homes, the cats would come for the food, and the coyotes would come for the cats. All in someone’s back yard. Thus, apparent coyote invasion.

Dr. Mitchell works on the radio collar.

“We’re creating habituation monsters; these coyotes that have been trapped, hunted, and poisoned, so they normally don’t want anything to do with humans. But they’re losing their fears and keying in on humans as providers. That may be okay with people interested in wildlife, but it freaks other people out. That’s when we get calls saying, ‘My neighborhood is overwhelmed with coyotes.’ ”

“I had the strangest dream”

Bonnie has been measured, weighed, and now wears a brand new radio collar. The telemetry has been tested, and with luck it will bring in a new data set that will continue to provide Dr. Numi Mitchell with information about the habits of coyotes. Dr. Pratt injects her with a stimulant to begin reversing the effects of the tranquilizer. The crew backs away several yards as she begins to open her eyes. Groggy at first, she emerges from the now-filthy blankets that had been used to keep her warm and quiet. She glances around once before moving off into the dense brush. In seconds, she disappears from sight. From start to finish, the whole procedure has taken almost exactly 30 minutes.

Bonnie begins to awaken.

Getting smart about coyotes

One of the things Mitchell has done to get word out about coyotes is to create a website called CoyoteSmarts.org , which she says is “a public information initiative of a group of Rhode Island organizations that have come together to address the growing presence of coyotes on Aquidneck and Conanicut Islands—and in other communities throughout the state.” The site is filled with information about coyotes, their habits, management, and how to report sightings. Her main message is that coyotes can be kept under control when feeding supplements are removed. “The solution to a coyote invasion is one resident coyote population, since they will defend their territory. The availability (or lack thereof) of food sources will control the resident population. Plus, they will develop a healthy wariness of humans.

“(The idea of a coyote invasion) is a perception issue more than reality. Every single human issue has had a feeding component.”

Dr. Ralph Pratt measures Bonnie. The pole in the picture is one way she is kept immobilized.