# Should I worry about it ?



## Sparky23 (Aug 15, 2007)

A buddy and me were hunting and he was video taping me. I shot a big doe that ran maybe 40 yards and staggered and fell. I turned and smiled at the camera looked back and a tote was already on her. She was probably still breathing. Because of the angle she was around 60 yards to where she fell. I yelled at it it looked and went back to pulling at her utters. I knocked another arrow took aim and let fly. Mistake as it missed the facing you're by inches and entered the gut of my deer. I deemed that the yote stand. I've seen same as sureshot. Had taken my little cousin Maggie on the youth hunt and she had shot her first deer. A 5 pt. I was fairly possitive it was a good hit. But did see some fatty tissue in with blood so we went and grabbed a snack and returned about 45 min later after dark. My uncle. Me her and her brother. 30 yards later we found her deer. I was showing them how to cut and when I looked up to explain with headlight there stood 2 totes at less than 20 yards. Little uneasy as they quartered us up to the truck while we drug it. Made it even more unforgettable for all of us I'm sure!


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## sureshot006 (Sep 8, 2010)

Our camp has had deer lay overnight untouched, and others ass eaten less than 2 hrs of the shot.


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## 9 (Jan 17, 2000)

I think those of you having the close encounters “quickly” As stated have a hell of a coyote population! More than I have in my trapping territory. LOL.


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## sureshot006 (Sep 8, 2010)

Seldom said:


> I think those of you having the close encounters “quickly” As stated have a hell of a coyote population! More than I have in my trapping territory. LOL.


Possibly. Or just packs really close by?

I get a ton on camera but I suck at trapping them. Mostly because of such limited time (I think).

First deer next season I will have to set a cam and see how long it takes for yotes to get it. I know the beaver carcasses I threw out this past fall were eaten by yotes in under 4 nights. Yes they were yotes for sure. Tracks everywhere.


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## Fool'em (Sep 29, 2016)

I’ve had numerous encounters with yotes during bow hunting. If I’m working on a deer after dark I enjoy it when they start barking and carrying on only a few hundred yards away. I imagine it’s young pups with limited expierience with humans and they are confused by my presence. I don’t speak good coyote but I bark back at them and that seems to further confuse and get them wound up. It’s kind of fun messing with yotes. 
I’ve had similar expierience with a pack of wolves while working a bear in the UP. Again I tried to mess with them with barking and yipping back but my wolf speak is clearly not good because they stayed a few hundred yards off and seemed confused by my presence. I just enjoy the interaction with other predators on their turf. 

Now as I don’t mind sharing on our trapping forum I can say my bow hunting strategy involves locating coyotes and hunting nearby. Any area of high coyote activity is always low human intrusion and those are the areas I am seeking for my hunting. My best scouting tool is early fall listening for coyotes just after dark. Where coyotes open up just at dark is most lilkly an area they are spending the day. That’s an area that I like to hunt because coyote don’t tolerate human intrusion and if they are hanging there during the day there can’t be many other hunters in that area. 
This is confirmed when I routinely see coyotes while hunting. Confirmation I’ve found an area of limited other hunters is when I see daytime coyotes while on stand. 
So I love coyotes because they lead me to excellent deer hunting on public land. 

Most deer hunters don’t believe my strategy but if they saw my pile of mature public land bucks taken with this strategy they would be surprised. 

That’s how reading coyote sign and behavior has helped my bow hunting immensely and why I love coyotes.


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## Chessieman (Dec 8, 2009)

From Seldon; I have yet to hear from a hunter tell me that the gut pile was gone the next morning because it was eaten by the coyotes!!! This is very important in helping understand and determine the purpose of the family unit during the close encounter.

I always gut my Deer at the same spot to prevent the yotes from stationary feeding in my food plots. Nice muddy area were the second day the gut pile is gone. Ever hang out 2 hours after dark on the opener of gun? The yotes are noisy at every gut pile having a yote holiday. If you do not get your Deer the night you hit it in one area I hunt, it is chewed by the time you find it the next morning, guaranteed. You are right about the road kills or dead Cows dragged out to the pile. Three weeks then they start to munch on them but not like a found deer kill. From your previous post it sounds like you are the one that wants all the Coyotes to trap regardless if they MOVE DEER from the area. The lousy deer hunters wasted the Coyote I could have trapped after season, sounds like the typical "I, me, myself" attitude. There are a lot of yotes that find their downfall during gun regardless if it may affect your deer hunting for a couple hours. Coyotes and their traditional territories? Come on, when we did not have the yotes in the 80's we had unlimited Fox. Traditional territories, before white men were here the Wolves would top species. What tradition do you want to claim?


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## sureshot006 (Sep 8, 2010)

My grandfather told me when he was young, opossum were a southern thing. Now they're everywhere.


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## 9 (Jan 17, 2000)

Chessieman said:


> Coyotes and their traditional territories? Come on, when we did not have the yotes in the 80's we had unlimited Fox. Traditional territories, before white men were here the Wolves would top species. What tradition do you want to claim?


Since it appears your post is directed toward me, the term "territories" is used by me to denote the area a coyote calls his own, as in a several sq mile loop which it defends and more or less lives in. The more coyotes in an area the smaller the loop/owners territory. The fewer coyotes, the larger it's territory becomes, more hunting area and the linger it takes for them to come back around on the loop of it's territory.


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## Chessieman (Dec 8, 2009)

Sorry, I should have said "historical territorial range" from the other posts not yours. I have to deal with that portion of their territory at my place and all the does and fawns move out if the yotes are staying at my place. I am on a river and once that freezes I get a lot more of them visiting. During the winter it is a pretty good place to pick them off during the dawn hours. I have a 35 mm picture of what appears to be a blood bath on the ice were a few were shot. I guess you can say they feed their own, at least it is not deer baiting.


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## FREEPOP (Apr 11, 2002)

Macs13 said:


> I've been reflecting on the attitude that I see a lot on here that "the only good coyote is a dead coyote." I appreciate that they kill fawns. They are predators. They have to eat. They are a natural part of the landscape.
> 
> Isn't this the exact same attitude that caused us to nearly wipe wolves, bears, and mountain lions off the landscape? The same is true of large raptors. Humans see competition toward their intended prey and they decide it's extermination time. To me, this is the opposite of being an outdoorsman or an environmentally conscious person.
> 
> ...


The thought is a good one but you need not worry about coyotes. Out west they gun them from the sky, poison, trap, hunt and still can't eliminate them. 
In a nuclear holocaust, only cockroaches and coyotes will survive.


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## 9 (Jan 17, 2000)

What you just posted pretty much to me says you have a ton of coyotes in your part of the State. In fact, it appears the whole southern 1/3 of the State has a lot of coyotes. Years ago when my hands were better I skinned all of the coyotes and fox as soon as they were caught. I had also read years before that coyotes were drawn to carcasses of their own and made for a good bait station. 

So, I piled the carcasses in places on the different properties I could easily see coyote sign quickly without causing a disturbance and leaving more of my scent. The best interest I ever observed was a couple of coyotes swinging past from downwind quite a distance and just continuing on their travels. Lots of other scavangers showed-up at all the sites to eat and always the Bald Eagles were there. I cannot say that my catch numbers increased at all because of the carcasses and felt no remorse of loss of catches when I quit doing that.


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## Chessieman (Dec 8, 2009)

Yep, we are over run. In the farm country there are welcome hounds men that put a dent in them. Around my area you have to call, bait, pick off or trick due to no road access. They devastate the fawns with some areas devoid of them in the fall.


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## 9 (Jan 17, 2000)

I will say though, there are "pockets" of high coyote population up here as well, out of my trapping area but nevertheless, enough coyotes that the property owners see them in multiples during the day while farming and/or deer hunting along with a serious overabundance of deer. No houndsmen(because of major highways), no trappers, and apparently few callers.

I told about the gal who shot those 2 coyotes while deer hunting. Last year she piled all of the butchered parts at a strategic location along the same brush line I set on but maybe an 1/8 mile away. Last year the bones had been on the ground for a week before I set and when I left 2 weeks later they were still untouched by coyotes. I'm told by an expert coyote trapper that you can tell coyote feeding on bones by looking at the tips of the ribs and the top edge of the shoulder blade. He says the cartilage is a coyote favorite and will never not chew them if the coyote are on the carcass. This year she shot her buck the 1st day and butchered it 2 days later, making for the carcass to have been at the dump site for 2 weeks before I got there and 1 additional week when I pulled. No coyote had touched the carcass!

One of my properties is a 500 acre, wooded property with a working sand pit and a deer camp and State land on 3 sides. There are many tower blinds scattered throughout the 500 acres with plots and shooting lanes. I came on this property by a DNR recommendation to the owner to have me come and help knock back the coyotes about 10-12 years ago. I started the 1st year by killing 10 and the next few years the total bounced up and down to a high of 16 but since then my catch numbers have steadily fallen to a 2-3 coyotes a year and there are a ton of deer on that property now but few coyotes use it. With me saying that, I do trap other properties scattered throughout the township and catch coyotes so I'm sure I'm also knocking back the numbers of other coyotes that would sooner of later swing through the 500 acre parcel.

I mentioned the gal and her shooting the 2 coyotes and her big 9pt to the 500 acre property owner and he commented that he found that crazy! He went on to tell me that in all the years the "crew" has deer hunted (only with firearms, no bowhunting) not a single hunter has ever seen a coyote to shoot while deer hunting even back when they called me in to trap! See them on the cameras but not while hunting.


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## jrose (Aug 17, 2011)

Macs13 said:


> I've been reflecting on the attitude that I see a lot on here that "the only good coyote is a dead coyote." I appreciate that they kill fawns. They are predators. They have to eat. They are a natural part of the landscape.
> 
> Isn't this the exact same attitude that caused us to nearly wipe wolves, bears, and mountain lions off the landscape? The same is true of large raptors. Humans see competition toward their intended prey and they decide it's extermination time. To me, this is the opposite of being an outdoorsman or an environmentally conscious person.
> 
> ...


Who or what keeps coyotes in check? It's us or nothing. You obviously haven't felt the effects of coyotes. If you had, you would understand the effects of an unchecked coyote population.


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## jrose (Aug 17, 2011)

Tail-Chaser said:


> Vary well put macs! Couldn’t of said it better myself. As I get older I begin to have a deeper respect for animals. I love deer hunting but I also see the fact that we are sliding down a slippery slope by killing all the coyotes. Lack of predation will inevitably result in a higher mortality of deer due to disease pressure. The entire point of predators is to take out the sick and weak.


Is a fawn deer sick or weak?


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## jrose (Aug 17, 2011)

Seldom said:


> It’s interesting when you mention you’ve felt them “crowding” at night. I’ve had a handful of property owners over the years who have dragged road killed deer back onto their properties for me. Not in one single instance were those deer touched by coyotes for 3 weeks minimum, with me being on the scene With set traps the last 2 of the 3 weeks.
> 
> I’ve also experienced a handful of road-hit, crippled deer and bow-shot, wounded deer that were considered “lost” and the coyote were eating on them within 1-2 nights as I found them. Every dead deer I’ve found as described I’ve immediately caught coyote in the very near vicinity, no so with the deer that had human scent on them such as the dragged road-kills.
> 
> I have come to believe these encounters with hunters as I previously described has more to do with a family unit’s curiosity stemming from the smell of deer blood smell and human smell. Sort of a Ying-Yang thing with the coyotes but I have yet to hear from a hunter tell me that the gut pile was gone the next morning because it was eaten by the coyotes!!! This is very important in helping understand and determine the purpose of the family unit during the close encounter.


I've had them "Crowd" me while gutting a deer I shot with a bow. I shot it about 20 minutes before dark and within 10 minutes of shooting it, heard coyotes howling (a pretty large group) I was sure the deer was down but it was out of sight and by the time I got to it, it was dark. While gutting this deer, there were coyotes within 30 yards of me, and it was a bit unsettling. They weren't leaving and knew I was there. I could here them going around me whining in the dark while I was dragging the deer. I made it to the truck (Only about 100 yards from where the doe fell) and could here them on the gut pile. I don't think they were concerned about human presence.


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## FREEPOP (Apr 11, 2002)

jrose said:


> Is a fawn deer sick or weak?


They are definitely weaker than an adult.

Two coyotes are capable of killing a healthy adult deer.


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## 9 (Jan 17, 2000)

I wonder if those pups that were watching the bowhunters in the towers that I described in an earlier reply probably would have done the same thing. I't obvious they felt little fear of the bowhunters as pups are dumber than rocks and very inexperienced hunters while still in the family unit in Oct.. So, I can understand that they would get real excited smelling fresh deer and blood!


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## 9 (Jan 17, 2000)

FREEPOP said:


> They are definitely weaker than an adult.
> 
> Two coyotes are capable of killing a healthy adult deer.


Absolutely!


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## FREEPOP (Apr 11, 2002)

FREEPOP said:


> They are definitely weaker than an adult.
> 
> Two coyotes are capable of killing a healthy adult deer.


If the deer is on ice, one coyote is all that would be needed.


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