Coyotes Howling In The Hollows Again

I can easily remember the first time that I heard coyotes howling on our hunting property. It was during the 1999 bow season on an evening bow hunt. Light was fading as I heard the howling coyotes in the hollow below me. This was the first time that I had heard this and it sent a shiver up my spine. There I was sitting in a treestand with a bow and arrow as I listened to howling meat eating coyotes. In the years since, I have come to enjoy listening to them.

I have only seen a coyote on one occasion. A couple of years ago during our whitetail deer firearm season I heard something running in my direction. It didn’t sound like deer or anything else that I was used to. The running just had a different sound to it. As they got closer, the three coyotes veered off and ran a different direction coming only about 100 yards of where I was. I have often wondered why they were running and where they were running to.

A neighbor shot a coyote in one of our fields a couple years back and we got to see it. I was surprised at its size. It was the size of a large German Shepperd.

In 1998 we got a picture of one with our scouting camera. The camera was set up on a trail that accessed the same field where the neighbor shot a coyote.

We are not sure what impact the coyotes are having on our deer herds. I blame them on reducing our groundhog population. In years past we have always had a healthy groundhog population, but in the last few years our groundhog sightings have been greatly reduced. In the years we hunted groundhogs the hardest, we had the highest populations. We had since reduced our groundhog hunting efforts and the population has reduced. There is nothing scientific to this, just the observation of a marked decrease in groundhog sightings and an influx of coyotes.

There has been murmuring among hunters that the coyotes had been placed into the area for deer herd control. I would not have blamed them but there is no real evidence for this and the state DNR has stated that this was not the case.

The deer population does not seem to have suffered, at least in our hunting area, since the coyotes have shown up. The turkey population hasn’t seemed to have suffered either.

There was the instance late this summer when a dead deer was found in one of our fields. It seemed odd that in only three days this deer had died and reduced to almost nothing in this short time frame. The plot seems much more interesting if we assume that coyotes were involved in the demise and quick clean up of this deer carcass. Driving the roads around this part of West Virginia I often see dead deer along the roads. For one to be cleaned up in three days is out of the ordinary from my road kill observations. Sure would have been nice to have had a scouting camera placed near this dead deer.

An article in the September 2004 issue of Deer and Deer Hunting magazine included a portion written by Daniel E. Schmidt. Mr. Schmidt stated that “a coyote can strip a deer carcass in just a few hours”. Another aside to this same article was written by Bill Marchel. In this piece he told of watching a coyote chase a doe onto an icy lake one evening where the coyote was able to overtake the doe. He stated that by the next morning there was little that was edible left of the doe.

It seems as though the coyotes are here to stay and I’m kind of glad. I guess it’s just more of nature for us to experience.

We caught this coyote sneaking around on our scouting camera. You can go to the digital scouting camera page to read about how we are now using our scouting camera.


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