doublegunshop.com - home Forums General Discussion DoubleGun BBS @ doublegunshop.com OT - a tribute to wild bobs

Gil, I intentionally avoided going into all of the eyewitness accounts of people who claim they saw coyotes being released into various states during the late 1980's and early 1990's. There are claims in my state that the coyotes were even being released from Pa. Game Commission trucks in the remote areas of central and eastern counties.

Around my area, fox hunting was never a formal horses and hounds affair. Fox were trapped for their fur, and varmint hunters used calls to lure them in and shoot them. Many others were shot in the course of hunting other species, and by farmers who considered them a nuisance. The dogs my buddies in the local Coyote Club use to hunt coyotes are not fox-hounds. They use big expensive Walker Coon hounds and other large aggressive tracking dogs that are not so likely to be killed or maimed by coyotes. They also use GPS tracking collars so they can get to the dogs and coyotes before the dogs get attacked.

My suspicions were raised about the sudden influx of coyotes because it seemed so odd that they appeared to leap-frog much of the country to get here. I saw that deer/vehicle collisions were becoming more frequent and more costly to insurance companies, and added hunting opportunities did no good in urban and suburban areas where it was difficult or illegal for hunters to shoot deer. But when I heard about the appearance of coyotes, I knew it was going to be a big problem because of how rapidly they breed, and how hard it is to get rid of them. The research you provided confirms that.

Now think about this... many of our State Game Agencies and Biologists tell us that coyotes were first found in Eastern and Southern states in the early 1900's, or even as early as the late 1800's. Yet there are very few accounts of people, especially hunters, seeing them or killing them. We are told by the Pa. Game Commission that they arrived in Pennsylvania in the 1920's or 1930's, and came from the Catskill Mountains in New York. So we are expected to believe that they had been here all along for 60 to 70 years before the population suddenly exploded and sightings and killings became common. We are expected to believe that these coyotes who breed so prolifically were somehow not quickly filling an environment that had everything they needed to thrive??? Then all of a sudden, in the late 1980's and early 1990's, we are expected to believe they decided to start breeding like cockroaches, and quickly spread around the whole state.

I have hunted and hiked a lot of the western and central part of my state, and not so much east of Harrisburg. I never heard a coyote howl until the early 1990's. And that mirrors what pretty much everyone else says. So we are also expected to believe that these coyotes have been here since the 1920's, and not only did they not expand their range through breeding, but they also remained quiet.

I reiterate that I believe that it took a combination of factors to cause the huge decline in our game bird populations, including habitat loss, herbicides and clean farming techniques, predators, and periodic poor breeding due to climate extremes. Our vaunted Biologists have not been able to show any smoking gun for widespread avian disease such as the West Nile Virus that hit our crows and blue jays fairly hard. Much of my area has actually seen the human population decline or remain stable for the last 50 years, so habitat loss is not the factor that it is in other areas. But the number of raptors and efficient predators such as coyotes has exploded exponentially, so the snipings and ramblings of ignorant Nutty Ecology Professors and agenda driven biologists has not been enough to leave me in denial of what is quite clear and simple to process... for those who are capable of thinking.

However, we do have to contend with some rather dense individuals who go so far as to say that coyotes are actually good for game bird populations... proof that you can't fix stupid: