I don’t understand why our effort to keep the population of coyotes in check is so controversial. We all know that coyotes are killers.
Here is a story about coyotes from my book, A Lifetime of Hunting and Fishing, published by North Country Press.
Coyotes are a controversial critter, for sure, especially with deer hunters who know coyotes kill a lot of deer. But they can also be very entertaining. I see them every so often in and around my woodlot, and hear them howling at night, and we’ve even seen them on the front lawn. Last year coyotes killed a deer right next to the fenced in area holding our neighbor’s horse.
There is a bunch of big boulders on my neighbor’s lot where porcupines typically gathered, but one fall, I found a dead coyote lying in one of the holes under one of the boulders. I’ve no idea what killed the coyote.
Dad, Harry Vanderweide, and I were sitting in the dark one day in Windsor, calling two turkeys in the nearby trees, when we were surprised by a coyote that jumped out of the nearby brush and right onto one of our turkey decoys. He didn’t stay around long, figuring out quickly that the decoy was not going to be anything he wanted to eat. This actually happened twice that year.
One spring I was sitting behind a rock wall, with my turkey decoys out in front of me in the field, when I spotted a beautiful golden-colored coyote trotting down the field toward my decoys. He circled the decoys, realizing they weren’t real turkeys, and then trotted back up the field and into the woods.
I made the mistake of writing about this in my outdoor news blog, and got roasted by some readers for not shooting the coyote.