Night coyote hunting could help preferred prey

Kentucky’s game managers always have been really touchy about people using lights to take animals, mostly because of poachers spotlighting deer and other protected game. Regulations are set to minimize poaching opportunities under the guise of nocturnal coyote hunting, but managers are willing to condone some level of light use out there for the added advantage it affords to hunters willing to put more harvest pressure on coyotes.

Coyotes are a furbearer and there is some value in their pelts during the prime season. However, while the season for hunting at night with lights does provide more opportunities for sport as well as fur harvest, an underlying motive for managers is to facilitate the killing and elimination of more coyotes.

First of all, we should recall that coyotes are not native here. They are immigrants from the trans-Mississippi West. Coyotes injected themselves into our Eastern ecosystem and, because they are highly adaptive, prospered here at the expense of other native species in some cases.

Coyotes are a combination of predator and scavenger. Omnivores, they can eat a huge range of organic material and survive handily on it. Opportunistic feeders, coyotes catch or find whatever they encounter, and that’s what’s for dinner.

People don’t mind at all when coyotes clean up various road-killed animals. It isn’t so offensive when coyotes kill and eat small mammals, reptiles and birds, especially when people don’t see it happen or note the results.

It starts getting into different territory, however, when coyotes feed on any kind of domestic livestock or poultry or pets.

People who hunt are also people who may have domestic animals or birds or small pets at risk of hungry coyotes. Yet, hunters particularly take it personally when coyotes prey on and reduce game populations that are dear to sportsmen and women.

Years ago now, when coyotes were firmly establishing themselves as resident predators here, a study on the canine interlopers was done in the Land Between the Lakes. It was poop research of a sort — an examination of coyote scat to see what they had been eating.

A somewhat damning finding was that, during a few weeks of late spring, virtually every coyote whose waste was assessed had been feeding on deer fawns. When highly vulnerable newborn and recently dropped deer were on the ground, coyotes gobbled them as fast as they could find them.

Since then, we’ve seen that coyotes have negligible impact on healthy adult deer, yet studies do show that coyote predation on fawns in the first weeks of the baby whitetails’ lives do measurably depress deer populations with a blow against fawn survival.

Fawns, of course, have always born into a hostile environment and they have always been at risk. The thing is, coyotes weren’t a part of our system here, absent before their influx and proliferation during the 1970s and 1980s created an added predatory pressure.

On another front, Kentucky is going through its last fall, either-sex wild turkey hunting season before a significant reduction of the harvest limit. The reason for the cutback of what hunters can take is a sag in turkey populations that over recent years has been experienced across Kentucky as well as numerous other states.

Studies reveal that a downturn in overall turkey numbers is chiefly the result of poorer production during the nesting season. Bad weather at the wrong time is a factor there, but managers say a prime driver of this downturn is lower survival rates among poults, baby turkeys, because of predation.

Ground-nesting turkeys and ground-bound poults before the getaway gift of flight are especially vulnerable to several predators. Raccoons, foxes, skunks and other eaters of eggs and young birds share the blame, but here again, coyotes are a non-native added drain to turkeys trying to perpetuate their flocks.

The night hunting season for coyotes allows hunters so inclined to pursue the varmints when they are most active. Coyotes can be afoot at any time, but they are nocturnal and boldest at night. The legalized use of lights levels the playing field between coyotes and largely night-blind humans.

Regulations for this night season allow the use of lights to take coyotes Dec. 1-May 31 except where and when firearms deer or elk hunting is under way.

A night coyote hunter cannot shoot from a vehicle and any light used cannot be part of or in any way connected to a vehicle. Existing law prohibits shooting from a roadway.

For weaponry, on public land where night coyote hunting is allowed, a hunter must use a shotgun with shotshell (no slug) ammunition. On private land, a night coyote hunter can use a rifle of 6.5mm/.264 caliber or smaller Dec. 1-March 31.

Night hunting with lights is prohibited in the Land Between the Lakes and on Clarks River National Wildlife Refuge.

Few pursue this illuminated hunting option, but best wishes to those who do. Fewer coyotes would not be a bad thing.