Ontario Farmer

© Copyright 2008, Sun Media Corporation

Coyote packs take toll of livestock
Cattle producers are looking for hunters to help them cope with growing predator numbers

Tuesday, February 19, 2008 

BY JOHN GREIG, ONTARIO FARMER 

Jim Magee has lost 10 calves in the past year on his 150-cow beef farm. He attributes them all to coyotes.

"It ticks you off when these buggers get them," the Drumbo-area farmer says.

But Magee isn't the only one seeing an increase in coyote damage. In 2006-2007, the Livestock, Poultry and Honeybee Protection Act paid out just under $1 million to farmers. In 2004-2005, just two years before, it paid out just under $600,000.

Coyote hunter and farmer George Wicke counts up the pelts he has from the coyote hunt so far this year and gets to 30. That's more than he has shot before.

Wicke, who is in his 70s, relies on his sons and grandson to help him out running coyotes with dogs these days. He says it hasn't been difficult to find them this year, although, without dogs, he doesn't believe many would have been caught. The coyotes like to stay hidden.

Wicke, who lives near Rostock in Perth County, says a dairy farmer in the area lost seven Holstein calves, plucked from calf hutches.

He helped another hunter track down a couple of coyotes in that area.

However, Magee hasn't been able to call in a hunter to take a crack at the coyotes near his farm. He lives near Hwy. 401 and hunters don't want their dogs to go racing after a coyote across the big highway.

Magee wants farmers who haven't had wildlife damage to their animals, like dairy, hog or cash crop farmers, to be tolerant of hunters chasing coyotes with dogs. Once they are let loose, the hunting dogs can end up far from the release point.

A guard donkey hasn't done the trick, says Magee, although he says, "maybe I'd have lost more with out him."

Magee has only found the remains of three of the 10 calves, although he's convinced that the others were dragged off by coyotes. "They were all calves that I'd seen were up and going. They were fine."

He would pick up that a cow had dried up and then realized that the calf was gone.

Not only would Magee be out the value of the calf, but the cows not nursing calves then gain too much weight.

Biological cycles come and go, and Wicke suggest that now may be the time of the coyote. He emphasizes he's not a biologist, but says "I have a theory."

While out hunting deer, this fall, he found it more difficult to find them. But, the number of coyotes he's shot is at an all-time high.

"We used to see a lot of deer. Now we see a lot of coyotes," he says. That might not be the case everywhere in the province, he says.

Maria de Almeida, a large carnivore biologist with the Ministry of Natural Resources, says coyotes have spread everywhere in eastern North America since the late 1800s and early 1900s, from their original base in the west.

Along the way, they interbred with eastern wolves and got larger. The original western coyote was too small to take on a deer. But now, coyotes thrive in Ontario hunting deer co-operatively.

The coyote is so populous that MNR doesn't try to keep track of their numbers. But de Almeida says when winters have been mild and prey abundant, then the natural cycle of coyotes will mean more coyotes. However, other factors like disease also have an impact on the coyote cycle.

Magee is concerned that hunting of coyotes be able to continue and is worried that the coyotes will run even wilder if animal rights groups get their way and hunting with dogs is banned in Ontario.

WE HAVE ANOTHER SOLUTION !  THE KUVASZ GUARDIAN DOG!

(Jane DeJong)