Predator

The two coyotes were putting on quite an exhibition as they worked their way up the half mile long river-bottom pasture catching mouse after mouse in the snow. A week earlier, we had gotten a couple feet of snow on top of a foot of older snow and then a string of warm, sunny days that dropped the snow depth considerably. The numerous field mice that inhabited the huge mountain pasture had taken advantage of the deep early snows to build grassy nests close to the surface where the bright winter sun’s rays would penetrate the snow and heat their cushy nest sanctuaries. The unusual warmth of the past few days had dropped the snow to just above ground level and left hundreds of grassy mouse nests exposed in the field, and the coyotes were taking full advantage of the vulnerable rodents. Over two hours, I glassed the pair of canines catch and kill almost 100 of the hapless mice — grabbing them, tossing them around for a short time, crunching them and then leaving the twitching rodents and moving on to raid the next nest. The wildly killing pair never ate a single mouse, much to the elation of the ravens and magpies that were scavenging raucously behind them. The coyotes’ “sport hunting” reminded me of a day on a prairie dog town with my favorite varmint rifle and damn sure didn’t qualify as subsistence hunting.In every instance where bunny huggers, animal activists and the uneducated public try to shove predator protection or reintroduction down the throats of the masses, they harp on the erroneous supposition that predators kill only what they can consume at the time. Subsistence hunting. Hogwash!My first enlightenment came years ago, while I was in high school, when I got a call from a local farm lady, who asked if I could get rid of a coon that had wiped out 18 of her laying hens the previous night. The bloodthirsty ringtail had dug under the roost house and killed every chicken, hauling off only a single bird.When I was in the Army at Fort Carson, Colorado, I oversaw the post hunting and fishing program and raising 3,000 pheasants for the hunting program. On one occasion, a bobcat climbed over the unfinished and still open-topped fence surrounding a young pheasant rearing pen and killed 22 half-grown pheasants in a single night. On another night, a coyote dug under an old section of un-skirted pen fencing and killed 13 birds. So much for killing only what they can eat then and there.When I was a conservation officer for the Colorado Division of Wildlife, I got involved in helping ranchers eliminate stock-killing coyotes, even though we weren’t responsible for livestock predator damage. On one occasion, a pair of coyotes killed 23 lambs in one night and on another, 13 lambs and several ewes. Yup, killing only what they can eat. On both of these major coyote depredations, the assigned government trapper and I were able to call up and kill the guilty canines and stop the killing.Shortly after moving to southwestern Colorado as a conservation officer, I was driving the backroads in some prime predator country and spotted a large fresh coyote track in the 6 inches of fresh snow. While still mulling over whether to set up and try calling the canine with a predator call, I spotted several magpies flitting in and above a sagebrush thicket several hundred yards across the open flat.After hiking to the site of the scavenger bird activity, where I fully expected to find a predator killed deer, I was surprised to find a freshly killed very large male coyote. The easy task of backtracking in the fresh snow showed where a large tom cougar had evidently spotted the unsuspecting coyote hunting rabbits, mice or voles in the new snow of the valley bottom. The big cat immediately went in stalking mode and made a belly dragging, zig-zagging stalk through the oakbrush for 200 yards. After a 30-yard bounding ambush through the sound-muffling snow, the big feline evidently caught the coyote completely unaware and killed it with a neck hold within a few snow churning yards. It then simply dropped the carcass and continued on its way.  Deadly, sport hunting cougar style! Several years back, I spent two weeks in Alaska tracking and hunting wolves from the air and found it hard to believe the number of moose we saw that had been killed by wolves and left untouched, as the apex killers moved on to make a fresh kill. According to a number of Alaskan pilots, outfitters, trappers and hunters, once a winter kill freezes solid, the wolves simply move on to make a fresh kill. After seeing six untouched dead cow and calf moose in a small valley and tracking the pair of killers to an adjacent valley where we killed both, I acquired a whole new perspective on non-survival predator depredation and the effect it can have on a local wildlife population. An influence that I feel is being grossly overlooked with many big-game populations today.

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The weeklong hunting season harvest was higher than the previous five-year average in four mountainous counties.

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Minnesota health officials say a person older than age 65 who had been exposed to a bat died from rabies.

Perusing an advertisement for a course on the internet took me back a lot of years, when I took a check from a grinning old fur buyer in Sioux Falls, South Dakota. I was 12 years old at the time, and he told me I was a tough negotiator, as he looked over my first big buck mink that I had shot while squirrel and rabbit hunting along the banks of a wooded creek bottom. I didn’t have the slightest idea what he meant. The dad of a schoolmate was an ardent trapper and skinned out and stretched the pelt for me and advised me that the mink was top quality and should bring $30.The first buyer my dad took me to started at $15 and had worked his way up to $22.50 before I walked out. The next buyer, a gentlemanly old Jewish guy complemented me on the quality of the mink and handling of the pelt and gave it a value of $20, which he later explained was a test price to see if I had any idea of what the mink was worth. When I resolutely refused his offer, he smilingly went to $25 and after I stalled for a bit went to the $30 I was hoping for.The advertisement that keyed this long-time memory was for a set of tapes on the fine art of successful negotiating, and being an active writer, photographer, trapper and newby fur buyer, I was constantly negotiating and could make use of any advice I could get.I listened to the four tapes numerous times and picked up lots of useful tips, such as to never jump into a negotiation immediately if possible — to take the time to fully ascertain all the pros and cons of the outcome. This may be only a short time, measured in hours or days, depending on the situation. When dealing in dollars and cents, the first price you want to quote is one that, if you get what you are asking right off the bat, you can take a guided hunting trip or buy a new vehicle. The second choice you would settle for would be a price that would make you a bit of profit and leave you with a smile and the feeling of a job well done. The final price would be an amount that would pay for your efforts and keep you in the ball game and let you think you might just be in the right line of work.A couple weeks after going over the tapes for the umpteenth time, I got a call from a major corporation’s advertising agency that wanted to use a photo of mine for a national advertisement for a year’s time with unlimited usage and wanted a price for such use, a pricey negotiation. I stated that I needed a short time to come up with a figure and would call them the next day.I figured such use should bring $1,000, so I’d start out at $2,000, then drop to $1,500 and reluctantly relent at the $1,000 price, if need be. When I quoted my opening bid of $2,000 there was dead silence on the phone, and I figured I’d priced myself out and lost a potential client. Not the first and probably not the last. “Wow! Thanks,” responded the gal I had been negotiating with, who stated exuberantly that the company figured the photo use for that major advertising would run between $5,000 and $10,000! Thorough research on use was another piece of advice on the tapes, which I obviously hadn’t absorbed sufficiently. I trashed the tapes right after that phone conversation.A few years back, when fur prices peaked and I was eyeball deep in trapping and fur buying, I was having coffee in my hometown of  Pagosa Springs, Colorado, with the retired government trapper and several local old-timers and discussing hunting and trapping in past years when a local rancher who lived right on the New Mexico state line and had access to some prime bobcat habitat came in and wanted to know if I was interested in buying five prime bobcat pelts. Informing me, boisterously, that I was going to have to pay top dollar for them.He went out and hauled the cats out of his pickup. I graded them and offered him $1,000 for the lot. He sputtered and told me in no uncertain terms he wouldn’t take less than $300 for the big tom, so I regraded the five cats an offered him $300 for the super tom, $250, $175 and $150 for the other three adult cats and $100 for a kitten to which he readily agreed. He yipped when he saw the check was for $25 less than I originally offered, but sometimes in negotiations you had better watch what you ask for or it can bite you in the butt.

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The Tri-State Coyote Project sheds light into the behavior of Canis latrans in the southeastern region of the United States.

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By using decoys, you not only appeal to a predator’s sense of hearing but also to its discerning eyesight.

After misidentification by state officials, a hunter killed a grizzly thinking it was a black bear.

Don’t let the dreams of a hunt in November turn into nightmares in the future if the wrong candidates are elected because you didn’t bother to vote.