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Predators Are Subsistence Hunters — Ha!
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.
