Coyotes and deer.
The fates of the two species have been increasingly linked in Penn's Woods.
That's not about to change. In fact, if state lawmakers get their way, they'll soon be tied more closely than ever.
Over the last several months, sportsmen concerned about the state's white-tailed deer have been asking the Pennsylvania Game Commission to decrease the number of doe licenses allocated to reflect deer lost to predators in general, and to coyotes in particular.
They've apparently been sharing those thoughts with state lawmakers, too.
State Rep. Ed Staback, the Lackawanna County Democrat who chairs the House Game and Fisheries Committee, said sportsmen believe coyote numbers are increasing even as deer numbers are decreasing.
"They're making a one-to-one correlation," Staback said.
It's true that coyote populations statewide are higher now than they were a decade ago, said Carl Roe, executive director of the commission. But they are not necessarily up everywhere.
In fact, harvest numbers indicate the population may have taken a dip last year, he said.
And, no matter the trend, the commission's deer biologists do factor predation into their deer management plan, he said. Right now, he said, there seems to be no reason for concern.
"When it comes to the harvest, we haven't see a significant change in our fawn-to-doe ratio, which would be an indication of significant predation," Roe said. "We have not seen predation as a determining factor in fawn survival."
The commission studied fawn survival earlier this decade, he said. It could do it again if more money was available, but it's not, he added. The agency's research budget for deer is already allocated to a study of the impact of shortening doe season in four wildlife management units — a study in itself begun in response to concerns from lawmakers that too many deer were being killed in places.
"We're going to keep pushing them on this coyote thing. We're not going to wait for their financial condition to improve," Staback said.
In the meantime, others are looking at coyotes, too.
The Quality Deer Management Association recently released its "Whitetail Report 2010," a look at all things deer related across the country. A section of it focused on the impacts of predators, specifically coyotes.
It noted that in addition to Pennsylvania's fawn-mortality study, research into coyote-deer impacts has recently been done in Alabama, Georgia and South Carolina. All indicated that coyotes can depress fawn survival, sometimes significantly.
"Collectively, these studies demonstrated the game has clearly changed for deer managers with respect to fawn predation," the QDMA report said. "Geographically and numerically expanding predator populations, in combination with more aggressive antlerless harvest rates, are altering the dynamics of traditional harvest models."
Interestingly, the report noted that coyotes have most regulated deer populations in places with "inherently low deer populations, poor habitats and perpetually severe environments" — all of which might be used to describe parts of Pennsylvania, and northcentral Pennsylvania in particular, where complaints about coyotes from sportsmen are most severe.
That doesn't mean that all coyotes eat is deer. A study of coyote scats done in Illinois, for example, found that deer ranked only third as a food source, behind small rodents and fruit and just ahead of cottontail rabbits and birds.
But the report concluded that coyotes "have successfully invaded all areas of whitetail range and they'll be an annual variable in deer-management programs."
"Their actual impacts will need to be measured and monitored, and deer seasons and bag limits can be adjusted if necessary. The important thing is to realize they are now a player in many deer-management programs, and as managers, we need to acknowledge them as such," the report said.
