Urbana, Ill. — Research in the West that received help from the Illinois Natural History Survey and the University of Illinois found that higher coyote populations across the United States are found in areas that allow hunting of the predator.
The study took a broad look at the predator, which has thrived in Illinois over the past two decades.
“As U.S. landscapes became increasingly plowed and paved over the past couple centuries, wildlife has become less abundant thanks to the loss and fragmentation of habitat,” researchers stated in a published paper on the study. “But not coyotes, North America’s most successful mid-sized predator, which have expanded their range despite eradication campaigns and rapid urbanization.”
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Co-author Austin Green, a researcher with the Utah’s Science Research Initiative, noted that it is reasonable to expect hunting to reduce species abundance. Unregulated hunting, after all, resulted in the disappearance of the passenger pigeon, dodo and monk seal, and near-extinctions of many other now-rare species.
Coyotes, on the other hand, have displayed a pronounced resiliency in regions, according to the findings based on extensive camera surveys.
“This is corroborating a lot of other evidence that direct hunting and intervention is actually not a really good way to manage coyotes, if the goal is to decrease their abundance,” Green said.
The new study was led by the University of New Hampshire. It relied on data compiled by Snapshot USA, a sprawling collaborative campaign to sample wild mammal populations with motion-triggered trap cameras arrayed in transects each fall.
Green and research partners conducted a three-year study using cameras to assess critical factors for coyote abundance. Nearly 4,600 camera trap sites arranged in 254 arrays were deployed across the contiguous United States.
Observations were recorded during the fall months of 2019 to 2021, and then statistically analyzed, with 22 separate factors considered. Coyote abundance was more positively associated with separate biome covers, and in regions with coyote hunting. The 97% positive abundance for hunting at a 100-meter scale heavily implies that coyotes thrive in the face of hunting pressure.
“Because they’re such territorial animals that if you remove the most territorial one,” Green said, “two or three take their place, start breeding, and you lead to actual increases in coyote population.”
These findings come in stark contrast to the effects of hunting on other carnivore populations, such as wolves, cougars, and other big cats, which have been extirpated from most of their native ranges. Regulations for coyote hunting are far looser than for other wildlife species.
The researchers hypothesize that hunting lowers the average age of coyotes, leading to less competition for food, which increases litter sizes.
Coyotes also demonstrate a keen ability to find food sources and naturally roam in search of new territories, traits that enable populations to rebound in places where they have been eliminated.
Published in the January edition of the journal Ecography, the paper credits Maximilian Allen of the University of Illinois and the Illinois Natural History.