00:00:05 Speaker 1: Welcome to this Country Life. I'm your host, Brent Reeves. From coon hunting to trot lining and just general country living. I want you to stay a while as I share my experiences and life lessons. This Country Life is presented by Case Knives on Meat Eaters Podcast Network, bringing you the best outdoor podcast the airwaves had off. All right, friends, grab a chair or drop that tail gate. I've got some stories to share. Welcome to this country Life podcast. This one's kind of different. You can see me on here, and you can see my guest on here. Today we're doing an audio and a video version of this. And I am in at Kansas State University in Manhattan, Kansas, and I'm talking with my friend, doctor Drew Ricketts. Drew is with the Extension Wildlife Specialists or he is an Extension Wildlife Specialist here and he works in the Hortor, Culture and Natural Resources Department here and as a professor. Drew, thank you for being here. 00:01:10 Speaker 2: Oh absolutely, thanks for having me on your show. 00:01:13 Speaker 1: Brent. 00:01:13 Speaker 2: This is a pretty big honor for me. 00:01:15 Speaker 1: Well, you know, we met I guess a month ago and we were decoy dog hunting with my friend Jeff Ryder, who you met on that hunt and that's that is a video that will come out sometime in twenty twenty six and Decoy Dogs give a brief history of that. Folks that's familiar with it, or maybe I did an episode on this a few several months back about decoy dog hunting and hunting with Jeff. But I tried to explain how it all works, which is the interaction between two different canines is. It's pretty cool. But it's always brought up a you know, references are it's brought up thoughts about how couts or coutes, however you want to pronounce it, affect the environment. And surprising to me a kid that grew up my father was a longtime cout hunter and he was just running coats with dogs, you know, they chasing it. Listened to the dogs and the cout gets away. You know. It was never usually the cout never lost and was never killed or caught by the dogs or whatever. It was just a sport where you listened to the dogs running. Whoever's dog was in front was the winner, you know, and that was the end of it. So someone who from a small child up until a large adult, now I had a wrong view of how couts really affect the landscape. And when once I got to talking to Jeff Ryder and seeing the different things and seeing things for myself, and then especially when you came in and started adding the facts to what the figures just didn't add up, it's been very intriguing for me. And we're gonna get into all of that, sure. The first I want to give give me a little a bio about yourself, Drew, and how you wound up being here where you are today. 00:03:10 Speaker 2: Well, I grew up in Southeast Kansas. I've lived in Kansas my whole life. Grew up fishing, hunting, trapping. When I was a toddler, dad was trapping for a living and writing trapping books really, and so my daycare was riding on his shoulders checking a trap line basically during during that season of the year. And and you know, lots of fishing when I was young, hunting as I grew up, and I kind of quit trapping for a while, got into coon hunting real big for a time when I was in college, and then got out of college, came back to doing a lot of trapping, started doing a lot of fur trapping for coyotes, and during I guess I got a degree at what at k State and wildlife management in between in there, had a brief stint in South Dakota studying some badgers and stuff like that, putting radio colors on those kind of critters. Came back to Kansas and started a habitat management business, doing a lot of pasture clearing and that kind of stuff too, And that's when I really got into coyota trapping. And then I really I beat up my body pretty bad doing that stuff for a living, and I got bored, and so I just decided I wanted to come back to school and pursue some kind of path that had let me fool with animals a little bit more for my job. Got a degree a PhD from Case State in in biology with a focus in wildlife management, studying small mammals. So I trapped like two thousand mice and rats about five thousand times over four years. 00:04:55 Speaker 1: And Jesus you mentioned now there's no difference in mice rats. Let me go and correct you. There's only a big rats, a little rags. Yeah, And I don't like none of yeah. Yeah. 00:05:06 Speaker 2: But during that time I had to figure out how to keep myself saying, because fooling was with mice is my favorite thing either. Really, So I've got some funding to put GPS callers on coyotes during that time and kind of studied how they moved around, looked at what killed them and that sort of thing, and that turned into part of my PhD degree, and then after that I just kind of rolled into this job. 00:05:27 Speaker 1: So, yeah, let me ask you a question before we get started on the on the on the stuff here. Did you learn more about coats trapping them or did you learn more about coats in school. 00:05:39 Speaker 2: All of the above. Yeah, but the school part of it isn't something that I learned in class. It's what I learned from putting GPS callers on coyotes and tracking them around, and then learning how to trap coyotes during the summertime is a totally different ballgame than trapping coyotes during during the fall when they're easy to get. 00:05:59 Speaker 1: My brother there is a a as a trapper, as a coat trapper, and a good one, and he's he's catching a lot of them for these fox pens and stuff like that, and for you know, to control them my own places where there's too many coats. If the landowners want to thind out and he'll tell you quick there is there's two different seasons to trapping codes. So it's and I probably phrased that question wrong. As far as did you learn more, let me let me ask you this. After you started with the radio callers, did you learn things that relearned things you thought you knew about how colds act or move across the landscape? 00:06:44 Speaker 2: Oh? 00:06:45 Speaker 1: Yeah, something, What was probably the most surprising thing that you learned? 00:06:48 Speaker 2: Well, you know, I had I had read about some of the differences in the social structure of coyotes. And to keep it simple, there's there's residents and there's train and residents are going to be the pairs that are breeding some of their offspring from last year that we would call helpers that they allowed to stay around and not disperse, and then the pups from this year if it's during a time of the year when they would have had pups already. And then the transients are these nomadic coyotes that aren't really tied to a home range. And when I got those GPS callers on the coyotes, just realizing how big of an area those transients cover, that was very interesting to me. Another thing that was really surprising is how often and how many times, even way into the future they are, not into the future, but long time after a cow or a buffalo has died. How many times they come back to that carcass, even when there's nothing left to eat, that remains an important part of their territory for six months or a year after that food's gone. 00:07:55 Speaker 1: Wow. Yeah, well, I'm going to mess around and learn something today. Let's get started, man, from from your point of view, when we got a list here stuff kyot biology and our historical kyote distribution. You know, a lot of people and me being included, have learned recently that kyotes haven't always been where colotes are. And I mean you see the stuff. You see the post on social media. You see the news reports of somebody's cat getting snatched in the middle of the chair by kydi, you know, because they saw it on the security camera or whatever. But that ain't always been the case. They haven't always been there. How did they get to where coyotes are now? Sure? 00:08:44 Speaker 2: So you know, there's been several different changes that have allowed them to expand their range Historically. You got that picture in front of you, and we can make that available on the on the YouTube stream when you put that up. But it's there's there's a big red area and now that's where coyotes were. That's their historic distribution prior to nineteen hundred. 00:09:04 Speaker 1: And if you're listening to this and not seeing the graft that's up, it's covering like two thirds of the United States from westward, like up to I assume that's like right along the Mississippi. 00:09:17 Speaker 2: River, Mississippi and Ohio. Okay, so that's that boundary on the eastern side. 00:09:21 Speaker 1: And on all the way down to the Yucatan. 00:09:23 Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, yeah. And so if you're east of that that boundary basically in Mississippi, I'm sure it's not a solid boundary because kyotes could swim across the sure, right, But that was basically the eastern extent of their range. And since nineteen hundred they've expanded to occupy all that area east of there. They've also gotten up into you know, Nova Scotia. They're further into Alaska than they ever were historically and further down into Central America. And so when we think about coyotes having an impact on critters in places, you know, a lot of the places where we hear about coyotes having the most impact on species like deer end up being places where there's only been coyotes for maybe one hundred years, but in some instances it's thirty years or sixty years, and so they're kind of a new predator in some of those places now they've replaced a predator. You know, the southeast would have been home to the red red wolves, right, and so coyotes have kind of expanded to occupy that niche that red wolves previously occupied. When we're thinking about what led to them expanding, the changes that people have made to the landscape, coyotes aren't really good at making a living in just totally forced dominated areas. So when we cleared the forest and started farming, and those sorts of things that made it easier for coyotes to make a living there, killing the large predators that were there or extirpating them, removing them from the landscape, gray wolves, red wolves, mountain lions, you know, all the different species that sometimes kill coyotes and prey on them or kill them because they don't like them. You know, those all those things together are kind of what's allowed them to expand. You mentioned the interactions in cities, and that's kind of an interesting one because there's a lot of evidence from from the southwestern US that coyotes in the very large Native American cities that existed prior to European settlement in North America. It looks like coyotes were probably incorporated into those cities just like they are into our modern cities really, and so it's just taking them time to figure out how to deal with modern humans a little bit better. And then the other thing along with that too is you know, coyotes are small enough that a lot of people are willing to tolerate them in town and close to where they live. We don't see them as a threat the same way that we do gray wolves, you know, and so they're tolerated more than the larger predators are, and that's why we see more coyotes in cities than we would the larger predators. 00:12:05 Speaker 1: Has that been you think the increase in sightings in urban areas is because of technology now like cameras, security cameras and stuff, or is the population growing or expanded into urban areas more. 00:12:20 Speaker 2: It's growing and expanding into urban areas more, for sure, you know, going back into the seventies is when there started to be reports of attacks on people in cities in California. So it's just as coyotes have become more and more abundant further east, they've started occupying some of these cities that are further and further east and having more interactions with people. 00:12:41 Speaker 1: Okay, any fatal Has there been any fatal reports or fatalities from a couple The. 00:12:50 Speaker 2: Most recent one, I'm going to get the date wrong. It was in the early two thousands, and it was in Alaska as a woman who I believe was a reporter and she was out for a jog and she got attacked by a pack of coyotes. 00:13:03 Speaker 1: And killed wow. 00:13:05 Speaker 2: And some after that happened, they did some research on that group of coyotes and figured out that there was a really hard winner, or a series of hard winners, and those coyotes had figured out how to prey on moose, which is way way out of the normal prey range for coyotes, right, But they figured out how to hunt more like wolves. They figured out how to chase those moose down in the snow, and so they became predators of larger critters and it was that group of coyotes that they believe attacked this woman. 00:13:41 Speaker 1: So that behavior, yeah, yeah, we're still not helping with a villain, no label that they've got. 00:13:49 Speaker 2: No no, And that's okay. I mean, you know, all critters have positive and negative values, sure right, I mean recreational value, monetary value, and all those sorts of things. But at the same time, we can have negative interactions with critters that we love. You know what, white tailed deer one of the most popular critters in the US, right, but they're responsible for more dollars in property damage and more of human fatalities than most of the critters that we have. 00:14:15 Speaker 1: Yeah, and to thin those down, I mean the object when you say, you know, kill a coyote, save a deer, I think, really how that goes? 00:14:25 Speaker 2: Is it? 00:14:25 Speaker 1: Well? 00:14:26 Speaker 2: You know, it really depends on where you are how much of an impact coyotes have on deer. So one of the things that goes along with that range expansion is as coyotes expanded into the east, there was some hybridization that occurred with wolves and with domestic dogs and sot. The next graph I brought to show you shows that in dark gray, all the coyotes in that area in dark gray are basically one hundred percent coyote, and all. 00:14:59 Speaker 1: That pretty close to the historic range of them is. 00:15:03 Speaker 2: That it's very close to the extoric range, but it includes the areas to the north and west that coyotes have expanded to beyond that historic range. In the eastern US, then most of those coyotes have some dog or some wolf in them, and they've documented that, you know, with the longer legs, a more a little bit more of a complex social structure where they might hunt in packs more than Western coyotes do, and those sorts of things that they're able to be better predators of larger animals. 00:15:37 Speaker 1: So there's a site there's a physical difference in Western and Eastern. 00:15:43 Speaker 2: They tend to be a little larger, they tend to have lankier legs, a skull structure that's not wolf like but more more robust than a Western coyote, and that translates into some of their behaviors too. 00:15:59 Speaker 1: Yeah, well, I know that there's and forgive me if I pronounced it's wrong, but I think it is not called Bergman's rule or Bergsman's rule. Where animal or mammals get larger, the further north, you go, yeah, in latitude, So I didn't. I had no idea there would be a difference going east and west instead of the north and south. 00:16:20 Speaker 2: There is, but it's more associated with their genetics than it is with their physical environment. So that tendency for critters to be smaller towards the equator and larger towards the poles has to do with heat dissipation and heat retention, whereas this other difference is because of that introgression of wolf and dog DNA. 00:16:43 Speaker 1: Well, tell me what's an old coyote? What's a lifespan with Kyovida? 00:16:46 Speaker 2: Well, a really old coyote, you know, in the wild, is going to be like ten years the maximum known age based on age teeth that I know of in the literature. There may be something newer than this, but fourteen years. Oh yeah, And in captivity they can live to be over twenty. So basically, when we think about their life span and that sort of thing, it's kind of like a dog's yeah yeah, yeah. 00:17:11 Speaker 1: Well, and you think about it too, at fourteen regardless of how you correlate that to human years, because I think seven has been kicked out. The one to hear as of lately from K and nine are dogs to humans. But I mean that dude's getting up and he's got to make a living every day and find something to eat right every day, and want in captivity somebody's bringing him yeah, you know, a chicken leg or whatever, which is kind of like the way I like to go through life. It's I'm more successful. I wouldn't be as big as I am if I had to rustle it up every day. But there's so many things working against these these these things out there just like it is all wild animals, sure, but they have become quite a depth that had adapted the difference surround us, which is why you see them in urban areas and s and making a living. But you've got a list here, stuff to go through. You've got mortality listed up here. Yeah, tell me what? Why? Why? This is why you've got this listen to here? What's the points there that you wanted to talk about? 00:18:14 Speaker 2: Well, you know, I mean just thinking about how it's different in different places. So one of the things that we talked about with their expansion is the fact that we released them from predation by bigger predators in a lot of places, and that allowed them to expand. So historically that would have been important in a lot of the range. Now human cause mortality has taken the place of that. So in many populations, human cause mortality is the majority of mortality, and sometimes that's mostly harvest, sometimes it's mostly vehicle collisions, and in a lot of places it's probably going to be somewhere, you know, some combination of that. But there's a recent study in Wisconsin that found that that you know, human cause mortality would the majority of their mortality, and harvest was like ninety some percent of that, which was interesting to me because I wouldn't think it would be that high. But then we've got natural mortality, so they're they're susceptible to basically all the diseases and parasites that we treat our dogs for. So canine distemprovirus is a really important one, parvovirus would be an important one, heartworm, hookworm, tapeworms, all those sorts of yeah, all of that, yeah, yeah, and then mange of course, oh yeah, I've seen that. You know where that came from. No, if you if you do a Google search or whatever internet deal you like to use, you can find a court document from nineteen oh six, where it might have been nineteen oh five. But anyway, the state of Montana hired some biologists to go out and catch coyotes and wolves and bring them into a lab and infect them with scabies and turn them back loose because they figured that would be cheaper, a cheaper way to control coyotes and wolves then paying bounties would be. And so that's how we got mange in our in our wild cans. 00:20:06 Speaker 1: Really. Yeah, well thanks a lot, Montown. I'm gonna blame Garrett Long for that. I hope he's watching that is Uh, that is so interesting. So and that brings up like the bounty thing. Yeah, they've been vilified for so long. You know, if you're paying a bounty on something just to shoot it, sure, you know, was that was it deserved when that when that came about? Or were they or were they getting blamed for a lot of stuff that they weren't actually doing. 00:20:39 Speaker 2: Sure, it's I think it's probably all the above, right, I Mean, the vast majority of coyotes don't fool with livestock. Uh, And that's surprising to a lot of people. That's that's basically an individual behavior. 00:20:55 Speaker 1: It tends sorry I'm gonna get I'm gonna get in a lot of trouble for doing that, right there. 00:21:02 Speaker 2: Coyot coyotes praying on livestock. It tends to be dominated by pair or family groups that have pups, uh, and that also have territories that overlap mostly sheep and goats, but but some some cattle as well. And when they have those pups, and especially that period around whelping time up until those pups can start getting out and hunting a little bit, uh, that's when we see the most large prey items being important to those coyotes. Most of the time, coyotes are eating rabbits and voles and insects and mice. 00:21:44 Speaker 1: And now you tell me how you know that, because somebody right now is looking at that radio that they're listening to and saying doctor Drew has lost his month. Yeah, yeah, tell me how you know that. 00:21:55 Speaker 2: So, so here's here's the studies from Kansas we can look at. Really, so I just I summarized one that is from nineteen sixty eight, so it's really old. But the cool thing about this study is it's based on stomach contents, so it's back during the bounty period and Professor by the last name of Guyer here at k State had folks that were bringing in coyotes, and he was looking at the reproductive tracks, looking at their stomach contents, aging them, and doing all. 00:22:26 Speaker 1: Kinds of at the universe. 00:22:28 Speaker 2: Oh yeah, yeah, And he was a physiologist, so he got into a lot of detail. But it's like twenty three hundred coyotes, okay, so it's not a small sample size. It's a really good sample size. Forty percent of the stomachs had rabbits thirty one or sorry, this is actually percentage of stomach contents. So forty percent rabbit, thirty one percent roding, and twenty eight percent carrying. So eaton did that stuff would regardless of But here's the deal. When a coyotes got a belly full of meat, that's big meat. We can't tell if it's from a calf that they killed or a calf that they scavened. They found it, and so that's all lumped into that bucket right there. The thing about this one, though, is that we didn't have all that many deer in Kansas when that study was taking place. Our first modern deer season was nineteen sixty five in the state of Kansas. 00:23:24 Speaker 1: So that's just three years into that. 00:23:26 Speaker 2: Yep, yep, and the study was actually done before then. So if we look at some of the more modern studies, these are based on scat contents. One of them a little bit further west in Kansas, seventy six percent of the scats had cotton rats, twenty nine percent voles, nineteen percent cotton tails, four percent had deer in them, two percent had cattle and this is hair, right, nineteen percent had insects, nine percent had fruits, and so on. Another one that was done by those same researchers about the same time here really close to Manhattan, on a site that had a lot higher deer densities. They found similar results for the small mammals and critters like that, but twenty percent of them had deer in them. So their main prey is small mammals and insects and fruit and stuff like that. But when deer are really abundant, they're going to eat some deer. That doesn't mean that they killed all the deer that they ate right. 00:24:27 Speaker 1: Right exactly, Because I mean a mice mice or a vole or a gopher or something's going to be a whole lot easier to catch than a deer. Yeah, and would you have a guess as to or is there any data that supports how much of that is carrying and how much is is our deer that they killed. 00:24:52 Speaker 2: So the data that you could look at to think about that is data from fond survival studies. So so we did a study way out in western Kansas, put GPS callers on a whole bunch of deer, both mule deer and whitetails, and we on average, you know, fawn survival in that study across three years was around thirty percent, okay, of the of the fawns that were killed, thirty to forty percent of those fawns were attributed to a loss to a predator, and a majority of those predator losses were coyotes. A fawn that dies out in the landscape but wasn't killed by cote, a lot of those fawns are still going to get scavenged by coyotes. 00:25:42 Speaker 1: Okay. 00:25:42 Speaker 2: So if you applied that same percentage to the scats that had deer hair in them, and then about forty percent, thirty to forty percent of those scats that had deer hair in them were probably fawns that they killed. 00:25:59 Speaker 1: Now, when you. 00:26:00 Speaker 2: Look at other areas in Kansas, we haven't seen a deer decline as coyotes have become more abundant through time in the eastern US, the areas that they've expanded into. Part of the reason that they're doing so much coyote research related to coyote impact on deer is because as coyotes increase, they did see a decline in deer numbers. South Carolina, Georgia, some of those states are very good examples of that. And if you look at this map, which is this is these studies here are included in these results, but they looked at a whole bunch of different studies that looked at scat coyote scatt throughout the US Okay, and the bars on these going from left to right are small mammals, fruit, rabbits, and then ungulates, which would be deer, caribou, anything we're going to think about that's in the deer family, oh and also pronghorn. So what you can see on this really clearly is that in the Great Plains where coyotes are native, ungulates are a small percentage of their diet. In the Southwest, in those desert communities, ungulates are almost non existent in their diet. Their diet is dominated by rabbits and small mammals and a little bit of fruit. But as you go further east, so in that dark green area in the east, in the light green area in the northeast, ungulates are a much larger percentage of the diet. And ungulates actually dominate the diet in those studies in the southeast, okay. 00:27:47 Speaker 1: Just because the sheer number of them being there. 00:27:50 Speaker 2: Well, not just that, but other things too. Right, those coyotes are the coyotes that have some wolf and doggedy in a and them, so they're they're more apt to be able to prey on those larger prey at thems so and maybe it's something that they've had to figure out as they moved in too. 00:28:11 Speaker 1: But they. 00:28:14 Speaker 2: I think that the broad answer to your question is it really depends on where you are, So they there's never a wherever you are with this species, it's always this way in biology, and that's that's one of the really big challenges that's associated with, you know, some of these things like one of you we talked before about that that meme from Facebook, let. 00:28:40 Speaker 1: Me stuff you're out there, Yeah, because we I'm I'm as bad as Clayton Newton. I'm gonna do a little foreshadow because we're going to stop right here, and this is going to be part one of my talk with doctor Drew right here, and we're going to get into the meat and the potatoes of what everybody is wanting to know about, and that's the deer and cold relationship, we'll call it, and whether or not we're doing the Lord's work when we're killing colds to save our dear leases. We'll be back next week for the next week. Thank you, doctor, Thank you sir. Y' all be careful.