Mary Bonnell discusses facts & myths about our buddy the coyote.?ÿ She has good insight into the creature from her experience.?ÿ I thought it was worth watching.
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BTW - she also has a good video on rattlesnakes.
Enjoyed that
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Had one within 80 feet of my side door yesterday.?ÿ It was checking beneath the fruit trees to see if anything good had hit the ground recently.
Good video, thanks.
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Coyote America by Dan Flores is good book on the topic if anyone is interested.
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The deer herd in Maine was always a concern in the area I grew up.?ÿ Everyone I knew was worried about hard winters killing them off or the scourge of all scourges, the coyote.?ÿ Maine Fish and Game didn't acknowledge their existence until around the 1950s when an old trapper threw one down on the steps of the capitol house in Augusta.?ÿ After that there was no mistaking what to do if you came across one, kill it!
All sorts of terrible methods were employed: hanging meat on large fish hooks just high enough to require the coyote to have to jump, cracking light bulbs in a handful of ground meat then throwing the frozen ball along snowmobile trails, pumping dead animal carcasses full of Strychnine, etc..?ÿ Few mammals on earth have been so intensely targeted for extinction yet managed to survive.?ÿ?ÿ
I don't have any objections to people hunting them, but at this point it seems like a stretch to make the claim that one is helping to manage their population.?ÿ Eliminating animals that become too bold in relation to human activities is a different matter and should be, and generally is, encouraged by biologists.?ÿ
