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Backyard Coyotes
Going Green
Going Green: Backyard Coyotes
More and more New York backyards are home to a growing number of coyotes.
Coyotes have been increasing since the last century. They started coming in around 1920-1930 and since then proliferated throughout the state in fact they in almost every part of the state.
Growing public concern prompted the study ESF graduate student Christy Boser is working on, to track coyotes using GPS collars.
"We take that information and use it to assess what kind of habitat, how long they're spending in one location and their movements, if they're booking it from one place to another it's obvious their hunting or they're being territorial," said Christy Boser, SUNY-ESF graduate student.
Thirty seven coyotes have been collared. One was tracked to East Stroudsburg, Pennsylvania 150 miles from the Oneonta study area.
We had previous reports of some of our animals in the Albany area. People spotted the ear tags. One visited Albany, came back to the study area and now is missing again.
Researchers want to learn more about coyotes' interaction with humans.
There's a second study that's being done in Westchester County which is looking at how coyotes move in an urban and suburban landscape, looking at how coyotes interacted and maybe caused problems with humans. They couldn't find anyone consistently having problems with coyotes so that's become a study of habitat use down there.
And so far, the research doesn't show any adverse impact on the deer population.
At the current deer population levels, managed by the DEC, we don't suspect that coyotes are having an impact. We suspect that most of the mortality that we see in fawns is compensatory, that these fawns would be killed in other ways.
But that's not a final conclusion and the study goes for another three to four years.
