Do whitetails alter their habits to avoid coyotes?

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By Tim Bunton Contributing Writer, Outdoor News
August 21, 2014

Springfield — A year into the study on how coyote pressure affects deer behavior, hunters and wildlife watchers around the country are patiently waiting to learn what may already be known.

Whether it’s Illinois, Wyoming, Pennsylvania or Georgia, growing coyote populations are causing at least some degree of havoc on whitetail herds.

Biologists at the University of Georgia’s Deer Lab began a unique study last summer, looking at white-tailed deer in two separate controlled environments – one with coyotes and one without. The Deer Lab has not released any data or information from the study, but researchers there and around the U.S. have been looking at the deer-coyote relationship for years, with most research concluding that intensive predator removal dramatically improves whitetail numbers. In one such study by University of Georgia graduate student Cory VanGilder, it was discovered that on a 2,000-acre wildlife study area, the removal of 22 coyotes and 10 bobcats prior to fawning season increased fawn survival by more than 250 percent. Another UGA study compared the effects of predation removal on fawn recruitment in an area where coyotes weren’t removed. That study found that two fawns were recruited for every three does in the removal zone, while it took 28 more does to recruit the same number of fawns in the non-removal zone.

Already, most wildlife biologists believe coyotes affect deer in two ways: directly through mortality and indirectly by eliciting behavioral responses to predation risk.

Current research is focused more on measuring the indirect effects of predation, including shifts in space use, foraging behavior, and body condition.

For Illinois deer hunters and deer watchers, the connection to the UGA study is interesting, because Georgia, like Illinois, is in the middle of a coyote population explosion.

Among questions being asked during this population explosion – not to mention the state’s established bobcat and potential future cougar and wolf populations – is if coyotes and other predators can co-habitate in the state.

According to an Illinois Natural History Survey fawn survival study conducted in the Chicago area, coyotes killed 20 percent to 80 percent of the fawns in different populations. That ratio, hunters and scholars agree, is likely to be different in rural areas across the rest of the state where deer have more cover to protect themselves.

There is an also an ongoing argument as to if coyotes have any effect on adult deer.

Meanwhile, the Quality Deer Management Association recently released a list of findings from past studies centered on deer-coyote relationships:

•In an Auburn University deer study, trapping of coyotes and other predators during fawning season improved fawn survival by 80 percent.
•In one of the largest studies on the affects of coyotes on white-tailed deer, the U.S. Forest Service collared and observed 60 fawns at the Savannah River Site in South Carolina. Within the first six weeks, 44 of the fawns died. Thirty-five were killed by coyotes and six were killed by bobcats.
•A look at 353 coyote scats collected on two public hunting areas by the University of Georgia indicated that coyotes on one of the sites switched almost exclusively to eating fawns during the fawning season.
As aside to the ongoing research on predators, coyotes are not alone in causing havoc on deer herds. A study by Chad Newbolt of Auburn University found that deer sightings at trail camera sites increased dramatically after feral hogs were trapped and lethally removed from the surrounding area.

The study results strongly suggest that deer actively avoid hogs, so hogs can essentially exclude deer from food sources with their presence.