Date: March 20, 2019
Source: North Carolina Museum of Natural Sciences
Coyotes
eat deer, but not enough to limit the deer population at a large scale. A new
study of deer numbers across the eastern United States has found that the
arrival and establishment of coyote predators has not caused the number of deer
harvested by hunters to decline.
"With
wolves and cougars extinct in most of the eastern U.S., white-tailed deer have
become abundant, sometimes overabundant," says Roland Kays, wildlife
biologist at the North Carolina Museum of Natural Sciences and North Carolina
State University, and co-author of a paper describing this research.
"Coyotes moved in as the new top predator of the east, but they aren't
nearly as effective deer hunters as wolves, so there's been a lot of
controversy about whether these medium-sized predators can really limit deer
populations at large scales."
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