BOSTON — Coyotes are seemingly everywhere in New England. Some people hunt them to reduce populations, but a new study from the University of New Hampshire suggests this could backfire.
Hunting can produce more coyotes
“It’s called a compensatory response. It has to do with the fact that if there are fewer competitors of your own species around, the females can increase their brood production,” Remington Moll, an assistant professor at UNH, told WBZ -TV.
Moll worked on the three-year investigation. He said hunting may reduce populations in the short term, but the lack of animals could also cause more animals to migrate to fill the gap.
“Sometimes I think sharpshooting may be appropriate if there are individual problem coyotes that need to be removed, that’s very reasonable,” Moll said.
Coyotes and trash
If hunting doesn’t work, what does? MassWildlife says it comes down to solving our waste problems.
“If the public did that, a lot of the conflicts they experience with wildlife would disappear,” says Dave Wattles, a biologist with MassWildlife. “You have to do a lot of work to get that food, or you can go to someone’s backyard and empty their bird feeder, which they will fill for you the next day.”
Wattles says people are, in fact, exercising coyotes to eat in their neighborhood rather than in the wild.
‘Studies have shown that coyotes occur in higher densities in suburban and urban areas than in completely natural areas. It’s counterintuitive to how we think about wildlife,” he told WBZ.
Moll also suggests that large predators may reduce populations. These are animals such as bears, pumas or wolves.
“They compete with them. They can kill them and so on. And we found that to be true, but it depended on the local conditions. It depended on the habitat,” Moll said.
Mike Sullivan
