Nov. 23–Rep. Mike Peifer, R-139, Honesdale, thinks Pennsylvania hunters need a reason to hunt coyotes. Every year, he sees more and more on his bear hunting trips. On his last trip, he said his party saw 10 coyotes and shot four.
Mr. Peifer has introduced HB 1534, a bill that would allow the Pennsylvania Game Commission to offer a $25 payment per coyote. State law currently allows hunters to kill an unlimited number of coyotes year-round with a hunting or fur-taker license. The bill cleared the state House Game and Fisheries Committee last week and now awaits a full House vote.
In addition to what he’s seen in his 30-plus years in the woods, Mr. Peifer said he has heard anecdotal evidence from constituents who tell him about hearing yips and howls where they never heard them before and losing pet cats to coyotes.
“People aren’t shooting them,” he said. “We’re not controlling the population to where it should be.”
Game Commission estimates show a spike in the coyote population. Travis Lau, the commission’s press secretary, said the commission estimated the state’s coyote population to be about 15,000 to 20,000 a decade ago. Last year, according to survey results extrapolated for the entire state, hunters harvested around 40,000 coyotes, he said.
Gauging the Eastern Coyote’s effect on the ecosystem is much more difficult. The Game Commission isn’t sure whether the species was native to Pennsylvania before European settlement. Coyotes were first documented in Pennsylvania in the 1930s and 1940s. Mr. Lau described the early history of Europeans, coyotes and wolves as a “blur.”
In the mid-1600s, Pennsylvania’s colonial government paid a bounty of 10 to 15 shillings for every wolf killed, Mr. Lau said. “That’s really the only record of wolves” in the Commonwealth, he said. “Those wolves could have been coyotes.”
The line between wolf and coyote continues to blur to this day. Many biologists think today’s Eastern Coyote is probably part wolf.
Jonathan Way, Ph.D., a research scientist at Clark University in Worcester, Mass., who specializes in Eastern Coyotes, prefers the term “coywolves.” In a paper he published this year in the ecological journal Canadian Field-Naturalist, he summarized previous research explaining the origin of this hybrid species.
“It is now generally accepted that Northeastern Coyotes formed in the early 1900s in southern Ontario through hybridization between colonizing coyotes from the west and remnant populations of Eastern Wolves,” he wrote in the paper.
In an email interview, Dr. Way said central and western Pennsylvania is at the edge of this area where coyotes and wolves mingled. “Admittedly, not a lot of work has been done in PA to know for sure,” he said.
He called the idea of putting a bounty on coyotes “nonsensical.” The predators have an important ecological role in helping regulate prey populations, he said. With the extirpation of cougars and wolves, the coyote is the second-largest predator the state has left after the black bear.
“The most common-sense thing for the environment would be to have people leave cats inside and welcome the natural predation that coyotes/coywolves provide to make deer and other animal (populations) healthier,” he said.
Scott Bearer, Ph.D., a forest ecologist with The Nature Conservancy, said the organization has noticed an increase in coyote population on its Pennsylvania properties, based on more frequent sightings of coyotes, their scat and their tracks.
The conservancy manages large properties in the state and works to promote overall biodiversity. Dr. Bearer said the organization has not seen any negative effects of the coyote’s population boom.
Mr. Lau said the Game Commission has not noticed any change in the doe-to-fawn ratio, a metric it uses to gauge trends in deer populations. The commission calculates the ratio for each of its 23 wildlife management units. Deer populations are stable or increasing at all of the units, except one near Pittsburgh, he said. He said coyotes could be affecting small mammal populations, though the commission would not be able to quantify this effect, especially on species such as mice and voles.
Rep. Peifer said the $25 payment would give hunters a reason to manage the population of an animal they would otherwise have no reason to shoot. Nobody eats coyotes. Blasting them with a shotgun — the preferred method, according to coyote hunting tips found on the Game Commission’s website — often renders the pelt unusable, he said.
But coyote hunting is fun, Rep. Peifer said. He talked about a coyote hunt he went on last year. “We saw a lot of tracks but we couldn’t get on them,” he said. “They’re cagey.” Offering the bounty could be another way of getting more people out in the woods hunting, he said.
The bill could get stopped in its tracks, though. This week, House legislators proposed an amendment allowing hunting on Sunday to the bill, he said. While Rep. Peifer supports Sunday hunting, he thinks this amendment would kill the bill.
“It’s a poison pill,” he said. “You can’t win there.”
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