Alright, got around to reading the article. There a some glaring issues of mixing scientific articles for a popular literature article, amd taking studies out of context, or not taking other pretty major factors into account.
But a couple points---
*You can't do a cookie cutter approach when cherry picking stats for wildlife management. Now kidding north studies find high deer mortality, even in mature deer....snow is a great help. Shocker, deer populations that are newly experiencing coyotes have a higher impact. But as deer figure them out at the landscape level (not talking about individual properties), the impact lessens.
*Example of why you have to look at the whole picture? If coyotes are such a huge impact, say in Texas, then why do we ever utter the words "over population of deer"? We have lots of areas in Texas that have lots of coyotes, and have deer out the ying yang......little hint, a doe only needs a female offspring to survive sexual maturity ONCE in five years for the population to be stable. Anything over that is INCREASING. So you have a 50% fawn survival, great, but so what. So when you see something like 72% (they love throwing that one around), you have to say "hmmmm, what's the rest of the story". Oh, there's usually a bigger habitat issue that needs to be addressed, like lack of cover due to overheating.
I'll write up more later, but there are a lot of issues with the article.
But a couple points---
*You can't do a cookie cutter approach when cherry picking stats for wildlife management. Now kidding north studies find high deer mortality, even in mature deer....snow is a great help. Shocker, deer populations that are newly experiencing coyotes have a higher impact. But as deer figure them out at the landscape level (not talking about individual properties), the impact lessens.
*Example of why you have to look at the whole picture? If coyotes are such a huge impact, say in Texas, then why do we ever utter the words "over population of deer"? We have lots of areas in Texas that have lots of coyotes, and have deer out the ying yang......little hint, a doe only needs a female offspring to survive sexual maturity ONCE in five years for the population to be stable. Anything over that is INCREASING. So you have a 50% fawn survival, great, but so what. So when you see something like 72% (they love throwing that one around), you have to say "hmmmm, what's the rest of the story". Oh, there's usually a bigger habitat issue that needs to be addressed, like lack of cover due to overheating.
I'll write up more later, but there are a lot of issues with the article.