Bear Grease - Ep. 345: This Country Life - Kansas Coyote College 101

Episode Date: July 18, 2025

Brent took a trip back to college on this episode! After his Kansas coyote hunt with decoy dogs, he sat down with Kansas State University professor and Kansas Extension Service Wildlife Control Specialist, Dr. Drew Ricketts, to correct Brent on some coyote facts. KSRE Wildlife Management on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCoCUoT3Oi90S5zDnzgL34iAFins, Fur, and Feathers on Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/7HyaYenrLLztd5l9NseZ8hKSRE Wildlife Management: https://www.wildlife.k-state.edu/Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/ksrewildlifeInstagram: https://www.instagram.com/ksre_wildlife/ Shop This Country Life Merch Connect with Brent and MeatEater MeatEater on Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, Youtube, and Youtube Clips Subscribe to the MeatEater Podcast Network on YouTube Shop This Country Life Merch Shop Bear Grease MerchSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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Welcome to this country life. I'm your host, Brent Reeves. From coon hunting to trotlining and just general country living, I want you to stay a while as I share my experiences and life lessons. This country life is presented by Case Knives on Meat Eat Eater's Podcast Network, bringing you the best outdoor podcast that airways have to offer. All right, friends, grab a chair or drop that tailgate. I've got some stories to share. Welcome to this country life podcast. This one's kind of different. You can see me on here and you can see my guest on here today. We're doing an audio and a video version of this, and I am at Kansas State University in Manhattan, Kansas. I'm talking with my friend, Dr. Drew Ricketts.

Drew is with the Extension Wildlife Specialist here, or he is an Extension Wildlife Specialist here, and he works in the Horticulture and Natural Resources Department here, and as a professor. Drew, thank you for being here. Oh, absolutely. Thanks for having me on your show, Brent. This is a pretty big honor for me. Well, you know, we met, I guess, a month ago,

and we were decoy dog hunting with my friend, Jeff Ryder, who you met on that hunt. And that is a video that will come out sometime in 2026. And decoy dogs give a brief history of that, the folks aren't familiar with it, or maybe I did an episode on this. a few several months back about decoy dog hunting and hunting with Jeff, but I tried to explain how it all works, which is the interaction between two different canines is pretty cool.

Yeah. But it's always brought up a, you know, references or it's brought up thoughts about how coyotes or coyotes, however you want to pronounce it, affect the environment. And it's surprising to me, a kid that grew up. My father was a long-time coyote hunter. Yeah. And he was just running coutes with dogs. You know, they chase them and listen to the dogs and the cout gets away.

You know, it was never, usually the coyote never lost and was never killed or caught by the dogs or whatever. It was just a sport where you listen to the dogs run and whoever's dog was in front was the winner. Yeah. You know, and that was the end of it. So someone who, from a small child up until a large, adult now. I had a wrong view of how Coyotes really affect the landscape. And when once I got to talking to Jeff Ryder and seeing the different things and seeing things for myself, and then especially when you came in and started adding the facts to what the figures just didn't add up, it's been

very intriguing for me. And we're going to get into all of that. Sure. The first I want to give, give me a little about yourself, Drew, and how you wound up. being here where you are today. Well, I grew up in southeast Kansas. I've lived in Kansas my whole life, grew up fishing, hunting, trapping. When I was a toddler, dad was trapping for a living and writing trapping books. Really? And so my daycare was riding on his shoulders, checking a trap line, basically, during that season of the year. And, you know, lots of fishing when I was young, hunting as I grew up. And I kind of quit trapping. for a while, got into coon hunting real big for a time when I was in college, and then got out of

college, came back to doing a lot of trapping, started doing a lot of fur trapping for coyotes. And during, I guess I got a degree at K State in wildlife management in between in there. Had a brief stand in South Dakota studying some badgers and stuff like that, putting radio collars on those kind of critters. came back to Kansas and started a habitat management business doing a lot of pasture clearing and that kind of stuff too. And that's when I really got into coyote trapping. And then really I beat up my body pretty bad doing that stuff for a living and I got bored. Right.

And so I just decided I wanted to come back to school and pursue some kind of path that had let me fool with animals a little bit more for my job. I got a degree, a Ph.D. from K. State in biology with a focus in wildlife management, studying small mammals. So I trapped like 2,000 mice and rats about 5,000 times over four years. Jesus. You mentioned mice. Now, there's no difference in mice or rats. Let me going to correct you. There's only big rats and little rats, and I don't like none of them. Yeah, yeah. During that time, I had to figure out how to keep myself sane because fooling was with mice didn't my favorite thing either. For real. So I got some funding to put GPS collars on coyotes during that time and kind of studied how they moved around, looked at what killed them and that sort of thing. And that turned into part of my PhD degree. And then after that, I just kind of rolled into this job. So, yeah. Let me ask you a question before we get started on the stuff here. Did you learn more about Cowboys?

trapping them or did you learn more about coyotes in school? All of the above. Yeah. But the school part of it isn't something that I learned in class. It's what I learned from putting GPS collars on coyotes and tracking them around. And then learning how to trap coyotes during the summertime is a totally different ballgame than trapping coyotes during the fall when they're easy to catch. You know, my brother is a trapper and is a coyote trapper and a good one. And he's catching a lot of them for these fox pins and stuff like that.

And for, you know, to control them on places where there's too many coyotes, if the landowners want them thinned out. And he'll tell you quick, there's two different seasons to trapping coyotes. And I probably phrased that question wrong as far as did you learn more. Let me ask you this. after you started with the radio callers, did you learn things that relearned things you thought you knew about how cahoots act or move across the landscape? Oh, yeah.

What was probably the most surprising thing that you learned? Well, you know, I had read about some of the differences in the social structure of coyotes. And to keep it simple, there's residents and there's transients. and residents are going to be the pears that are breeding, some of their offspring from last year that we would call helpers that they allow to stay around and not disperse, and then the pups from this year, if it's during a time of the year when they would have had pups already.

And then the transients are these nomadic coyotes that aren't really tied to a home range. And when I got those GPS callers on the coyotes, just realizing how big of an area those transients cover, that was very interesting to me. Another thing that was really surprising is how often and how many times, even way into the future, or not into the future, but a long time after a cow or a buffalo has died, how many times they come back to that carcass, even when there's nothing left to eat.

That remains an important part of their territory for six months or a year after that food's gone. Wow. Yeah. Well, I'm going to mess around and learn something new today. Let's get started, man. From your point of view, when we've got a list here stuff, coyote biology or historical coyote distribution. You know, a lot of people and me being included have learned recently

that coyotes haven't always been where coyotes are. Yeah. And, I mean, you see the stuff, you see the post on something. social media. Do you see the news reports of somebody's cat getting snatched in the middle of town by a coyote, you know, because they saw it on the security camera or whatever. But that ain't always been the case. They haven't always been there. How did they get to where coyotes are now? Sure. So, you know, there's been several different changes that have allowed them to expand their range. Historically, you got that picture in front of you, and we can make that available on the

on the YouTube stream when you put that up. But there's a big red area, and that's where coyotes were. That's their historic distribution prior to 1900. And if you're listening to this and not seeing the graph that's up, it's covering like two-thirds of the United States from westward, like up to, I assume, that's like right along the Mississippi River. Mississippi and Ohio. Yeah, so that's that boundary on the eastern side.

And going all the way down to the Yucatan. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, and so if you're east of that boundary, basically, in Mississippi, I'm sure it's not a solid boundary, because coyotes could swim across that. Sure, right? But that was basically the eastern extent of their range. And since 1900, they've expanded to occupy all that area east of there. They've also gotten up into, you know, Nova Scotia. They're further into Alaska than they ever were historically and further down into Central America. And so when we think about, Coyotes having an impact on critters in places, you know, a lot of the places where we hear about coyotes having the most impact on species like deer end up being places where there's only been coyotes for maybe 100 years, but in some instances it's 30 years or 60 years. And so they're kind of a new predator in some of those places now. They've replaced a predator.

You know, the southeast would have been home to the Red Wolf, yeah. Right. And so coyotes have kind of expanded to occupy that niche that Red Wolfs previously occupied. When we're thinking about what led to them expanding, the changes that people have made to the landscape, coyotes aren't really good at making a living in just totally forest-dominated areas. So when we cleared the forest and started farming and those sorts of things, that made it easier for coyotes to make a living there, killing the large predators that were there or extirpating them, removing them from the landscape, gray wolves, red wolves, mountain lions, you know, all those different species that sometimes kill coyotes and prey on them or kill them because they don't like them.

You know, all those things together are kind of what's allowed them to expand. You mentioned the interactions in cities, and that's kind of an interesting one because there's a lot of evidence from the southwestern U.S. that coyotes in the very large Native American cities that existed prior to European settlement in North America, it looks like coyotes were probably incorporated into those cities just like they are into our modern cities. Really? And so it's just taking them time to figure out how to deal with modern humans a little bit better. And then the other thing along with that, too, is, you know, coyotes are small enough that a lot of people are willing to talk.

them in town and close to where they live. We don't see them as a threat the same way that we do gray wolves. Right. You know, and so they're tolerated more than those larger predators are, and that's why we see more coyotes in cities than we would the larger predators. Has that been, you think the increase in sightings in urban areas is because of technology now, like cameras, security cameras and stuff, or is the population growing or expanded into urban areas more? It's growing and expanding into urban areas more for sure. You know,

going back into the 70s is when there started to be reports of attacks on people in cities in California. So it's just as coyotes have become more and more abundant further east, they've started occupying some of these cities that are further and further east and having more interactions with people. Okay. Any fatal, has there been any fatal reports or fatalities from coyotes? A couple. In recent times? The most recent one, I'm going to get the date wrong. It was in the early 2000s, and it was in Alaska. As a woman who, I believe, was a reporter, and she was out for a jog, and she got attacked by a pack of coyotes and killed.

Wow. And after that happened, they did some research on that group of coyotes and figured out that there was a really hard winner or a series of hard winters and those coyotes had figured out how to prey on moose, which is way, way out of the normal prey range for coyotes, right? But they figured out how to hunt more like wolves. They figured out how to chase those moose down in the snow. And so they became predators of larger critters. And it was that group of coyotes that they believe attacked this woman. So that was learned behavior. Yeah. Wow. On blood trails, the stories don't end when the hunt is over. They just get darker.

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Follow now on Apple, Iheart, YouTube, or wherever you get your podcasts. We're still not helping with the villain, the label that they've got. No, no, and that's okay. I mean, you know, all critters have positive and negative values. Sure. Right. I mean, recreational value, monetary value, and all those sorts of things. But at the same time, we can have negative interactions with critters that we love.

You know, White Tail Deer are one of the most popular critters in the U.S., right? but they're responsible for more dollars in property damage and more human fatalities than most of the critters that we have. Yeah. And to thin those down, I mean, the object, when you say, you know, kill a coyote, save a deer, that ain't really how that goes, is it? Well, you know, it really depends on where you are, how much of an impact coyotes have on deer. So one of the things that goes along with that range expansion is as coyotes expanded into the east, there was some hybridization that occurred with wolves and with domestic dogs. And so the next graph I brought to show you shows that in dark gray, all the coyotes in that area in dark gray are basically 100% coyote. And that's pretty close.

to the historic range of them, isn't it? It's very close to the historic range, but it includes the areas to the north and west that coyotes have expanded to beyond that historic range. In the eastern U.S., then most of those coyotes have some dog or some wolf in them.

And they've documented that, you know, with the longer legs, a little bit more of a complex social structure where they might hunt in packs more than Western coyotes do, and those sorts of things, that they're able to be better predators of larger animals. So there's a physical difference in Western and Eastern Coyotes. They tend to be a little larger.

They tend to have lankier legs, a skull structure that's not wolf-like, but more robust than a western coyote. And that translates into some of their behaviors, too. I know that there's, and forgive me if I pronounce this wrong, but I think it isn't not called Bergman's rule or Bergsmans rule where animals get larger the further north you go in latitude. So I didn't, I had no idea there would be a difference going east and west instead of north and south. There is, but it's more associated with their genetics than it is with their physical environment. So that tendency for critters to be smaller towards the equator and larger towards the poles has to do with heat dissipation and heat retention.

Whereas this other difference is because of that intr regression of wolf and dog DNA. Tell me what's an old coyote. What's a lifespan of a coyote? Well, a really old coyote, you know, in the wild is going to be like 10 years. The maximum known age based on age teeth that I know of in the, the literature, there may be something newer than this, but 14 years. Oh, wow. Yeah.

And in captivity, they can live to be over 20. So basically, when we think about their lifespan and that sort of thing, it's kind of like a dog's. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Well, and you think about it, too, at 14, regardless of how you correlate that to human years, because I think seven's been kicked out the window here, as of lately, from K9, our dogs to humans. I mean, that dude's getting up and he's got to make a living every day and find something to eat every day.

Right. And wanting captivity, somebody's bringing him, you know, a chicken leg or whatever, which is kind of like the way I like to go through life. It's more successful. I wouldn't be as big as I am if I had to rustle it up every day. But there's so many things working against these things out there, just like it is all wild animals. Sure. But they have become quite adept at adapting to different surroundings. which is why you see them in urban areas and making a living.

But you've got a list here stuff to go through. You've got mortality listed up here. Tell me what, why this is, why you've got this list here. What's the points there that you wanted to talk about? Well, you know, I mean, just thinking about how it's different in different places. So one of the things that we talked about with their expansion is the fact that we released them from predation by bigger predators. in a lot of places, and that allowed them to expand. So historically, that would have been important. In a lot of the range now, human-caused mortality has taken the place of that. So in many populations,

human-caused mortality is the majority of mortality. And sometimes that's mostly harvest. Sometimes it's mostly vehicle collisions, and in a lot of places, it's probably going to be somewhere, you know, some combination of that. But there's a recent study in Wisconsin, that found that, you know, human-caused mortality was the majority of their mortality, and harvest was like 90-some percent of that, which is interesting to me because I wouldn't think it would be that high. Yeah. But then we've got natural mortality, so they're susceptible to basically all the diseases

and parasites that we treat our dogs for. So canine distemper virus is a really important one. Parvo virus would be an important one, heartworm, hookworm, tapeworms, all those sorts of things. Or like you, all of that. Yeah, yeah,

and then Mange, of course. Oh, yeah, you know where that came from? No. If you do a Google search or whatever internet deal you like to use, you can find a court document from 1906

where it might have been 1905. But anyway, the state of Montana hired some biologists to go out and catch coyotes and wolves and bring them into a lab and infect them with scabies and turn them back loose because they figured that would be cheaper

a cheaper way to control coyotes and wolves than paying bounties would be. And so that's how we got mange in our wild canids. Really? Yeah. Well, thanks a lot, Montana. I'm going to blame Garrett Long for that. I hope he's watching. That is so interesting.

And that brings up like the bounty thing. They've been vilified for so long. You know, if you're paying a bounty on something just to shoot it, you know, was that, was it deserved when that came about? Or were they getting blamed for a lot of stuff that they weren't actually doing? Sure. I think it's probably all the above, right? I mean, the vast majority of coyotes don't fool with livestock. And that's surprising to a lot of people.

That's basically an individual behavior. I'm sorry. I'm going to get a lot of trouble for doing that right there. Coyotes preying on livestock. It tends to be dominated by family groups that have pups and that also have territories that overlap, mostly sheep and goats. But some cattle as well. And when they have those pups, and especially that period around whelping time, up until those pups can start getting out and hunting a little bit, that's when we see the most large prey items being important to those coyotes. Most of the time, coyotes are eating rabbits and voles and insects and mice and fruit.

Now, how do you know that? You tell me how you know that because somebody right now is looking at that radio. I know. They're listening to you and saying, Dr. Drew has lost his mind. Yeah, yeah. Tell me how you know that. So here's the studies from Kansas we can look at really quick. So I just, I summarized one that is from 1968, so it's really old. But the cool thing about this study is it's based on stomach contents.

So it's back during the bounty period. And a professor by the last name of Guy here at K. State had for, folks that were bringing in coyotes. And he was looking at the reproductive tracks, looking at their stomach contents, aging them, doing all kinds of different things. They're doing necropsy here at the universe. Oh, yeah. Yeah. And he was a physiologist, so he got into a lot of detail.

But it's like 2,300 coyotes. Okay, so it's not a small sample size. It's a really good sample size. 40% of the stomachs had rabbits, 31, or sorry, this is actually percentage of stomach contents. So 40% rabbit, 310. percent rodent and 28 percent carrying. So eating dead, dead stuff, regardless of... But here's the deal.

When a coyote's got a belly full of meat that's big meat, we can't tell if it's from a calf that they killed or a calf that they scavenged. That they found, yeah. And so that's all lumped into that bucket right there. The thing about this one, though, is that we didn't have all that many deer in Kansas when that study was taking place. Our first modern deer season was 1965 in the state of Kansas. So that's just three years into that. Yeah. Yeah. And the study was actually done before then. So if we look at some of the more modern studies, these are based on SCAT contents. One of them

a little bit further west in Kansas. 76% of the SCATs had cotton rats, 29% voles, 19% cotton tails, 4% had deer in them, 2% had cattle, and this is hair, right? 19% had insects, 9% had fruits and so on. Another one that was done by those same researchers about the same time, here really close to Manhattan on a site that had a lot higher deer densities. They found similar results for the small mammals and critters like that, but 20% of them had deer in them. So their main prey is small mammals and insects and fruit and stuff like that.

But when deer are really abundant, they're going to eat some deer. That doesn't mean that they killed all the deer that they ate. Right. Right. Exactly. Because, I mean, a mice or a vol or a gopher or something is going to be a whole lot easier to catch than a deer. Yeah. And would you have a guess as to...

Or is there any data that supports how much of that is carrying and how much is our deer that they killed? So the data that you could look at to think about that is data from fawn survival studies. So we did a study way out in western Kansas, put GPS collars on a whole bunch of deer, both mule deer and white tails. and we on average, you know, fawn survival in that study across three years was around 30 percent, okay? Of the fons that were killed, 30 to 40 percent of those fons were attributed to a loss to a predator. And a majority of those predator losses were coyotes. a fawn that dies out in the landscape but wasn't killed by coyote, a lot of those fauns are still going to get scavenged by coyotes.

Sure. Okay. So if you applied that same percentage to the scats that had deer hair in them, then about 40%, 30 to 40% of those scats that had deer hair in them, were probably fons that they killed. Now, when you look at, at other areas, in Kansas, we haven't seen a deer decline as coyotes have become more abundant through time. In the eastern U.S., the areas that they've expanded into, part of the reason that

they're doing so much coyote research related to coyote impact on deer is because as coyotes increased, they did see a decline in deer numbers. South Carolina, Georgia, some of those states are very good examples of that. And if you look at this map, which is, this is a, these studies here are included in these results, but they looked at a whole bunch of different studies that looked at scat, coyote scat throughout the U.S. Okay. And the bars on these going from left to right are small mammals, fruit, rabbits, and then ungulates,

which would be deer, caribou, moose, anything we're going to think about that's in the deer family. Oh, and also pronghorn. So what you can see on this really clearly is that in the Great Plains, where coyotes are native, ungulates are a small percentage of their diet. In the southwest, in those desert communities, ungulates are almost non-existent in their diet. Their diet is dominated by rabbits and small mammals and a little bit of fruit. But as you go further east, so in that dark green area in the east and the light green area in the northeast, ungulates are a much larger percentage of the diet, and ungulates actually dominate the diet in those studies in the southeast.

Okay? Just because of the sheer number of them being there. Well, not just that, but other things too, right? Those coyotes are the coyotes that have some wolf and dog DNA in them. So they're more apt to be able to prey on those larger prey on them. And maybe it's something that they've had to figure out as they moved in, too. But they, I think that the broad answer to your question is it really depends on where you are. So there's never a wherever you are with this species, it's always this way in biology. And that's one of the really big challenges that's associated with, you know, some of these things. Like one of you, we talked before about that meme from Facebook. Let me stop you right there. Yeah.

Because we, I'm as bad as Clay Newton. I'm going to do a little foreshadder because we're going to stop right here. here, and this is going to be part one of my talk with Dr. Drew out here, and we're going to get into the meat and the potatoes of what everybody is wanting to know about, and that's the deer and coyote relationship, we'll call it, and whether or not we're doing the Lord's work when we're killing coyotes to save our deer leases. We'll be back next week for the next one. Thank you, doctor. Thank you, sir. Y'all be careful. First Light's fieldware collection is made for the work that happens long before opening day and continues when the season ends.

Products built for early mornings, full days and real use. Hard wearing where they need to be versatile where it matters. No shortcuts. Just gear designed for the work that earns the season. Built to perform, built to last. Check out. First Light's new fieldwear gear at firstlight.