Osky;
Thanks again for the reply, it's always good to learn stuff.
Up here one of the little political footballs being chucked with fair velocity is that the wolves are the main cause for killing off most of a rare mountain Caribou herd.
There's lots of angles to this one, for instance the feds are building a very expensive Caribou breeding center now just out of Jasper National Park or maybe within the park - not sure - to try to bring them back from the brink. The figures we've been given is perhaps as few as a dozen of them left.
Now one of the little wrinkles seems to be that there is First Nations support for taking out a bunch of the wolves, so of course the provinces and to some degree the feds too are torn between trying to virtue signal to the greenies who are at odds with the FN folks this time.
Through contacts in various parts of BC, I know some of the info on the breeding center being built and by extension some of the remedies being used to lessen the wolf numbers.
We'll see how it'll all shake out, but as mentioned it's interesting to watch.
For sure though as you and 673 have said, I don't believe we can put a meaningful hurt on even coyotes by shooting them alone. That said, I'll relate a quick one from 30 years back, again that I've got some first hand knowledge of.
There was a California Bighorn herd a few hours north of us that was being absolutely hammered by coyote predation on lambs. Something in the order of less than 12% survival sort of thing.
The bio involved was a no-nonsense old school fellow and brought in a couple trappers who had the green light to rid the area of coyotes, which they pretty much did.
Of course other coyotes from surrounding areas came in to fill the vacancy left, but what the bio found was that the new coyotes weren't specialists in eating lamb. By the time the new coyotes figured out successful sheep hunting, the herd had bounced back.
We're currently going through that to some degree here in spring with our mule deer fawns in that it appears there's some black bears who specialize in eating them. The prevailing theory is that if a few of these bears were removed, it'd help a fair bit.
We're trying to do just that Osky, but life and almost $2 / liter diesel fuel make chasing spring bears a costly activity.
Thanks again.
Dwayne
