Home Forums Hunting & Shooting Hunter's Campfire Coyote predation on pheasants

My experience is that owls are hell on pheasants as well.

Riding a bicycle across Texas this past June I didn’t see a single hawk between Mason TX and Seminole, five turkey vultures total. Maybe 2 - 300 miles.

Saw a schidtload of lubber grasshoppers and rank roadkill tho.

I have a video on my phone of a canada goose sitting in an eagles nest eating the eggs. The goose suddenly looks up while simultaneouly ducking as an eagle strikes it from above. This was captured from a full time monitored live net cam. The monitor killed the video feed at the moment the eagle hits the goose.

Other instances of the monitor killing the video feed occurred when the eagles brought kittens or puppies to the nest. No interruptions are deemed necessary when they bring up a carp.

Peafowl will eat chicken chicks, tame pelicans and cormorants will eat kittens. I imagine a hen pheasant might put up a stiff defense against a turkey tho.

According to a study by pheasants forever,coyotes help pheasant population.

And there’s enough coyotes in the areas that have good pheasant populations to support this from what I’ve seen.

There are lots of hawks down here now. We always have a lot in the winter!

That’s interesting. I am a PF member, and have an e mail to them on this topic.

I have 640 acres of stellar pheasant habitat in west central Ks. In 2010 and 2011, we shot over 100 roosters off that land. In 2012, we hunted it one day, with dogs and never “saw” a pheasant. There was a terrible drought and heat wave that killed off almost all of the population.
Since 2012, the population has increased at a very slow rate. I can’t understand why there are not more birds. The property has lots of cover multiple food plots, and three water sources on the property.

Ditto that on the owls! We loose a lot of the birds we release due to owls. Coyotes are definitely involved, but not like the owls! I coyote hunt where we release the birds, they could care less about a "rabbit" in distress, but use a pheasant call (yes, there's pheasant calls) and get ready! For the coyotes that is... not the owls. Though they come to it too!

Coyotes have been implicated in helping Lyme disease too, through fox control.....

https://www.outdoornews.com/2012/07/27/did-coyotes-trigger-the-ticks-lyme-scourge/

Indeed, but shooting them all as vermin is still widely practiced in sheep and goat country.

No doubt they take some. Pheasant chicks have the whole spring to fall period before they can fly that they are susceptible to ground and air attacks.

But there is probably no more successful predator on from song birds to young game birds to cottontails than feral cats. At least in some areas.

https://forums.bowsite.com/TF/bgforums/thread.cfm?forum=1&threadid=478769

Try their subscriber site......

https://birdsna.org/Species-Account/bna/home

Lengthy articles on every facet of a given bird, complete with references, it’s a scholar-research-reference site. The data on pheasant nest losses came out of Iowa, adult-to-raptor losses the highest rate was Sweden with such predation major everywhere, especially in winter.

As for Thayers, I used their software for years to teach birds to people, but in recent years they’ve been superseded just about entirely by free stuff on the internet, like Cornell’s own allaboutbirds website....

https://www.allaboutbirds.org/guide/Hermit_Thrush#

Varmint populations have exploded since Hollywood turned fashion completely away from the use of fur or animal hides. When a raccoon was worth $25 and fox and bobcat even more a ground nesting bird had a chance. Now you can hardly give a hide away and nobody traps. It is a mystery to me how a duck or any other ground nesting bird can survive much less reproduce.

If you always have a internet connection I suppose the web based programs will work for ya.
I spend a lot of my time in pretty remote regions so when I need the resource a connection is seldom available.

I have Thayer's BNA gold edition, it covers a lot and it's always with me.

Don't forget owls. Cover makes a big difference. On the up side if a nest gets destroyed pheasants will make a replacement nest - why you sometimes see juvenile birds hunting season.

'Morning George. That was the theory in SE SD since at least the 1930s. Dad said no cat not near a farmhouse was safe from Grampa. And pheasants were introduced in 1908.

As an anesthetist in a rural practice, I made untold 30-mile round trips to my primary hospital at all hours of the night over almost four decades. This was mostly by blacktop but in extremes of ice by gravel.

At some point in those years, I considered that my headlights picked up at least one hunting cat every five miles. That’d be six cats per trip while going 60 mph (sometimes a little faster). Those were the ones who were white or in the open in the ditch — that I’d see.

They are also the most frequent road kill here.

We have a neighborhood cat that is a pet of some fine people here. But it roams and is death to birds and cottontails on our yard let alone the whole area. It is a ten pounder and I’ve seen it carrying birds to young rabbits around. Imagine a 100 million of these, 70 million of which roam freely.

And I agree with your grandpa. 😉

Studies in canyons in San Diego seem to support that idea. Basically, in some canyons without coyotes the smaller predators, coons, housecats, possums and such, decimate ground nesting birds like quail. The habitat would be perfect for the birds without the heavy predation by the smaller predators. Granted, the studies are a few years old now, but it was my experience while living there that the further from civilization (as in the outer suburbs) the more 'yotes and the more quail one would see.

https://www.nature.com/articles/23028




https://conbio.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/j.1523-1739.1988.tb00337.x



Don't know if that is changing there as I left that area permanently in '91. But I do know, from relatives and personal observation on visits, that coyotes have moved back into areas where there were none when I grew up. Like walking down the streets I used to deliver papers on at 0530 in the 70's. Never saw a 'yote there. Now they are taking cats and small dogs from yards, and likely the possom and coon populations are down too.

There was no shortage of coyotes where I lived in E. WA and there was what I would consider decent populations of pheasant in suitable areas. Quail, partridge (Huns), and chukar too. Just an anecdote, but the birds seemed to be doing fine with coyotes around.

Geno