Coyotes Eat Meat
We are more like coyotes than you think
by Randy Bodkins (Originally published in the September 2012 issue of Two-Lane Livin’ Magazine)
I hope that you have enjoyed following the coyote chronicles over the previous couple of decades. I know I have. First, we didn’t have any, and as more and more were hoisted out of the backs of pickups; it was admitted that we had a few. They weren’t numerous or found in every county and they lived off of mice and berries. I hope I am jogging your memory, a little bit. They then admittedly populated the whole state, but they didn’t create a negative impact on the whitetail population, They just consumed road kill and the weak.
Do you remember that? Some people believe everything they are told, but a few who are capable of thinking, learning, and evolving do not. Hmm, maybe we are more like coyotes than we think.
The coyote’s goal for the day is to consume the greatest amount of calories it can get; while expending as little energy as possible. They are extremely opportunistic and not very picky as to what they eat. They need food and a lot of food just to maintain their body weight. It seems to be agreed in numerous studies that they need to consume one-third of their body weight per week. This is just to maintain body weight; not to increase and grow.
Let’s just break this down in a very simple manner and use a 40-pound healthy coyote as an example. It would need a little more than 13 pounds of food per week; just to maintain its present weight. I am using a weight of .82 ounces for a deer mouse. They range from .52-1.12 ounces according to the sources I looked at.
Now we see that our coyote must eat about 254 mice per week to fulfill its nutrition requirements in just one week. That sure looks like a very high amount of calories to expend in search of food. I don’t think that there would be a significant difference between mice, voles, moles, and shrews. A chipmunk might be a jackpot prize.
I can hear them now; coyotes are omnivorous and supplement their diets with berries. In reality, how long are those berries available? Everything is out there eating berries as soon as, if not before they ripen.
Coyotes are smart and adaptable, but I don’t think they have freezers and I’m pretty sure they aren’t capable of canning or preserving anything. Coyotes will eat just about anything. But, they live off of meat. They are pack animals and hunt as a pack. One deer will go a long way in providing needed weekly food intake for the whole pack. Working together saves energy and calories they therefore have more time to lay in the sun and scratch fleas. When they doze off and dream; they’re not chasing mice.
We have been told that coyotes do not significantly impact our deer herd. If every coyote in the state eats just one fawn the second week of June next year; is that not a significant impact? This seems very conservative to me, too. The most recently completed study has stated that coyotes eat more deer than previously thought. Yep, they eat meat and they take that meat from the biggest readily available prey species.
Do you remember when there used to be groundhogs everywhere? I wonder what happened to all of them.