Return to sender
Christina Boser trapped a coyote nine months ago and placed a global positioning system collar around its neck.
But days after Boser, a graduate student at the State University of New York College of Environmental Science and Forestry, released the animal back into the wild, it vanished from the sensors.
That was until 64-year-old William Fancher of Marshalls Creek, Pa., checked his animal traps.
Fancher killed the animal, and upon closer look, saw a SUNY collar around its neck.
The 2-year-old, speckled grey and brown eastern coyote was named M-19 (Male, #19). It was one of 40 animals graduate students at ESF have been tracking to investigate the size, eating habits and migration patterns of the coyote population in upstate New York.
‘Right away I knew something was different,’ Fancher said. ‘I dispatched it because that’s what I’m supposed to do. Then I called the gaming commissioner and first he told me there were no collared coyotes in Pennsylvania. And I thought, ‘Well then, what am I looking at?”
The Pennsylvania Gaming Commission sent its education supervisor to Fancher’s home, and then contacted ESF researchers. The animal carcass and collar were then returned to ESF.
‘These are very expensive collars, and the time involved in trying to catch an animal and put a collar on and keep up with it is also lengthy,’ said Jacqueline Frair, wildlife ecologist at ESF. ‘But what’s incredibly valuable is the data (in the collar). So for it to turn back up was really exciting.’
The coyote traveled more than 150 miles in less than a month, remarkably avoiding dangerous highways and interstates. Since the collar recorded the coyote’s location every six hours, Boser and Frair can use the data to research its path.
‘The first look at the data shows the interstates and highways play a big role,’ Boser said. ‘It would try several times to cross, and then walk around or walk along the interstate for miles.’
Coyotes are better at crossing interstates than most animals, Boser said. ‘You will see coyotes sitting on the road and just watching the traffic. They seem to kind of get the fact that there’s a danger there.’
While the returned collar will provide supplementary information to Boser and the rest of the team, their primary task is to track the coyotes as part of the New York State Department of Environmental Conservation’s five-year study on how many coyotes live in the state, how their population is distributed, and how they effect, if at all, the white-tailed deer population.
‘In the past 10 years, (coyotes) have been showing up in everyone’s backyard,’ Frair said. ‘And they’re asking simple questions like, ‘How many do we have?’ And the DEC says, ‘We don’t have any idea.”
Frair and Boser have received help from hundreds of volunteers from ESF and across the country. The team will continue its research until 2011.
It is the interest in predator-prey dynamics that draws people to the study, Frair said.
‘The larger and fuzzier the creature, the more interested people are,’ she said. ‘My snail study, on the other hand, I have a hard time getting students into.’
Published on January 21, 2009 at 12:00 pm
