Coyote survival in a row-crop agricultural landscape

Abstract

With intensive farming, planting and harvest are the primary disturbance factors driving cover dynamics that influence wildlife communities. A top predator, coyotes ( Canis latrans Say, 1823) impact other wildlife when populations are high. Thus, knowledge of coyote demographics in agricultural habitat is critical to understanding ecosystem dynamics. We studied survival of 59 radio-collared coyotes (28 juveniles, 31 adults) from 1996 to 2001 in intensively farmed central Illinois. Logistic regression suggested that age and year were important covariates, but sex was not. Divergence in age-specific Kaplan–Meier survival functions occurred during fall harvest because of higher mortality among juveniles. Annual survival (30 April – 29 April) was 0.59 (95% CI = 0.47–0.71) for adults and 0.13 (0.06–0.20) for juveniles captured after June 1. Shooting (58% of mortality) was the principal cause of mortality, followed by road kills (24%) and other mortalities. Mortality of juveniles following agricultural harvest probably occurs because of inexperience, dispersal through unfamiliar territory, intense human activity, and catastrophic loss of agricultural cover. In contrast, we recorded no shootings of coyotes during the growing season when agricultural cover was highest (14 June – 29 September) despite a year-round open hunting season on coyotes in Illinois.