For about five or six weeks this summer we had a young Austrian/American man helping out on the ranch. He is now back in Switzerland for a short visit with his parents before returning to school. Ben Cunningham, the eighteen year old son of friends of the ranch, has now learned, perhaps more than he ever wanted to know about taking out old and building new barbed wire fence, about compensating for pastures with little pasturage, and about moving buffalo through a working corral system–something that for us is probably a less than once a year activity. What he probably really learned most is that the legendary romance of the west is, in reality, not very romantic.
Ben loves all manner of wildlife, particularly spiders and snakes; so in his free time, he would often go off in search of spiders (a large black widow was his most exciting find )and snakes, of which he found several bull and garter snakes while searching for them and discovered three rattle snakes, while doing something else. It seems that these always show up as a surprise. One of these was a likely Boone and Crocket candidate, but nobody stayed around long enough to measure it.
A few days after Ben had left I was awakened in the early morning hours by an unfamiliar sound, which set the dogs to barking and howling. I got out of bed and went outside to listen for a repeat of the sound. What I heard was young coyotes trying to sing and howl like their parents, but like young everywhere, they don’t usually sing so very well. What I had thought and sort of hoped to hear was a mountain lion or perhaps a wolf, but that was not to be, at least not yet–perhaps in the future. Then we will have to put our environmental honesty where our theory is, which brings me in a rambling way to something several CRR readers have asked me about: coyotes, predation, and control programs.
My knowledge of coyotes is limited to my observations of them, and so is worth about as much as you pay for it. I know them to be predators of small animals: mice, rabbits, prairie dogs, and all manner of bird, particularly immature ones, including game birds. I know them to be scavengers of larger animal carcasses, dead for any number of reasons. I know them to be hunted by many people for their fur and also to protect ranch animal herds for them. Personally I have never done either. Buffalo do not seem to suffer predation from them. The wolf and perhaps the grizzly bear are the only real predator threats to the buffalo. And as yet this ranch has not been made to face that situation. I don’t believe we would support proposals to eliminate that situation. A healthy prairie has both predator and prey. Killing predators does not seem to increase prey species populations. Buffalo populations are probably more limited by the availability grass–but that is a theory we have not yet been forced to test. And the availability of grass depends largely on timely and judicious amounts of moisture. Did I remember to tell young Ben Cunningham all that?