JACKSON, Wyo. — A small speck of brown is moving across a seemingly endless valley of snow. It’s so silent and so frigid, it feels as if the slightest sound could crack the sky.
Franz Camenzind is unbothered by the cold. He lines up his spotting scope atop a tripod and moves it slowly, left to right. He stops, focuses. A smile creeps beneath his beard.
A trio of coyotes is trotting around the carcass of a dead elk. Ravens flit around, taking nibbles. One coyote dives in and pulls at the meat. The elk around them barely even glance over.
“Coyotes are incredible,” the biologist says. “They’re smart, cunning and incredibly adaptive. I admire them.”
That has scarcely been the main sentiment aimed at coyotes, seen as villains in popular culture and vermin by cattle ranchers and killed in myriad ways.
But things finally may be looking up for coyotes.
New Mexico Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham is awaiting the arrival of a bill that passed both legislative chambers this month that would eliminate coyote hunting contests — making it the third state, after California and Vermont, to initiate such a ban. Grisham has until April 5 to sign it.
This year, bills to ban “coyote whacking” — killing the animals by running over them with snowmobiles — were introduced for the first time in the legislatures of Wyoming and Montana, hardly coyote-friendly refuges. However, neither bill got to a vote.
And national nonprofit groups mostly focused on wolf repopulation have increasingly been adding coyotes in their “call to action” releases.
Camilla Fox began the California-based nonprofit Project Coyote a decade ago as a way to stop the killing contests aimed at a variety of predators, including bobcats, foxes, wolves and the coyote. Camenzind, who has studied coyotes extensively, is on the group’s science advisory board.
Fox said the group has only recently begun seeing small gains for the animal’s protection as images of coyote hunts and kills are spread on social media platforms.
“When we first started, we were viewed as fringe and people were asking ‘Why in the heck did you choose the coyote?’” Fox said. “We don’t have to justify that anymore. They’re so persecuted and maligned, more people are becoming aware of how badly they’re being treated.”
There are no solid estimates on coyote populations in the United States, but the species has managed to thrive despite years of bounties put on their heads by the government, contests rewarding high-volume kills and human populations that have bled into wild and rural areas of America.
According to the U.S. Department of Agriculture, 68,913 coyotes were killed in 2017 — down from 76,868 in 2016. From 2010 to 2017, the USDA alone killed 592,328 coyotes.
Utah still offers a $50 bounty for a pelt. Most states have no bag limits on the number of coyotes that can be killed. Furs can be sold for as much as $125 apiece. And coyote-killing contests are still plentiful throughout the country.
Once mostly found in Western states, coyotes now live and thrive in every state but Hawaii. They also have spread widely into Mexico and Canada. Their persistence has annoyed ranchers for decades, seeing them as a threat to their livelihood.
Mike Carrico, who runs a cattle ranch near Rawlins in southern Wyoming, takes people on coyote hunts — usually in the spring when newborn calves are at their most vulnerable.
He said a coyote’s killing of a single calf can be costly, with the value of that livestock ranging from about $800 to nearly $50,000 if it produces calves for a decade.
“That loss will make a rancher sore,” he said.
But he said he also believes in the ethical hunting of coyotes, though he conceded that definition may vary from hunter to hunter. He said for about $750, he will take hunters out on about 250 square miles of land, set up stands — where hunters will wait — and then call coyotes with sounds that bring them close before being shot.
This year, he said, coyotes haven’t been plentiful but “can still be found on every square mile of the land.” He said he has respect for the coyote who, unlike the wolf, managed to adapt and survive without help from the Endangered Species Act.
Camenzind said coyotes should engender respect as a truly native species to America. Weighing in at 35 to 40 pounds, they are smaller than wolves and can work in a pack or alone. They are resourceful and hardy.
They tend to have an alpha male in a group, and he tends to breed with a single female who will usually deliver a few pups; the other members of the group won’t breed.
The biologist said the problem with unlimited hunting of coyotes is alpha males can be killed, leading to other males in a pack who wouldn’t have otherwise bred beginning to produce litters. He said the hunting has the opposite effect of population control and that it instead leads to larger numbers of coyotes — sometimes with females having eight to 10 pups per litter.
Nature, he said, has its own built-in survival instinct that has helped buoy the coyotes through what predator advocacy groups believe has been a relentless killing of the animals.
Near Pinedale — about 90 minutes from Jackson — rancher John Fandek figures he’s killed hundreds of coyotes in his lifetime. He grew up in Wyoming, starting as a ranch hand and settling to run his own cattle ranch more than five decades ago.
He’s 76 and semiretired now, and he stopped hunting the canids several years ago, deciding the land was better served by allowing the coyote to do what it’s always done: keep rabbit and ground squirrel populations in check while cleaning up the mess of dead elk and deer. He sees a spot for the coyote in the ecosystem and wants to help them out.
He mentions the practice shown recently in videos of people running over coyotes, something he’s seen happen over several decades. Using snowmobiles to chase them to exhaustion and then running them down, he says, is barbaric.
“That’s not hunting,” he said. “They’re not working for it. When I see that, it bothers me a lot. It’s reprehensible.”
The videos have been condemned by a wide swath of people, including Safari Club International, an advocacy group that is generally opposed to restrictive hunting measures.
Its president, Paul Babaz, condemned coyote whacking in a statement to the Los Angeles Times.
“Ethical hunters respect wildlife and are commonly the most ardent conservationists. This respect is codified into legal practices and a deeply held ethical code that ‘coyote whacking’ directly violates,” the statement read.
It added that coyote management is necessary, but under ethical guidelines. “Those who refuse to follow such guidelines and resort to abusive and cruel practices such as ‘coyote whacking’ have no place in the hunting community.”
Franz Camenzind, a biologist with Project Coyote, observes a group of coyotes on an elk preserve outside Jackson, Wyoming. (David Montero | Los Angeles Times)
