Catching the Chicken Killin' Coyote

A coyote is killin’ my chickens!” my son, Eli, lamented over the phone.

- Hal Sullivan

“Well catch it,” I told him. Gol-darn coyotes are just about everywhere in Ohio these days, where 50 years ago there were none.

Eli is not a total novice. He did a little bit of fox trapping back when we had fox in Ohio. In fact, he gave a neighbor boy some “lessons” and that boy caught his first fox. But Eli didn’t follow the trapline. By his own admission, he did not want to subject himself to tending traps, day after day. He chased ducks and deer. When you come home from that, you can put your gun in the closet, you don’t have to go back out until you’re darn good and ready.

These days, he owns a 50-acre parcel of mixed habitat in the upper flood plain of the Ohio River. Some of this is in crop fields he rents to farmers. It is a perfect bit of habitat. Two little creeks come together to drain into the Little Scioto River, which drains into the Ohio. The proliferation of edge habitat makes it a real wildlife haven. Every fall he kills a deer or two on his place – with a handgun. So, he is in touch with a lot of wildlife, like it or not. A couple years ago I had to coach him through trapping the beavers that were flooding his driveway.

His current hobby is free-range chickens. Folks pay a premium for freerange eggs. But his free-range chickens get in the path of some free-ranging wildlife. I’d walked his farm a couple of times, showed him some coyote tracks in the mud. At least he could identify them. He found a few piles of chicken feathers around the perimeter of his range and tracked a couple of them to a coyote.

He got a Pyrenees dog, as big as a Shetland pony. But to keep it at the farm, he had to use a proximity shock collar on it. The coyote figured out where the perimeter of that shock collar was, and a chicken beyond that might very well be dinner.