Recursive use of home ranges and seasonal shifts in foraging behavior by a generalist carnivore

Abstract

Coyotes (Canis latrans) colonized the southeastern United States over the last century as large predators, including the red wolf (Canis rufus) and eastern cougar (Puma concolor), were extirpated from the region. As a generalist carnivore, the coyote preys on white-tailed deer (Odocoileus virginianus) and various smaller mammals, birds, and vegetation. While resource selection by coyotes has been well documented at the home-range scale, little is known about their foraging behavior, which is an important factor in thoroughly understanding influences of coyotes on prey and sympatric carnivores. We assessed third-order resource selection of coyotes at sites across Alabama, Georgia, and South Carolina during 2015-2016. Using GPS collars, we tracked 41 resident coyotes across four calendar seasons and identified suspected foraging areas using recursive analysis where individuals repeatedly returned to known locations.We found that resident coyotes selected for open landcover types throughout the year, while avoiding primary and secondary roads. Additionally, resident coyotes avoided forested landcover types while selecting for forest edges except from April to June when they foraged within interior forest away from edges. Previous studies have documented substantive predation rates on white-tailed deer neonates by coyotes, and that fawn mortality may increase in forested landscapes away from forest edge. Our findings indicate that foraging coyotes may select forest cover types during spring where fawns are more vulnerable to predation. Additionally, there has been debate in the literature as to how coyotes obtain consistent levels of deer in their diets outside of fawning and fall hunting seasons. Our study indicates that use of road-kill carcasses by coyotes was an unlikely explanation for the presence of deer in coyote diets throughout the year, as coyotes in our study were not observed using roads during foraging excursions.

Resource pulses shape seasonal and individual variation in the diet of an omnivorous carnivore

“…The only difference between males and females we found was in fall, when males were either killing or scavenging more deer than females. It is possible that the slightly bigger males are better able to kill yearling or adult deer during this season (Cherry et al, 2016;Chitwood et al, 2014;Youngmann et al, 2022); but given how drastically predation rates on fawns decline as they age (Muthersbaugh, 2023;Nelson et al, 2015) and how important scavenged ungulates are in coyote diets (Prugh & Sivy, 2020), we suspect that scavenging largely drives this difference. Indeed, in Oregon, scavenged ungulates were up to 70% of coyote diets, and resident male coyotes were the primary demographic scavenging at puma kills (Ruprecht et al, 2021).…”

Coursing the mottled mosaic: Generalist predators track pulses in availability of neonatal ungulates

“…The resulting dataset included one intensity of use value for every 12 points along with an average value of the relative probability of use for each reproductive period. To ensure that our interpretation of the relationship between intensity of use and relative probability of use by deer was not an artifact of differing movement strategies (i.e., resting vs. moving) throughout the diel period, we calculated movement metrics using only crepuscular locations to reflect the time wherein coyotes are most likely to be foraging (Andelt & Andelt, 1981 ; Youngmann et al, 2022 ).…”