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Who is behind the Narragansett Bay Coyote Study? What are Coyote Best Management Practices? How many coyotes are there on Jamestown and Aquidneck Island? |
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Scroll above for more FAQs
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Hooray for Middletown! Town Council Passes a No-Coyote-Feeding Ordinance and Adopts the Coyote Best Management Practices
Thanks to the efforts of spearheads Sen. Lou DiPalma and Rep. Deb Ruggiero, Chief Anthony Pesare and his staff, other members of the Aquidneck Island Coyote Workgroup, and the Middletown Town Council, Middletown Rhode Island is the first community in Rhode Island to institute a no-nonsense "No Coyote-Feeding Ordinance" with fines.
Middletown has also adopted a town-specific version of the Coyote Best Management Practices. It is the third of four communities in the NBCS study area to do so. The No-Feeding ordinance is designed to address the problem of bold urban coyotes. The CBMPs are a larger set of science-based strategies for dealing with coyote problems – a toolbox for towns to proactively or, if necessary, reactively deal with coyote issues.
NBCS, became part of the solution when we discovered that the key to coyote population control is through control of their food resources. This is accomplished by eliminating food attractants provided by humans. Attractants such as petfoods, garbage, or small pets left outdoors, tempt coyotes to forage in neighborhoods, which can lead to dangerous coyote behavior.
Once coyotes associate people with food they can loose their natural fear and become habituated. This can lead to potentially dangerous human-coyote or coyote-pet interactions. In contrast, coyotes not subsidized by people tend to pass through neighborhoods but remain shy of people and generally forage elsewhere.
If habituated coyotes are a problem suspect there is a food source nearby. Using GPS collars to visit coyote hotspots NBCS has found that attractants can be anything from farm waste or compost piles to feral cat feeding stations. Putting out food at dusk for birds or pets is a magnet for the "night shift" - coyotes passing through will quickly catch on. If you are seeing coyote droppings in your neighborhood someone is probably feeding coyotes.
Once food attractants are identified, it will be a matter of working with people and changing their habits. For persistant coyote feeders that endanger their communities Middletown has its ordinance to fall back on.
Middletown's town councilors, Police, and Animal control have taken a vital step towards coyote-safe neighborhoods. Their efforts will result in fewer coyote attractants and, ultimately, fewer coyotes in neighborhoods. Three Cheers for Middletown!
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Don't have Google Earth?
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Install
Google Earth. Then, right click on each Google Earth
logo below and save the link or file to your desktop. Next,
double click each  icon to open the files in Google earth.
You will be able to see hourly GPS points of our
NBCS coyotes. By zooming in and
clicking on points you can see the coyote's name
and when it was at each point location. NBS has GPS-tracked resident coyotes from 10 different packs and numbers of transients since the field-work began in 2005. |
| Example study coyotes | |
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Pilot - older transient female |
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Java - beta (subordinate) male resident |
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Bonnie - alpha female resident |
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Clyde - alpha male resident |
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Milo - transient male disperser - left Aquidneck Island for Massachusetts |
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Pilot with ATT-Telenav collar prototype |
| NBCS study coyotes 2005-2011 | |
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all other study coyotes |
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| Color coded territories of 10 coyote packs on Conanicut and Aquidneck Islands |
Background on The Narragansett Bay Coyote Study
Since 2004 The Narragansett Bay Coyote Study (NBCS) has been developing science-based coexistence and management strategies for our newest top predator. Coyotes, originally a prairie species, have successfully colonized all parts of the continental and nearshore US in the past 100 years. They reached the islands of Narragansett Bay in the mid-1990s. Since then coyotes have become increasingly abundant and problematic in some island communities.
In our history of cohabitation with coyotes people have consistently tried to eliminate them by hunting, trapping, and poisoning. Lethal removal works for individual problem animals but does not work as a population control strategy. Why? Coyotes have intrinsic physiological and behavioral abilities to control their own numbers. Their reproductive rate is regulated by the amount of food comptetition with other coyotes. If numbers of coyotes are lethally removed those remaining will respond to the decrease in food competition by increasing reproduction. Coyote populations rapidly rebound. As long as coyotes are well fed their populations will grow.
It is also known that the opposite effect occurs if coyotes are stressed by food competition. If there are too many coyotes competing for the food available coyotes will drop their own numbers to the level sustainable by those resources.
Understanding this relati
onship, NBCS scientists decided to study the resource use of coyotes on two islands in Narragansett Bay, Rhode Island. We used GPS tracking collars to find out where the coyotes were spending their time. We theorized that if we could identify important coyote food resources - and control them - the coyotes would bring their own numbers down. NBCS calls this "passive coyote management."
Since 2005 when we trapped and collared our first island coyotes we have continually found that the most important food resources to our study coyotes are provided by people. That means they are within our control. If follows that coyote populations can also be controlled. If we remove anthopogenic resource (human subsidies), coyotes will lower their population to the level sustainable by natural resources. When coyotes are sustained only by natural prey (mice, woodchucks, rabbits, geese, and deer) coyotes numbers will be lower and they will provide helpful pest control services.
Based our scientific data NBCS has generated a set of Best Management Practices for Coexistence with Coyotes (CBMPs)- basically a toolbox for safe, sustainable, community coyote management. We are working with the towns in our study area to adopt the CBMPs and be the first community in the nation to successfully and sustainably manage coyotes. We also believe other cities and towns should be able to use our results as a template if they are experiencing coyote problems. We have only just begun to implement the CBMPs on our islands. We hope in the near future to have all our towns implementing the CBMPs - only then will we see the full impacts they make on coyote numbers and behavioral problems. You can follow our progress on this website.