I’m curious if anyone has insights on how common this is!
There is a smallish female coyote who keeps appearing on my trail cams hauling deer chunks of various sizes (probably back to her den and cubs). The first time I saw it I thought maybe she’d raided a mountain lion’s kill, but it’s happened multiple times now.
So it seems like she’s actually regularly hunting and killing them, AND doing it solo, which is incredible to me. I always assumed that it was fairly rare for them to target something so large, and that they’d do it in a pack if they did.
Common. Very common.
Coyotes usually target fawns, older, injured or sick deer, but will go after healthy adults too.
High losses in fawns can be half or more each year.
I once saw three coyotes chasing deer in the Cuyahoga Valley National Park. I’m thinking it was a family group of coyotes. Like a lot of places, Northeast Ohio has a lot of white-tailed deer. It’s no wonder the coyotes try to catch them.
Coyotes can and will hunt deer — especially young, who are probably not much more challenge than a jackrabbit. They will also chase and test many things they cannot or do not catch or kill. But coyotes are also preeminent scavengers. These are great trail cam captures, but none actually document predation. There is plenty of opportunity at this site for road kills, group kills, human kills, fence entanglements, illness/parasites, etc to produce sufficient deer mortality for an alert coyote to stay in groceries.