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We first found the deer carcass by simply listening. A raucous chorus of crows and a few smaller blue jays seemed suspicious in February. The scavenging “meat birds” frequented pasture’s edge trees, circling on tilted wings to the natural funnel at the bottom of a steep, south-facing hemlock ravine located a mere hundred yards from the house. The noisy scavengers are harbingers of a meat source in snowy woods otherwise devoid of food.
CSI South Sutton
As expected, we found a freshly-killed white-tailed deer – disemboweled with entrails and spine pulled free of dangling legs; its neck and head still intact. A short walk uphill led to a half dozen feeding platforms packed in the snow, each flecked with blood and bits of meat, hide and hair. Nearby, the discarded rumen sack contained the deer’s last meal – a cud of partially digested tree bark and sapling buds looked as foreign as grass clippings spilled on the snow.
The coyote pack fed first on liver, heart and other vital organs while leaving the gall bladder. They cleaned the spine and ribs of meat leaving the neck and legs for later just as we might eat a lobster – choice tail and claws first. The hide was peeled back from the carcass. The back haunches had been pulled free of the hips and dragged uphill and carried off into the forest. Trees at the perimeter of the coyotes’ nocturnal dining room were marked with bright yellow urine – territorial claim and clear warning to interlopers. By day, crows and jays left wing prints while scattering bits of nutritious frozen venison. The coyotes were not happy to share their kill. The race had begun to dismember and move the deer departed uphill into the jumble of ledges and boulders overlooking the Lane River valley.
Patterns of travel recur each winter
The steep ledges and talus boulders overlooking the forest of oak and hemlock are ruled by a pack of coyotes who howl - often startlingly close and always unexpectedly - from beyond the cultivated fringes of our small Tree Farm.
Deer highways are re-established every winter where a brook exits the woods to cross beneath the dirt road and emerge into a wide alder swale and meadow at the edge of a larger wetland. Stone walls and a former fenced sheep pen corral wildlife travel nightly. The open barway in a stone wall at the edge of the road made a perfect spot for a coyote ambush. Coyotes are cunning in using natural ambush sites for driving deer into cornered positions for a group kill. It’s happened very nearby before – perhaps for decades.
We hear coyotes howling more frequently over the course of winter as deer weaken in the deep snow and as the late February coyote breeding season arrives. The tracks and signs in the snow become easier to read with more intimate knowledge of our local topography. The deer move laterally across the hill randomly but tend to ascend and descend in the wooded corridors between adjacent fields and houses. Coyotes drive deer uphill into ambush positions where steep terrain slows deer and hinders escape from pursuing coyotes as others wait at the base of the ledges or bottlenecks where trails converge.
“Carcass cam” captures coyotes
My neighbor, Garrett Evans has shared stunning wildlife images he has captured using remote game cameras. I asked him to attempt to capture a portrait of the successful coyotes.
The deer carcass was going fast by the time Garrett strapped two infrared cameras with cable locks to trees at the ambush site. One focused on the carcass and the other on the wider angle of approach to the area to capture nighttime visitors. The likely path coyotes would follow would have them removing the meat uphill, away from the road. Feeding visits abruptly stopped for several very cold nights, curtailed by human scent after we initially visited the carcass. Then the coyote visits accelerated while we avoided the area entirely after a heavy snowfall.
Cute fetal coyote pups conceived in late February breeding season will be born in April. The pups are now growing and developing in utero from the protein and fat of winter deer kills. We mourn the deer and malign coyotes… until the “awww” moment when pups appear. Why coo at a photo of cute coyote pups in a den without acknowledging they are born of venison? The skilled predators will one day pursue the fawns born to surviving does in June. The recurrent annual dramas of coyotes hunting deer is writ large in our forests, the NH version of hyenas hunting gazelles.
Our human predecessors might have gladly taken a share of the meat we found – alerted by crows to the largess. Perhaps native trappers would have set snares to obtain coyote pelts when the predators returned to claim the balance of a deer kill. We’re insulated from the realities of "survival of the fittest." Our status as alpha-predator is blurred by the convenience of the supermarket butcher shop. Meat gives life to many and brings death to others. This is business as usual in the winter woods. Coyote-deer dramas illustrate an ancient and elegant local food chain.
Despite following tracks and finding kill sites and scat, I’ve never caught even a fleeting glimpse of a coyote while I was on foot. They’re ghosts inhabiting our shared landscape. I know they follow my scent and perhaps have even watched me on snowshoes on winter nights walking in the pool of blue halogen light from a headlamp. Often I squint into the dark woods and coil in anticipation of their wild, celebratory howling on winter nights.