Coyotes: Clever Rebounders, Columnist confounds trappers, foils the FBI article

Last edited Mon Oct 29, 2018, 09:00 PM - Edit history (1)

(Did you know, Coyotes are truly native to North America. Wolves came here from Eurasia 20,000 years ago, but Coyotes came from here, North America, current species about 1 million years ago, related species about 6 million years ago).

full article
https://www.bendsource.com/bend/coyotes-clever-rebounders/Content?oid=7870282

Way back in the '50s and '60s, I was a thorn in the side of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service's Predator and Rodent Control program—a misnomer if there ever was one.

Their main target was the coyote. The trappers thought they could eliminate the coyote on the "open range"—as they termed the millions of acres of native grasses and other vegetation on "public lands"— as they did the wolf.

In my opinion, not one of those agents thought that wolves and coyotes were about as alike as apples and oranges. The trappers only thought of them all as "predators" and used the same technique on both, as commanded by the cow and sheep growers who thought of public lands as their private grazing pastures.

What started my involvement with the government's killing campaign was an announcement in the local paper about the closing of the Brothers School because a so-called "rabid" coyote was found dead in the school yard. I was pretty new to Central Oregon at that time, having rolled into Bend in 1951. A local naturalist told me the Brothers coyote wasn't rabid, but had died of 1080 poison—another name for sodium fluoroacetate, a weapon of mass destruction left over from WWII. I couldn't believe it. The technique for killing predators was to put out poison stations with 1080-laced horse meat—also lethal to anything else that got into the bait, such as eagles, woodpeckers and small mammals including weasels, mice and other rodents, and just about anything that got into the bait.

After finding these mass killings around 1080 bait stations and discovering they were illegal since there were too many of them per acre, I began to destroy them. I urinated on several, poured kerosene on others and went so far as to burn some. One day, a government trapper back-tracked and caught me at work. All hell broke loose and his boss in Portland —who by that time was my mortal enemy — sicced the FBI on me. That apparently went on for several years, because...

Around 1965, while employed with the Oregon Museum of Science and Industry as a staff naturalist, I was asked to be the keynote speaker at the National Audubon Society's annual meeting in Tucson, Ariz. Just before I was to give my talk, Sandy Sprunt, my pal and biologist for Audubon, said, "Hey, Jim — see those two guys in the back of the room... the guys in suits?" I said I did. And he added with a big grin, "They say they're FBI and here to arrest you for destroying government property."