Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, May 16, 1993 TAG: 9305160092
SECTION: VIRGINIA PAGE: B-1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: By JAY TAYLOR CORRESPONDENT
DATELINE: LENGTH: Long
Tomsa cups his hands around his mouth, gathers his breath and lets fly several shrill yips, then a long, melancholy wail.
As the moan trails off, he drops his hands to his sides. Nearby, a donkey snorts and haws.
Tomsa's chilling coyote howl conjures Western phantoms: A sallow, grand moon rides a sky scattershot with stars. A landscape dotted with mesas and mesquite, cactus needles and dried sagebrush.
But this is a sheep farm in Montgomery County, and the donkey has reason to be queasy. Just a quarter of a mile away, a pack of hungry coyotes has recently killed a half-dozen pregnant ewes. Dire and gory, their mark was unmistakable: The ewes' necks were chewed, the internal organs mangled and the carcasses were mostly intact. The coyotes had laid waste to hundreds of pounds of sheep for just a few pounds of nutrition.
One ewe survived, and it skitters in a pen with the flock, its wounded neck and flank a glaring, purple testimony to the peril in the woods.
All this happened at night, silently, in a field not far from Blacksburg's sprawl. After seven sheep were killed, the farm manager turned to Tomsa. For fear of retribution from animal rights activists, the farm's owner will not allow the farm's name to be used.
Tomsa is Virginia's one-man coyote bureaucracy: counselor, tracker, phone answerer, speechmaker, killer. As Virginia's animal damage control agent in charge of chronicling and limiting coyote damages, he works to stop livestock deaths in Virginia.
Coyotes are blamed for hundreds of farm-animal kills each year, most of them in mountainous Western Virginia. The state's animal damage control unit estimates losses in Virginia of 1,647 sheep, 30 calves, one cow and 39 goats from 1990-92. This happened in 16 counties, many of them southwestern.
Tomsa thinks those figures are low. According to the Virginia Agricultural Statistics Service, 4,100 sheep and lambs were lost in Virginia in 1990, and 700 calves were lost in 1992. About 75 coyotes were killed with Tomsa's help in those years.
Whichever set of numbers you trust, the results are profound.
"We have had a number of producers who have gone out of business because of the coyote," said Steven Umberger, a Virginia Tech sheep expert. "We have excellent conditions for the coyote, and so I think most producers accept the fact that they are here, and we have to learn to deal with them."
Some farmers have lost as much as 60 to 70 percent of a season's lamb crop to coyotes, he said.
Highland County has been hit hard, says Extension Agent Rodney Leech, prompting dozens of producers to quit. The county produced 94,000 pounds of wool three years ago.
That has dropped to 64,000 pounds.
"The big thing that forced them to sell was dealing with the coyote," says Leech. "I think it's going to be quite a big problem as far as our agricultural economy goes in Highland County. Once the sheep are gone, it's going to be the calves."
Mountainous and rugged, Highland is perfect coyote country. Prey and cover are abundant, and the terrain perfect for the coyotes' preferred guerilla tactics. They can hide easily and and strike at night.
Hard to track in the hills and too cunning for many traps, coyotes have proved a baffling and formidable foe for resourceful mountain farmers.
Tomsa counsels farmers to fight back by making life hard for the coyote. Put up fences. Put big guard dogs in with the sheep. Guns, traps and nooses are his last resort, he says.
"They're very stealthy," Tomsa says. "If they can exploit a prey population without creating a lot of alarm, they can pick one off whenever they need one."
But the sheep at the Montgomery County farm already are skittish. "Yesterday, my dog ran by them and they were very flighty," said Dave, the farm manager. "That's always a symptom."
Not far from his sheep herd, the same group of coyotes dragged down a 1,600-pound cow as she was giving birth.
Coyotes kill most in the early spring, when they need food for pups. Their stomachs hold only 5 pounds, so they eat the richest food available - the heart, liver lungs and spleen. Thus a coyote will kill a big animal for a light meal.
Livestock aren't the only targets of the opportunistic coyote. Red fox, nesting birds, small wildlife, even pets can complement the menu.
"We've had many instances in which we'd go to a farm and they'd say, `You know, I had 81 barn cats and now there are none,'" Tomsa says.
As the coyote population increases, most coyotes will stay in the woods, feeding on squirrels and mice, berries and fruits. But if the coyote performs in Western Virginia as it has in other regions, some will get braver and move close to towns and cities.
Some will kill small pets. A few will breed with dogs, producing coy-dogs. Some coyotes will become rabid. As they discover the food in the suburbs, as they become less timorous about humans, they may, as they have done in the West, attack small children.
Tom Tomsa pulls a hair off a dead coyote lying in the back of a pickup truck. A Tazewell County farmer had found it in a trap the day before and killed it.
It resembles a small German shepherd, with a narrow snout.
Tomsa will measure the mouth, feet and nose, see what is in its stomach and look for parasites. He will send tissue samples to UCLA for a DNA analysis. Probably there is some wolf in there, he said.
Figuring what mixes have created the breed are nearly as difficult as controlling the coyote's population.
It's an intelligent, wary animal, not often duped by traps and often too furtive to offer a clean shot from a rifle barrel.
Some have tried to frighten them off at nighttime with a photovoltaic cell that turns on a flood light and siren when a coyote approaches. This didn't work long, Tomsa said.
"I had a coyote come in and kill an animal right under the thing," Tomsa said.
"Some people think that if you kill a coyote and hang it up on a fence," this will scare the others off. Tomsa said. "The next coyote that comes by will urinate on it and crawl on through."
Electric fences can help. Keeping sheep in a pen, rather than adrift in a pasture, can help, too. So can a guard dog, which is a pricey but effective solution that Tomsa often recommends. The Great Pyrenees, a French dog, and
the Abkash, a Turkish dog, are good sentries, as are llamas. A dog that is reared with the sheep at a young age will become a part of the flock. But when guard dogs, fences and decoys don't work, guns do.
Tomsa hunts them after sunset, using night-vision goggles and scopes. He sets up an elaborate ruse to lure coyotes and ties his chocolate Labrador, Murphy, nearby to deflect the coyotes' attention from human scents. They approach the bait always cautiously.
The coyote is a tenacious inhabitant. When hunted intensely, coyotes will leave an area temporarily, sometimes to return in greater numbers. And when their numbers are thinned out, the females produce more pups.
In Virginia, coyote damage has been purely agricultural. But there are signs that coyotes may be filtering toward more heavily populated areas: Some have been seen near the Radford Army Ammunition Plant.
"It's impractical in my opinion for anyone to think they're going to control the coyote," said Larry Crane, the state's veteran coyote watcher. "I wouldn't expect people to jump up and be terrified. However, they might as well get ready for them. Five years from now . . . we'll be seeing them quite frequently."
by CNB