Coyotes (Canis latrans) can be major deer fawn predators. They are habitat generalists able to adapt to diverse environments, so they can track prey resources as needed. However, they are also highly flexible in their diet. When confronted with spatial heterogeneity in a highly valuable resource, such as deer fawns, will coyotes specialize, adjusting distributions towards areas with high fawn density, or generalize, ignoring the variation in resource density? We investigated coyote response to black-tailed deer fawn density (Odocoileus hemionus columbianus) using occupancy modeling of camera trap data from 63 sites in the North Coast region of California. We used spatially-explicit capture-recapture modeling of fecal DNA samples to estimate overall deer density and then employed N-mixture modeling of camera trap data to determine what proportion of that density was attributable to fawns. We then utilized those fawn density estimates as a covariate in coyote occupancy modeling to explore the relationship between the two groups. We found that coyote occupancy probability was higher in areas with elevated fawn densities, consistent with the specialist hypothesis, suggesting that coyotes in the North Coast adjust their summer distribution to take advantage of this highly valuable, temporally limited prey resource.

Andrea Broad is a PhD candidate in the Graduate Group in Ecology at the University of California, Davis and an Environmental Scientist with the California Department of Fish and Wildlife. Her primary research interests involve using non-invasive survey methods to understand how environmental factors affect wildlife populations and how that information can inform wildlife management and conservation. While the research she is discussing at this conference is focused on deer and their predators in northern California, she has also worked with upland game birds, sea turtles, wolves, shorebirds, raccoons, and Florida panthers.