On Sunday, April 26th at 3pm the South Kingstown Land Trust will hold its annual meeting at the Land Trust Barn in Matunuck. After our business meeting we’ll hear from Numi Mitchell, PhD and learn about coyotes!
Since 2004 the Narragansett Bay Coyote Study (NBCS), led by Numi Mitchell PhD, has been developing science-based coexistence and management strategies for our newest top predator. Coyotes, originally a prairie species, have successfully colonized all parts of the continental US in the past 100 years. They reached the islands of Narragansett Bay in the mid-1990s. Since then coyotes have become increasingly abundant and problematic in some communities. People have tried to eliminate them by hunting, trapping, and poisoning, but while lethal removal works for individual problem animals, it does not work as a population control strategy.
Numi will explain how coyotes’ reproductive rate is regulated by the amount of food competition with other coyotes. She will describe the NBCS project which tracked coyotes and identified their primary food sources. NBCS scientists theorized that if we could identify important coyote food resources – and control them – the coyotes would bring their own numbers down.
After the meeting is adjourned and all guests were invited to join us for refreshments.
