Predators are becoming a growing problem for farmers in east Linn County, and now the county is trying to figure out how to help slow the killing of lambs and other livestock by coyotes and cougars.
Members of the Linn County Livestock Association met Friday morning, June 12, in an emergency meeting at the Pioneer Villa Truck Plaza Restaurant that drew 20 producers, along with Linn County Commissioner Will Tucker, to discuss the problem.
As a result of that meeting, livestock producers will address the County Commission at 9 a.m. Wednesday, June 17, asking the county to help pay for a wildlife specialist, also known as a county trapper, to keep predators at bay.
Farmers say that coyotes have become a serious problem, rising to an all-time high over the past five years.
“It used to be you’d never see a coyote, not in the daytime,” said Roger Ruckert, a Tangent-area farmer who runs sheep on his fields where he’s not growing a crop of grass or wheat. “I had to move over 1,200 lambs near the city limits of Tangent because they were getting nailed so bad.”
Farmers say guard animals such as dogs, llamas and donkeys can protect sheep, but the problems occur around the perimeter of the fields where the guard animals are not always present.
The county is proposing paying $20,000 to employ a full-time trapper, which roughly matches funds from the federal and state governments. But state and federal funding is being cut, Tucker said.
Dave Williams, state director for the U.S. Department of Agriculture Animal and Plant Inspection Wildlife Services Program, said the loss of the cooperatively funded county trapper program would likely impact small producers more than large ones.
He said that $27,000 worth of livestock losses to predators have been reported in Linn County since last July 1 “but that’s just a fraction.” He said that a lot of losses are never reported and it’s hard to determine how much loss is prevented by having a trapper remove a predator.
“Someone calls us up and they’re losing a few lambs every night. We go in there and selectively work on the coyote or cougar that’s causing that damage,” he said. “It’s hard to estimate what further damage might occur.”
The state conducts regular surveys to determine livestock losses to predators. In the last sheep count, in 2005, 2,800 adult sheep worth $325,000 and 5,800 lambs worth $331,000 were killed by predators in Oregon.
In 2006, the latest cattle survey, 400 adults worth $386,000 were killed by predators and 4,100 calves, worth $1.5 million were killed.
Ruckert said he believes the current problem is partly due to increasing cougar numbers, as well as multiplying coyote populations.
“They’ve littered up now,” he said of the coyotes. “There are now five to six new ones out there for each one there was before. You kill one but they double or triple their population every year. We’re not holding our own.”
He said he suspects that increasing cougar populations are driving the coyotes out of the hills.
“I don’t think the coyotes want to be around cougars,” Ruckert said.
Williams said that predator problems tend to move about.
“The thing about predation, it’s not evenly spread from one producer to another,” he said. “In our experience, predation will ebb and flow. We work in partnership with livestock producers and advise them what they can do to minimize the potential for predation. We might solve the problem and that particular producer may or may not have as bad predation the following year.”
Shelby J. Filley, the Oregon State University Extension Service’s regional livestock and forage specialist for this area, said that the problem with sheep kills is that they are not only financially debilitating, but disheartening.
“”It costs a lot of money, but seeing animals killed that way is frustrating and disheartening,” she said. “You don’t want to see your animal spread all over the place like that.
“It’s the number one reason people tell me they quit raising sheep.”
Tucker, who lives north of Lebanon in the Lacomb area, has lost two calves this year to cougars and said he quit raising sheep because of coyote problems.
He said he has lost as many as 30 lambs in a single year.
The problem, he said, is not only how to solve the problem but who is going to pay for it.
Some livestock producers want to employ private trappers, who charge $125 per coyote, Tucker said. But he said the consensus of the group on Friday was that they didn’t want to hire a private trapper.
He said bounty systems don’t work very well and he’s concerned that if hunters were encouraged to shoot predators, it might cause other problems.
“The bottom line is I don’t think we want to have everybody and their brother shooting in the fields,” Tucker said.
He said he got a call from one constituent who suggested that county residents be taxed or that the county could sacrifice a sheriff’s deputy position to make room in the budget for a trapper.
“Is it fair that 10 percent pay or is it fair that all the taxpayers pay,” he asked, rhetorically. “It’s true that when a coyote doesn’t have sheep to eat, it will attack domesticated pets. But€¦”
Williams said the county trapper program has continued in Linn County for “more than two decades,” since before he arrived in 1997.
The trappers deal with a wide variety of predators and problem animals in addition to coyotes and cougars, he said, including bears, beavers, nutria, blackbirds, starlings, pigeons, bobcats, foxes and geese.
He said Linn County is proposing a $18,900 cut, from $38,900, in its contribution to the $66,360 cost of funding one trapper in the field for a year. He said federal funding has held up but the state Department of Agriculture is cutting its predator eradication budget by 75 percent and the Department of Fish and Wildlife is cutting its by 33 percent, a total loss of $8,200.
“”We’re quite some distance from a 12-month program,” he said.
According to the most recent figures Williams said he has available, since last July 1 the trapper has eradicated 99 coyotes and seven cougars in Linn County.
Tucker said he’s hoping the livestock producers will help with the cost of funding the trapper.
“The federal program has been great,” he said. “The frustration is how to pay for it.”
Ruckert said he’d be interested in talking to hunters who would like to help thin out the coyote population.
“I’d love to have a couple of people come to take care of my coyotes,” he said.