While most of Iowa's hunting seasons are now closed some Hunters are turning to coyotes coyote hunting is open all year and night hunting is legal now this is a controversial practice with some arguing hunting at night gives an unfair advantage to humans and interestingly the price of Iowa's coyote pelts has dropped over the last few years here to talk about all this is Vince evaer fur bear wildlife biologist for the Iowa DNR we're going to see if we can get Vince pulled up here on Zoom For You
Vince thank you so much for being back here on the current I want to start with this practice of night hunting while controversial it is legal in the state however you cannot use an artificial light is that correct so what is legal is uh thermal optics that don't cast a light and then infrared light sources can be used as long as it's attached to their weapon and it cannot be used during the the gun deer seasons and the deer bow season but it can be used throughout the rest of of the Year okay w
ell something that Hunters have to be wary of when it comes to coyote hunting is mistaking wolves for coyotes talk about that yeah that that was one of our biggest messages is that we just encourage coyote Hunters if they're going to be out there hunting at night you know regardless of your technology to just be sure of your target if you see something that's bigger than a normalized adult coyote don't pull the trigger if you're in doubt okay well back in 2020 Iowa coyote pelts were selling for
almost $21 each and that was considered average but this year that price has dropped to $870 why is that uh during those years uh three or four years ago KY pelts were worth more because they were valued for the trim trade uh specifically for some of the higher-end winter parkas and since that time um those have lost value so Iowa coyotes along with other coyotes throughout the US are now worth less and is it true that you know Iowa pelts are behind some of our Northern neighbors States the Iowa
coyotes are considered average some of the better coyote pelts some of the best coyote pelts are in The Dakotas and Montana and Prairie Canada those are the higher value coyote pelts because they're typically a thicker more pale color overall well Vince in the time that we've left I wanted to slightly pivot the last time you were here on the current we were talking about Iowa's critically endangered gray fox population and I understand you had a meeting this morning about your ongoing conservat
ion efforts can you give us an update on this situation yeah it's been a a good story overall um the gray fox is a really neat little animal adults only weigh 10 to 12 pounds and current however we only have one Gray Fox collared at this time and so we're actually asking private Trappers to help us catch the gray fox for conservation purposes you know to be able to do more science so we have one card right now that gray fox is doing uh quite well so far to date um at last we saw it was healthy a
nd we've been able to kind of start getting a home range mapped out with that animal so so far so good with that anything can happen at any time to a gray fox you know so we'll see what happens with this one it'll be real interesting of course if people want to learn more about how they can contact I DNR about gray foxes we have that up on our website right
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