Really want to hear about it?  It's a sad story.  For close to 20 yrs it was my passion, because I was living in an area of upstate NY with lots of small family dairy farms (not the industrial farms that now predominate), & where permission to hunt was not difficult to obtain. Furthermore, the land & climate obviously suited them, because they were prolific--it was a daily (& sickening) sight to see one run over in the road.

Then two disasters occurred: real estate speculators began offering the farmers deals they couldn't refuse, so vacation homes replaced the cows, and at about the same time the eastern coyote invasion began. Even smart farm dogs have little trouble catching them, so a pair of coyotes working together were absolutely lethal.  So the woodchuck population crashed, and where some escaped the coyotes by moving into subdivisions, they couldn't be hunted.  So ended my chuck hunting career.

By the way, I always hunted them with a very heavy Peterson-barreled Stevens 49 in .22LR using cross sticks & an optical rangefinder, & never took a shot under 50 yrds, mostly in the 75-80 range, and even that far necessitated some careful stalking.  The challenge of hitting them at hundreds of yds with CFs eludes me completely.  Once, just to see if I could do it, I stalked one to about 20 yds & killed it with a K22, one shot to the brain.

Redsetter is right. The coyotes eat them as fast as they grow. The survivors live in the suburbs or very near some farmhouse and along the interstate highways. Not much chuck hunting in these parts anymore.

Maybe somebody needs to start thinning out the coyotes.

BP wrote on Jun 16^th, 2018 at 3:50am:

Good luck! I have been told they do not respond to predator calls west of the Cascades. 

Joe,

Maybe its because of all the ethanol that they put in the mogas.

westerner wrote on Jun 16^th, 2018 at 3:29pm:


Of course.  Woodchucks evolved with wolves, which didn't bother with them, & foxes, which were too small to tackle anything larger than a half-grown one.  Coyotes are to woodchucks, dim-witted to begin with, an alien invader against whom they have no natural defenses. 

The other reason is the conversion of most of those small farms which provided pasture & thus food to support a large chuck population into subdivisions, trailer-parks, condos, etc.   

Anybody with a cursory interest in chucks knows this, has observed in taking place with their own eyes over the last 40 yrs, anybody EXCEPT the know-nothing wildlife biologists working for most state conservation depts.--because no fact in nature can exist unless it's been "proven" by a mutimillion dollar, multi-year study, & few if any depts. would invest that kind of money & effort in such a "minor" species.  One of NY's regional conservation offices in near here, & I've talked to their staff about this--about which nobody in that office knew ANYTHING, though hunters & farmers have been talking about it for yrs; hard to remember another group as ignorant & pig-headed as that bunch.  Amazingly, though there's a closed season on coyote hunting (to which I don't object), there's none on woodchucks, nor bag limits!  That might have made sense when there were "bazillions" of them, but then isn't now.  Only state I know that treats them (rightly) as a game animal with seasons & limits is Pa.

BP wrote on Jun 16^th, 2018 at 4:40pm:


Another situation in which close study of a situation by reliable observers is utterly dismissed by the "professionals" in ag & wildlife agencies; with them, nothing can be known or even surmised unless millions have been spent in "studies."