[QUOTEIt's very rare for coyotes to take down a mature buck, at least down here it is. Maybe it is more common up north where snow could hinder a bucks escape. Most deer taken by yotes are either fawns or wounded or sick deer. Regardless, those are neat but sad pics. It's a shame a buck that nice has to go that way. ][/QUOTE]
We have a lot of snow here most years.The only time I recall the yotes really taking out a lotta deer was 3 or 4 years ago.There was so much snow it lasted into the spring when I normally am out looking for shed antlers.A combination of things led to them killing so many deer that year.
First we had a lot of ice storms, and in between we had a ton of snow that piled up deep.The layers of ice in between the snow made it real hard fo anything to find food, it was about impossible to dig through.The deep snow also buried all the foodplots the deer would normally use.They were weak and starving by mid winter.
The yotes found out the deer would bust through the snow drifts if they could herd them towards a fenceline where the snow was the deepest and become stuck in the belly deep snow.The yotes were lighter and could stay on top of the crust, it was easy for them that year to pick off starving deer snuck in the deep snow.I found somewhere between 45 and 50 deer dead that spring and I would guesse almost 1/3 of them were coyote kills, you could still see the tracks in the snow on many of them. Once you got away from the fencelines there were starved deer, and deer that hunters had lost and cars had hit but the yotes had pretty much left these alone.
I dont recall out of all those ever seeiing one biger than a button buck though, certainly no mature bucks were killed by the yotes.