Man Has Spent 40 Years Killing Coyotes for a Living

By Lance Frazier The Herald Journal

LOGAN — Newell Fredrickson doesn’t enjoy killing coyotes. It’s just something he does to earn a living.

In 40 years with Wildlife Services — the branch of the U.S. Department of Agriculture charged with removing problem predators — Fredrickson has trapped and shot all sorts of animals, crashed in helicopters half a dozen times, roped eagles and seen a lot of country. But the large majority of his job these days focuses on one thing: killing coyotes.

Folks with Wildlife Services (formerly Animal Damage Control) tend to tiptoe when discussing their work. The Utah Wildlife Services Web page states that "Utah WS is uniquely positioned … to assist livestock producers, industries and our cooperating agency partners with wildlife damage issues. Professional wildlife biologists and trained technicians provide direct assistance (their emphasis) when wildlife damage requires special skills …." Fredrickson, on the other hand, doesn’t trade in euphemisms.

"That old coyote supported me for 40 years and let me be as free as a bird on the wing," Fredrickson says. "He’s my brother, but that don’t mean I won’t kill him."

Which is not to say that he does it for fun or, as some people imagine, that he guns down every coyote he sees: "I ain’t going out there to see how many I can kill."

The Hyrum resident targets offending animals in specific areas, answering calls from ranchers and sheepherders after they lose livestock to suspected wild predators. And he knows that his solutions, final as they may be for the targets, are a temporary fix at best, since coyotes reproduce rapidly.

"You take ‘em out and maybe you’re OK for a couple of months," he says.

If his job seems a little anachronistic, given that few people are aware of the agency or know what it’s there for, it’s probably a perfect fit. Fredrickson, now 73, grew up south of Avon on 160 acres homesteaded by his grandfather. He trapped muskrats for pocket money until he dropped out of school to "ride them buckin’ horses" on the rodeo circuit. That petered out when he went broke in Salmon, Idaho, and he returned to Cache Valley and hired on as a ranch hand.

The work — living in a remote cabin and herding cattle — was "heaven," but the money wasn’t, and when he got a chance to go to work as a trapper for the federal government he jumped at it.

Over the ensuing decades he’s been responding to complaints from operators, who agree not to take matters into their own hands with poison or bullet if the government will send someone to take care of their livestock depredation problems. During his career Fredrickson has been honored with the Jeff M. Yates Memorial Award for field operative excellence (2003), and the Utah Woolgrower’s Trapper of the Year Award (1998), and most recently he became the second Utahn to receive the Bill Spalsbury Award, one of the highest honors given by Wildlife Services. For that one he and his daughter, Shayane, traveled last month to San Antonio, where he received a plaque with a carving of an eagle.

Which brings up a story about a guy who says, "Hell, that’s all my life is, stories." Last year a rancher called looking for help. Seems a bald eagle had been snagged in a muskrat trap on the guy’s property and couldn’t get free. Fredrickson tried to approach the giant bird, but "I’d get within 10 feet of the sucker and he’d fly off." After looking things over a bit, he finally borrowed a skill from his cow-punching days and threw a loop over the eagle. "Well, hell, I got him like roping a calf, around the neck and one wing," he recalls. He freed the bird and released it near Porcupine Dam.

Then there were the six times he’s gone down in helicopter crashes, something that’s often fatal. "They were mostly soft landings," he says, with the biggest danger coming from having to walk out of remote country — 14 miles in one case — in winter to find help. Those helicopter flights, as well as the fixed-wing flights the service occasionally utilizes, are forays to look for coyotes, which are often shot from the air. It’s an image some find appalling, and Fredrickson can understand why. He doesn’t define his job as coyote-killing, but as saving mule deer and sage grouse.

His approach is practical: Coyotes kill deer, so if you want more deer you have to reduce the number of coyotes, and livestock are in the mix too. Two years back he killed 66 coyotes that were right in the middle of a deer herd near Hardware Ranch. It was the sort of thing sportsmen, eager to see more and bigger bucks, clamor for.

"It’s not the world of Walt Disney," Fredrickson says, "and that deer isn’t Bambi."

Yet he believes that if you destroy wild things, "you destroy an important part of nature." He’s even undergone a bit of an Aldo Leopold-like transformation, having given up hunting a few years back after a lifetime of venison steaks.

He has no plans to retire, but the writing on the wall indicates that his job, like the coyote’s home ground, is becoming marginalized. As he ponders the future, he lapses into cowboy poetry.

"My race toward the sunset is a high and lonesome kind," he says. "Like the coyote, I don’t leave no tracks." When he does make a successful shot with his coyote gun –the age-worn .243, with the black fabric on the barrel to block reflection, was given to him by his father’s only brother — Fredrickson pats the stock and says, "Guess we did it again, Uncle." That doesn’t happen on this day, which ends at a greasy spoon on Brigham City’s main drag. The waitress greets Fredrickson, who’s wearing a dark Stetson adorned with a pin of a howling coyote, with a hug as she says to an observer, "I don’t like what he does."

It’s an attitude Fredrickson understands and respects, even if it feels as foreign as the computer, cell phone and 4-wheeler that are his new-age tools of trade.

"I’m more scared of John Public" and political pressure than anything else, he says over a burger and a cup of black coffee. "I used to wear the white hat. Now I wear a black hat."

In fact his job has become more difficult, and not only because of ever-increasing public disapproval. The coyotes themselves — agents also deal with cougars, bears and wolves, but around here it’s almost always coyotes — are becoming more canny. Thirty years ago, Fredrickson says, a guy could call them in without half trying. These days the animals are more wary, especially if they’ve been shot at before, making it that much harder for the next hunter.

He has no plans to retire, but the writing on the wall indicates that his job, like the coyote’s home ground, is becoming marginalized. As he ponders the future, he lapses into cowboy poetry.

"My race toward the sunset is a high and lonesome kind," he says. "Like the coyote, I don’t leave no tracks."