This is remarkable footage. Coyotes actually aren’t the best deer predators. It normally takes a pack of them to bring down a prey of this size, and coyotes are much more “reactive” with each other than dogs and wolves are. The result is they very often can’t form packs of any size; they just can’t get along!
When deer are pursued by predators, they will often take to the water. White-tailed deer are great swimmers, and the deer can touch bottom and continue to run while the coyote will have to swim. That maneuver slows down the predator’s advance and gives the deer a bit of an advantage.
Of course, the cameraman scares off the coyote. Coyotes are deathly afraid of our species– for good reason!
And the deer survives:
The deer then exhibits another defense mechanism. Although deer are generally quite afraid of people, if pursued by a predator, they will try to get close to people. The deer seem to know that predators don’t want to get too close to people, so they will use people as “human shields.”
Interesting how this guy mentioned he thought it might be a Red Wolf–it MAY well have been a coyote with Red Wolf ancestry–it was obviously taken up in the mountains of Eastern Tennessee–Red Wolves WERE released there in the Smokies National Park for several years. SUPPOSEDLEY(the official status) all of them were recaptured and removed–but one reason was because they were crossbreeding too readily with the well-established coyote population, and couldn’t be controlled that way. Plus numerous litters were born that never got radio-collared–the “unofficial” status is that the coyote population around the Smokies has a good chunk of Red Wolf DNA! Too bad this video was not clearer on the canid; you might have been able to tell…..