CAUGHT UP IN TRAPPING as a youngster, Glynn Riley has spent almost four decades doing predator control work, mostly on Texas ranches. Trapping itself has changed little in that time, he says, but increased paperwork and changed attitudes have made the overall job more frustrating. Still, Riley likes his work so much that he doesn't look forward to retirement anytime soon.

Glynn Riley Tallies 39 Years
With ADC And Is Still Counting

By Colleen Schreiber

BROWNWOOD — Glynn Riley loves his job as a much as he did the day he started with the Texas animal damage control program almost 40 years ago. For Riley, it's never been a job, rather a way of life that he's thoroughly enjoyed.

"I can remember about three weeks into my job in Wise County. I was out walking across someone's pasture. It was a pretty day. I was young and feeling good, and I can very clearly remember thinking, 'I’m getting paid for this. I’m good for at least 40 years of this.' And here I am. It’s nearly gone and nearly too fast."

Born in 1935, Riley was raised in Wortham, northeast of Waco.

"I took to the woods when I was a kid, and I'm still in them. When everyone else was off playing ball, I was off down on the creek somewhere."

As a youngster he trapped everything from coyotes to mink to raccoon. In 1948, the Texas Parks and Wildlife Department reintroduced deer in the area, closed the season on them and put a bounty of $25 on coyotes. Riley went to town trapping coyotes and that's ultimately how he was initiated into the professional world of predator trapping.

An old fellow named Cliff Whitaker who lived at Stewards Mill. He and his wife, Miss Jessie, lived in the back of an old mercantile store. Riley spent a lot of time with him as a youngster learning the trade.

When he was 18, he wrote to the government agency about a job. He knew then that's what he wanted to do, and in 1960 he went to work for them. The first trapping he did around Angora goats was for Franklin Jackson, who had the sale barn at Groesbeck. It was about 1958. Jackson had taken several thousand goats to the Navasota River bottom and the coyotes were eating them up.

"He agreed to pay me $20 a coyote and the county paid $5. I caught 13 the first week. I was making more money catching coyotes than I was working," Riley says.

Soon after that he took a job with animal damage control. They sent him to Boonsville in Wise County. He was there for four months and then in Denton for about four years. From there he went to Cooper, Texas, and then Lubbock for a couple of years and on to Liberty, where he stayed 11 years.

Riley has been in Brownwood now for 20 years, where he's responsible for 14 counties. He has 12 trappers, two troubleshooters and a helicopter based in Brownwood to assist him. In addition, 10 or 11 of the 14 counties have trapping clubs.

In his district, he says, Mills County tends to have the most problems, primarily because it's the county in his district with the most sheep and goats. Overall there are more meat goats in his district; the Angoras are all but gone. There are still a fair number of sheep but not as many as at one time. At one time Concho County, which is in his district, was the leading county in the state for sheep.

Considerable changes have taken place in his 30-plus year tenure, Riley says.

"The coyotes are the same, even the trapping methods and baits are about the same," Riley says. "It's the conditions that we have to work under that are so different; the people and all the interference that we have."

Land use is one of the most notable changes that has had an impact on his job.

"Used to, people lived in all these houses you see scattered around the countryside. They didn’t have television and they didn’t have a lot of money to spend, but they all had .22 rifles and dogs and that’s what they did for recreation.

"Oldtimers built netwire fences and some even built wolf-proof fences, where they put an apron on the bottom," he continues. "They'd run the coyotes and the wolves, and whenever they came to a fence they would just go through, no one cared. Nowadays you can’t get that much cooperation out of people.

"Now someone from Austin lives there, and they bought it strictly for recreation. He comes on the weekends and he wants to hear the coyotes howl, and right across the fence, those same coyotes are eating Mr. Jones' sheep and goats, but we can’t go across there and catch the coyotes. The hardest place to catch a coyote is in the pasture where he’s killing. You have to go back to where he’s living," Riley explains.

As far as actual trapping goes, the number of hunters and the various hunting seasons tend to wreak havoc on ADC's ability to do their job, Riley says.

"During deer season you can’t work, and quail season lasts forever, until the end of February. The best time to catch coyotes is from about October until the first of April. The worst time is during the hot months in June and July, and those are the only months that we can get in the pasture now in many cases."

Coyotes, Riley says, are more vulnerable to control methods in the fall because they have a dispersal of sorts along about November.

"The pups are like teenagers. They get out and get in trouble and they’re easier to catch then."

Usually it's the juvenile females that do the leaving. Then around the first of February the breeding season begins. From that time until about the first of March is another period where they're really vulnerable, but again, hunting often prevents Riley and his team from doing their job.

"The first trip a coyote makes through your ranch is your best chance to catch him because it's all new to him and he's investigating everything. He's more prone to get into something then," he explains.

Once considered mostly a western animal, the coyote's range continues to expand as numbers annually surpass previous levels. Not surprisingly, Riley avows that there are more coyotes today than there has ever been in his lifetime.

"In the late 1970s, TP&W reported that over 100,000 coyotes were trapped in Texas. I couldn't tell that we'd even made a dent. We keep them about static in sheep and goat country," he says.

His trappers turn in depredation reports monthly. Total kills, he says, run anywhere from a low of 20 to a high of 50 or so, depending on the time of year.

In terms of livestock, Riley believes a coyote would rather kill an Angora goat than anything, then lambs and finally Spanish goats.

"A coyote can be neck deep in rabbits, and he’ll kill lambs and kids if they’re there. I don’t think there’s a coyote drawing a breath that wouldn’t kill a sheep or goat if given the opportunity.

"If you don’t have anything for coyotes to eat you won’t have problems," he continues, but then adds, "but they’ll eat anything from mesquite beans and prickly pear apples to rats, sheep, goats and old leather."

Coyotes, no doubt, are the worst predator for sheep and goats, but red fox, he says, are right behind them.

"Until the kids and lambs are too big, red fox are just as bad as the coyote. Red fox were introduced here by people who wanted to run them with dogs. The fox really do better around farmland than on strictly rangeland. If there’s a lot of coyotes, they don’t do as well because coyotes will kill them, and if you're in an area where there are lots of coyotes, the foxes will be closer to town," Riley says.

As far as adaptability, the specialist says, the coyote puts everything else to shame.

"He's the smartest critter in the woods. If he can’t beat you, he’ll join you and then beat you. They’ll eat anything, and I mean anything. They have a high reproductive rate, and they can live in places that will amaze you."

Like any animal, Riley says, there are areas that they prefer.

"You can talk to one rancher who never has any trouble and another one might have trouble all the time. A lot of that has to do with where the ranch is. If I was going to be in the sheep and goat business, the first thing I would ask is if that ranch had a history of predator problems, and I wouldn’t buy one that did unless I had a lot of money to spend," Riley remarks.

Though some of the toxicants have been banned, he says trapping methods in general haven't changed much.

"When I first started working, we didn't use snares and now we use them all the time. We had the coyote getter early on and now we have the M-44."

Aerial hunting, he says, was supposed to offset losing the poisons, and if used properly it can be a very effective tool.

"It's one of those tools that's not really understood as to how it's supposed to be used," Riley says. "It’s a tool you have to learn how to use in order to use it correctly, and to use it correctly you have to have some people on the ground telling you where to go. You can’t just hop in a helicopter and start looking for coyotes. You can spend a lot of money that way."

Unfortunately, hunting seasons again interfere and often keep the tool from being utilized effectively.

Riley says it takes a special kind of person to be a good trapper.

"A person has to like it; he has to be naturally turned towards that sort of thing. He has to be able to get along with people; that’s very important, and he has to have great, great patience, as much as Job had, at least. He has to be persistent and always keep an open mind. I’m still learning every day."

There are some tricks of the trade, but in the end the coyote, Riley says, teaches the experts more than the experts teach each other.

"Trappers are very interesting people. We have bait gurus ... I have a friend with hundreds of bottles of odors. I used to be that bad. I went through that, looking for the thing that a coyote couldn't resist, and it doesn’t exist. There’s just no such thing. Now I've got two or three that I rely on."

All trappers go through stages, Riley says.

"A new trapper starts off asking lots of questions and talking to all the 'experts.' Then he starts having a little success and begins to think he's getting the hang of this. And then they have a little more success and they begin to think, 'I'm getting pretty good at this' and then a little more success and they begin to think, 'by golly, I’ve got it.'

"Those who do that are in trouble," Riley says.

A new trapper usually spends about a month in the field with an experienced troubleshooter or trapper to learn the basics, but in the end, Riley says, "trapping is like real estate — it’s location, location, location."

Besides learning from the coyote, the main trick of the trade, Riley insists, is in being observant.

"Watch what the coyotes are doing. They'll tell you where to catch them," he reiterates. "Coyotes, thank goodness, are predictable," Riley continues, "If they weren’t, we’d be in bad trouble.

"You can catch all the coyotes out of a county and you can wait 100 years and the next batch of coyotes that come in, if you haven’t altered the country, they’ll go back to the exact same places. They’re a whole lot like people. They have places that they prefer, and some of it you can see why and others you can’t."

Coyotes, Riley says, especially know how to utilize cover.

"The Viet Cong could learn from coyotes; they know how to hide. Everyone who has ever tried to trap coyotes should get up in a helicopter and look at the country, because it gives a whole new concept of what he knows."

Some oldtimers and experienced trappers, Riley says, believe that coyotes are smarter than they used to be.

"I can't see that. Coyotes are just like people. Some are smart, some are dumb, some learn by experience. The dumb ones don’t last long," he remarks.

"If you have 100 coyotes, the first 50 percent are easy to catch; the next 25 percent will make you work a little harder; the last 25 percent will make you work quite a bit harder, and if you take the last 10 percent of that 25 percent you’ve got to really get down on it, because all that’s left are the ones who have seen everyone else get caught. They’ll pull snares out of the way, go around traps, etc."

Two other positive attributes of the coyote are its excellent memory and exceptional parenting skills.

"I've never seen any abandoned pups," Riley says.

A pack or family group can be anywhere from two to 15 animals. There are theories that in high coyote populations the litter size is smaller. In areas where there are fewer coyote numbers, the litters often exceed the normal average litter size of five to seven pups.

ADC personnel tend to have more reports of problem coyotes during the summer months when they're feeding their pups.

"Along in June and July you can go around their dens and pick up lots and lots of fawn hooves. They'll kill just about as much to feed one pup as they will if they have six," he insists.

Riley says there's never been a coyote that he gave up trying to catch, though he admits that some took much longer to catch than others.
One such coyote that stands out in his memory took three years to catch.

"The little females are the ones who give you the most trouble," Riley says. "Invariably, the worst killing one will be a little scrawny, beat-up looking thing that’s feeding a bunch of pups."

There was also the turkey-killing coyote.

"A family in Denton County raised about 50,000 turkeys, and along about the middle of May I knew that my phone was going to ring because that's when they put their turkeys out," Riley says. "You could hear them for five miles and smell them as far, so you can count on having trouble.

"One year a coyote killed 98 turkeys on the first night. I came out the next day to try to find where the coyote was getting in, but it's hard to find tracks where 50,000 turkeys have been stomping around.

"The second night the coyote killed about 50, and 30 or so the third night, and then he settled down to three or four a night. I still hadn't found the coyote.

So those guys took some coal oil lanterns and hung them up on posts, and that stopped the killing for a few nights. I still hadn't found the coyote. So then they got some battery-packed radios and built some stands and tuned in to a soul music station in Dallas. That worked for a few nights, and then that coyote had music and lamplight to dine by."

Finally one morning, Riley found a set of tracks in the middle of the freshly graded county road and buried his trap right where the coyote had stepped. Seven days later he caught the turkey-robbing coyote.

"There’s an old saying, 'there never was a horse that couldn’t be rode, never a cowboy that couldn’t be throwed, and never a coyote that couldn’t be caught.'

"I have the highest respect for coyotes," Riley continues. "I’ve made my living with coyotes all my life, and there's one thing I’m convinced of. If you have coyotes, he’s going to cost you some money one way or another. You may not know it or think it, but he’s going to cost you money."

Riley has had numerous interesting experiences, almost too many to count, but he's documented the last 39 years of those experiences in a daily journal. Among the many adventures are the seven years he spent trapping wolves for research purposes in Minnesota.

"Wolves cover a lot more country than coyotes, and you don’t get a chance at them as often," Riley notes. "A wolf will be one place one day and 20 miles away the next day. When you get a chance at him you better have it just right, because you might not get another chance for another month.

A wolf is a more matter of fact animal," he continues. "A coyote is more curious. Wolves are not rabbit chasers; they want large animals. It takes a lot of meat to feed them. I think they’d starve to death if they had to hunt rabbits for a living.

"Wolves are highly misunderstood by people who like them and those who don’t. A lot of folks think wolves have to have a wilderness, but they don’t. They’d do good in any cattle country."

In his younger days, Riley spent some time with Bill DeLong, of Wizard Wells, in Jack County. Long was one of the initial six who started with the animal damage control program in 1915. His claim to fame was that he was the best lobo trapper in the country. He told Riley about trapping wolves down around Rankin.

Later in his career, Riley had the opportunity to spend a couple of weeks at the Smithsonian working with various wolf specimens.

"There's a wolf skull, a Texas gray wolf, and it's labeled 'caught 10 miles south of Rankin, Texas by Bill DeLong on September 3, 1915.'"

Riley has done more than his share of educating the masses about predators, their implications and the animal damage control program in general. Next to the increased paperwork, the education aspect of his job is one part that he's found frustrating.

"It’s hard to compete with Disney," Riley remarks. "You just can’t beat the Disney channel. What I have to say is not what they want to hear, anyway."

People’s attitude about animals, he adds, has changed dramatically in his lifetime, a change he says has been hard to accept.

"People want to treat dogs and cats — all animals — like they’re human. A lot of information that people receive about wildlife is colored. They don’t know about the sick animals, and the mangy coyotes, and the ticks and fleas and that they don’t all smell good. They think they’re just sweet little critters, and that's not always the case."

Riley says his greatest fulfillment is in knowing that he's helped people over the years. That and the fact that he's been able to make a living doing exactly what he likes to do better than anything else.

He says he's thought some about retiring and has even put a pencil to it.

"November 3, 1999 will give me 30 years for the federal government and December 31, 1999 will give me 39 years total time," Riley says. "But I’m not ready to retire. I think I’ll stay 'till I’m 70, and then look at it."