South Dakota kids snapped up the $200,000 allocated to the remnant of the nest predator bounty program in just a month and a half this spring. But trappers young and old left on the table more than half of the $300,000 allocated toward bounties for coyote tails:
On Friday, [Game Fish & Parks] regional wildlife supervisor Jacquie Ermer met with commission members during their meeting in Webster and presented numbers on how the coyote bounty program has fared since its April 1 launch.
Ermer said the 4,097 coyote tails came from 473 participants, including about a quarter of them younger than age 18.
That total included 2,007 tails submitted during April, followed by 814 in May, 735 in June and 341 this month.
The busiest three counties were Brown, Beadle and McPherson, according to Ermer [Bob Mercer, “New Coyote-Bounties Program Ends, Far Short of GFP Target,” KELO-TV, 2026.07.10].
Kids got $10 for each raccoon, striped skunk, badger, opossum, and red fox tail. GF&P offered $30 to critter-killers of all ages for each coyote tail. But triple the money only drew a fifth as many coyote tails as the 20,000 tails of smaller creatures and led to a total payout of $122,910, leaving $177,090 to bolster the state’s $69-million budget surplus.