Smaller towns here in the northwest that have developed suburbs over the last decade or two are overrun with deer, because coyotes have been displaced. It's a real problem.
What would keep a coyote from killing deer (particularly young deer)? I'm not sure where abouts you are, in Eastern Ontario coyotes eat deer. A quick search shows multiple sources that support the same dynamic in various places in the US as well.
Heh, ok, I stand corrected. My impression was that was it was mostly wolf and mountain lions that eat deer. I dug around and found a few studies that mentioned that heavy snow let to more coyote deer hunting.
Then several other studies that tried to tease out if coyotes cause additive predation (increase in mortality rates) or compensatory predation (killing deer that would die anyways). Found a summary of the related research papers claiming "None of these studies found any evidence that coyote removal caused an increase in the deer population." another two studies found "Removal studies with white-tailed deer populations also show that coyote removal does not affect overall population growth."
Seems like the general conclusion is that coyotes have stabilizing effect on deer herds, which seems about right from a healthy ecosystem point of view. Similarly wolves help stabilize various populations, even of distant species like song birds, beavers, trees and other plants.
Found reports even of adult deer, and even moose. But they did need some advantages. Deer predation was noticeably lower during winters with less snow. Leading factors for moose hunting were things like:
* deep crusted snow that the prey couldn't run on top of, but the coyotes could
* steep (40-45 degrees) slopes (harder on large animals)
* dense tree cover (makes whirl and kicking less effective)