By Ronica Stromberg
Emma Balunek was watching motion-activated video she had taken of a rockpile in rural Colorado when a badger and coyote strolled onto the scene together. The young scientist knew badgers and coyotes competed for the same prey and even preyed upon each other. Why were these two strolling side by side?
Balunek had earned her bachelor’s degree in ecosystem science and sustainability in Colorado and had been contemplating a master’s degree but needed a study topic that truly drove her interest. This might be it.
"I was really sick of school," she said. "And so, I'm like, 'It needs to be something that I love, that I want to work on.' So, I started doing research about coyotes and badgers and learned that little was known about their hunting relationship and there weren't many high-quality photos and videos of them out there together either.”
Most of what she found was anecdotal, stories dating back to 1884 from naturalists seeing the two animals hunting in tandem.
She contacted Mike Forsberg, the director of the Platte Basin Timelapse photography project at the University of Nebraska–Lincoln, and asked if a research and storytelling project about the coyote-badger relationship would fit into his master’s program. Forsberg said yes, and they brought in another professor, John Benson, to shore up the research side.
Balunek started her master’s project at Nebraska in August 2022, with the goal of gaining a better understanding of the environmental conditions needed for a coyote-badger hunting relationship to occur. Both animals prey on prairie dogs, and the rockpile where Balunek had filmed the strolling pair was near a large prairie dog colony far from humans. She laid out questions like where and when does the hunting relationship happen on the land? Do the two animals only hunt together near large prairie dog colonies? Do they hunt together less when they are closer to areas used by humans?
Read the rest of the story and see videos of the badgers and coyotes work together at https://snr.unl.edu/aboutus/what/newstory.aspx?fid=1183