They're out there, area residents say. But it's hard to tell just how many coyotes there are in southwest Minnesota, or if their numbers are increasing.

"I'm not sure if there were any around when I came here in 1992," rural Porter resident Mary Wente said, but she can hear coyote howls from her home now. "Sometimes if you sit quiet, you can hear them. It drives the dogs nuts."

The Yellow Medicine County Board discussed complaints of coyote activity, and whether the county could come up with an incentive to control them, at is regular meeting this week.

If people are seeing more coyotes in Yellow Medicine County, they're not calling the sheriff's department about it, said Yellow Medicine County Sheriff Bill Flaten.

"Most of the animals we deal with are domesticated," Flaten said. Incidents with coyotes are very rare for the department. The most recent one he could remember involved a coyote in the road that had been hit by a car.

The Lyon and Lincoln County sheriff's departments also said they haven't gotten any animal complaints about coyotes in recent memory. However, Flaten said, "People are seeing more around. Even in town sometimes you can hear them hooting and hollering."

Kent Schaap, assistant area wildlife manager with the DNR office in Slayton, said it's hard to tell exactly how many coyotes live in Murray County.

"We're not managing for them, so we don't have a good grasp on the numbers," Schaap said. However, data from annual scent post surveys hasn't shown any major population changes.

Schaap said coyotes adapt well to living near people, although they tend to favor grassy areas for their dens. Coyotes' usual prey are small animals like mice, gophers or rabbits, but he said they have been known to kill pets or fawns.

"They usually won't take adult deer," Schaap said.

Wente, current owner of the Cut Loose Bar in Porter, said the bar has sponsored an annual coyote hunt for the past few years, a tradition carrying over from the bar's previous owner.

"Usually we wait until after there's snow. Otherwise (the coyotes) are hard to see," Wente said. She estimated about 35 people came in groups to participate in last winter's hunt, but they didn't have much to show for it.

"I think they only got one," she said, and maybe two or three coyotes were bagged the year before. "In 2001, they got 66 coyotes, but I think that time they were hunting more south, like by Ivanhoe. We have the picture at the bar."

Porter resident Gary Denelsbeck said he went coyote hunting with a small group last winter, over an area covering parts of Yellow Medicine and Lincoln County. "Anywhere from northwest of Canby 20 miles down to the Ivanhoe area, east of Porter a bit, the St. Leo area," Denelsbeck said. He estimated the group shot about 50 coyotes. That number seemed close to normal for their takings.

"There are quite a few coyotes around," he said. "Lately it seems like maybe there are somewhat more."

At Tuesday's meeting, Yellow Medicine County officials suggested the possibility of offering incentives for people to hunt or trap coyotes there. There hasn't been a bounty offered on coyotes in Minnesota since 1965. Schaap said it might be possible for local governments to set bounties of their own, but no area counties have done so. Nowadays, he said, bounties are usually reserved for beavers damming county ditches.

Denelsbeck said he doubted hunting and trapping would put much of a dent in coyote numbers in the area.

"You'd have to set them back quite a ways," he said.