CALIFORNIA ALBUM : A Grisly War on the Coyote in Sheep Country : Ranching: Hunters hang their kills on roadway fence posts. The predator is so hated that the displays are viewed with amusement and respect.

PASKENTA, Calif. — On the front wall of this farm town’s general store and post office is a crudely lettered message to the occasional lost motorist. It reads, “This Is God’s Country. Please Don’t Leave It Looking Like Hell.”

Past the town center--which consists of the store, a restaurant and a fork in the road--and just beyond the state fire station, where crews spend hot summer days washing and polishing trucks, is the gully where the mummified carcasses of dozens of coyotes have been dumped.

At one time, the carcasses had been hung along Toomes Camp Road on fence posts, all in a row like meat in a packing house butcher line. A reporter who happened on the scene counted 57 coyotes, bound and strung up.

All that’s left today of the exhibition of rural wildlife justice are the jumbled carcasses, rotting in the summer heat on the dry, wind-swept eastern ridges of the Coastal Range.

Rather than provoking outrage in God’s country, the killing and posting of coyotes is viewed around here with a mixture of amusement and respect.

“It was kind of interesting,” recalled Jeff May, a ranch hand who works for several farmers in the Paskenta area and who says he uses a .270-caliber rifle when the coyotes come near town. “I’d go down there (to the fence line) to see if he got two or three every day.”

“Coyotes is why I quit,” fumed sheep rancher Roy Sutfin, whose family came to this area in the 1850s and who raised sheep on 4,000 acres until this year. “I just couldn’t stand it any more.”

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While financial and demographic pressures, including low prices and urban development, have contributed to the dramatic decline in Tehama County sheep breeding over the last decade, it is the coyote that haunts sheep ranchers in the night.

“You go out there to your sheep every morning and don’t know what to expect,” said Raymond White, one of the largest sheep breeders left in Tehama County. Some years he has lost 20 to 25 sheep to coyotes and that, he tells you, is his profit being chewed up one mutton leg at a time.

“They don’t always kill to eat,” White said. “They kill for the fun of it. . . . When they run out of sheep they eat the deer. Then the ground squirrels, then mice and then the chickens.

“The only enemy they got is man.”

In days past ranchers fought coyotes with poisons such as sodium monofluoroacetate and strychnine, which were injected into meat bait. But environmental concerns have almost totally curbed the use of poisons.

Some rural counties paid trappers to hunt coyotes, but tight budgets ended that practice. Helicopters and light planes have been used to hunt coyotes but operating expenses can exceed $175 an hour.

White said that last year he turned to a zon gun, a propane powered explosive device used in rice fields to scare off ducks. “It worked for a while but the coyotes adapt,” he said. “They are very smart.” Four weeks before he was to take his sheep to market, White found four of them dead within 100 yards of his zon gun.

When Tehama County ranchers find a dead sheep in the morning or hear a coyote howl in the night, they increasingly turn to a 43-year-old trapper and timber cutter named Eddie Weston.

Weston’s tools include a rifle on a tripod, a shotgun, various traps and the ability to lure a coyote from the foothills right into his gun sight.

“They are a survivor,” Weston says of his prey. “They’ll eat anything, from grasshoppers right up to sheep.”

Some coyote hunters use calls mimicking a wounded rabbit, or a wild turkey. Weston refuses to use the call devices, saying that if a coyote hears it once and associates it with a man, the animal will never return to a hunter’s trap.

Instead, Weston barks.

According to one sheep rancher who has heard Weston’s bark, it is so effective that coyotes often crash down upon Weston before he has time to sight them in his rifle. That’s when he uses a shotgun.

“The problem I have is that the ones that kill sheep, somebody often has already had a crack at them,” Weston said. “With that education they can be tough.”

For each coyote he kills, ranchers pay Weston $250. While not claiming credit for the Toomes Camp Road exhibition, Weston said he routinely hangs his kills on fence posts, not so much out of showmanship but as a reminder to his employers that he’s getting results.

“It’s more or less an advertisement,” Weston said, without any hint of pride. “I just want to let the rancher know I’m doing my job.”

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Not everybody appreciates the work of a professional coyote killer.

When the 57 coyotes were hung from the fence posts last year, a newspaper in Chico, 50 miles away, featured the carcasses on its front page in a critical story headlined “Coyote Blues.”

City dwellers’ views on coyotes, Weston is quick to add, are based on “ignorance.” “With the coyote, no matter what we’ve done we can’t wipe it out. . . ,” he said. “There’s not going to be a bit of deer or other things left up here because of the coyotes.”

Wildlife biologists say the coyote population is growing and its territory has expanded during the last 300 years, ranging all the way from Costa Rica to the northern coasts of Alaska.

Sutfin, an old-timer in Tehama County ranching, confirmed that the coyote scourge is growing. “I’m 74 years old,” he said. “There’s 20 times as many coyotes as when I was 14 years old.”

He figures that man is about the only natural enemy a coyote has left, with the decline of bears, wolves and cougars that naturally hunted coyotes.

“Coyotes will be here when everything else is gone,” Sutfin predicted. That is, “Unless I win $30 million in the lottery. Then I’d spend $29 million hunting coyotes.”