Coyote

The coyote is North America’s great survivor. Over the last century, as humans removed wolves and cougars from most of the continent and transformed the land, the coyote did the opposite of what a large predator is supposed to do under that pressure: it expanded, moving into farmland, suburbs, and the centres of major cities.

Overview

Coyotes originally lived in the open country of central and western North America. With the near-elimination of wolves and the clearing of eastern forests into a patchwork of fields and edges, the coyote spread in every direction — east to the Atlantic coast and New England, north into Alaska, and south into Central America. It is now present in all 49 mainland US states and in every large North American city, including Los Angeles, Chicago, and New York.

Physical characteristics

A coyote looks like a slender, lightly built dog: greyish-brown to tan fur, a sharp pointed muzzle, tall ears, yellow eyes, and a bushy black-tipped tail carried low. Western coyotes weigh 8–13 kg; eastern coyotes, carrying some wolf and dog ancestry, run larger at 13–20 kg. It runs at up to 65 km/h and can clear a two-metre fence.

Adaptable everything

The coyote’s success comes from refusing to specialise:

• Diet. It will eat almost anything — voles, mice, rabbits, ground squirrels, deer fawns, grasshoppers, snakes, birds, fruit, and, in cities, pet food, fallen fruit, rodents, and garbage.
• Social structure. A coyote can live as a solitary hunter of small prey, as a mated pair, or in a family pack that defends a territory and cooperates to take larger animals — switching between these as conditions change.
• Activity. Naturally most active at dawn and dusk, urban coyotes shift to the middle of the night to avoid people.

The “you can’t kill your way out” problem

Coyotes are among the most intensively persecuted wild animals in North America, targeted by bounties, contests, poison, aerial gunning, and trapping. It does not work. When a local population is cut back, the survivors breed earlier and raise larger litters, more pups survive on the freed-up food, and lone animals disperse in from surrounding areas to fill the gap. Decades of lethal control have coincided with a steadily growing coyote population and range.

Reproduction and life cycle

Coyotes usually mate for at least one season and often for life. A litter of four to seven pups is born in spring in a den, and both parents — sometimes helped by a grown offspring from the previous year — feed and guard them. Pups disperse in autumn, sometimes travelling more than 150 km to establish a territory.

Living with coyotes

The coyote is listed as Least Concern and is in no danger. The management questions are about coexistence: keeping people from feeding them, securing garbage and pet food, supervising small pets, and using hazing to keep urban coyotes wary. A coyote that stays afraid of humans is a normal and useful part of the ecosystem, controlling rodents and cleaning up carrion; a coyote that has been fed is the one that becomes a problem.