Current research is dedicated to understanding coyote habitat selection within urban areas, in order to understand if coyotes benefit from human-associated developments i. In urban areas, coyotes prefer wooded patches and shrubbery, which provides shelter to hide from people. Our research has found that within the urban matrix, coyotes will avoid residential, commercial, and industrial areas but will use any remaining habitat fragments, such as those found in parks and golf courses.
Some people believe that urban coyotes primarily eat garbage and pets. Although coyotes are predators, they are also opportunistic feeders and shift their diets to take advantage of the most available prey. Coyotes are generally scavengers and predators of small prey but can shift to large prey occasionally.
Researcher Paul Morey analyzed scat fecal matter contents at different locations within our study area. After investigating 1, scats, he found that diet items varied across space and time, which reflects the flexible food habits of coyotes. Apparently, the majority of coyotes in our study area do not, in fact, rely on pets or garbage for their diets. Another way coyote diets can be determined is by performing necropsies like autopsies in people of deceased coyotes.
These are either study animals that died or road-killed animals that are found; even though they are dead, these coyotes still provide a wealth of knowledge about their lives. For diet analysis, the stomach and intestinal tract are investigated to classify and quantify contents.
The diet results found by Morey is often mimicked by what is found through necropsy. Rodents are nearly always present in the diet, with a mixture of other items depending on the season. Stomach contents may provide the most exact picture of what a coyote is eating because it is not yet digested and still identifiable. While this only shows the most recent meal of any animal, when compared to many other mortalities, results are consistent. Visit the new research page for information on a novel scientific procedure we are now using to further investigate diets.
Coyotes typically mate in February, however, only the alpha pair in a pack will mate and subordinates will usually help raise the young. Coyotes appear to be strongly monogamous and so far, bonds between alpha pairs have only been broken upon the death of one of the pair. Therefore, a number of pairs have maintained bonds for multiple years read the story about coyotes 1 and In April, after a 62 to day gestation period, the female will begin looking for existing dens or dig one herself.
Something else? Finally, 19th-century Anglo Americans had to get halfway across the continent, to the Great Plains, before they ever saw a coyote. That becomes most interesting, given the modern story. That the coyote plays such a significant role in the ancient religions of North America is a testament to how powerfully it captured the human imagination.
There are sound scientific reasons, readily expressed through religion and history, for why we have subconsciously intuited so much human nature from coyote nature.
The coyote, then, is perhaps the best American totem animal of our continental historical experience, past and especially present. How so? Consider coyote evolution. As a family the Canidae are older, evolving in North America 40 million years ago and spreading across the globe about 5 million years ago.
Ancestors of the gray wolf Canis lupus , particularly, became cosmopolitan, eventually colonizing almost the entire planet. The coyote, however, did not emerge directly from the lineage of the world traveler gray wolf but claims more indigenous, North American roots. The best nursery candidate is the red wolf of the mid-South, whose original habitat stretched from Florida to west Texas and north to the Ohio River.
As naturalist E. The advantages may have been similar for both coyotes and human beings. During the Pleistocene epoch, the extensive savannahs were where most of the action was.
In America, elephants, giant bison, wild horses and a diverse bestiary of smaller animals flocked to the Great Plains. Perhaps spawning the smaller, quicker coyote enabled North American canids to compete in a situation with many opportunities but also many larger carnivores like dire wolves, saber-toothed cats, short-faced bears—and, eventually, gray wolves, returning to their evolutionary homeland.
The paleontological record suggests that Pleistocene coyotes had to be especially creative adapters, and that, too, has had consequences.
Fission-fusion adaptability grants unusual flexibility to individuals, who can be either social or solitary, depending on the circumstances. The gray wolf, which specialized as a pack animal to pursue large prey, is not a fission-fusion carnivore. Indeed, that would become a near-fatal flaw in wolves trying to survive in the modern age. Most other predators are either solitary or social, not both.
Humans and coyotes are exceptions. Our successes stem from our plasticity. Coyotes can be solitary hunters, focusing on the kinds of small prey an individual animal can capture. They can also band together as pack animals when prey like deer call for cooperation. Such adaptation made them, like us, opportunists able to thrive in a range of situations.
This adaptation seemingly traces its origins to the Pleistocene. Coyotes then were distinct from the animal Lewis and Clark encountered on their trek to the Pacific Ocean in Their skulls and jaws were thicker, their teeth wider, most likely because their initial response to life on the American Plains was to pursue larger prey in packs.
This was, unfortunately, a niche gray wolves also occupied. So in the wake of the Pleistocene extinctions of 10, years ago, when scores of animal species on the Plains disappeared, competition between gray wolves and coyotes intensified.
The genius of the coyote was to back out and switch to the strategy of individual effort. These attacks were largely in urban and suburban environments. Only two of the attacks were fatal. The most effective way for humans to prevent coyote attacks is to avoid feeding them directly or indirectly, according to the Cook County Coyote Project in Illinois.
The project also advises people to not let their pets run loose and to keep their yards secured. During a coyote encounter, the project recommends that people try to scare the animal away. However, if a coyote is trying to avoid people, then humans should not deliberately aggravate it.
Coyotes typically hunt alone or in pairs unless they are working together to kill deer. However, they are adaptable creatures. In cities and other urban environments, coyotes have been known to modify their day and night cycle to better avoid humans and traffic. While individual coyotes are often seen traveling and hunting alone or in pairs, they are typically part of a larger pack.
These packs defend their territories from other coyotes and are usually made up of an alpha male and female pairing and their close relatives, according to the Cook County Coyote Project. Coyotes use sounds to communicate, including yips, barks and howls, as well as scents and visual signals. Pack members will also howl at each other when they reunite, according to the ADW.
The coyote breeding season runs from January to March each year. In the spring, female coyotes build dens in preparation for their young. Females have a gestation period of about 63 days and give birth to groups of six pups on average. The groups of pups are called litters. Both the males and females in a pack participate in taking care of the pups. The male will bring food to the female and the pups, and help protect them from predators. When Anglo Americans began arriving in the Southwest in the ss, they began encountering people who called the animal coyote.
Over time, most people began to replace the name prairie wolf with coyote or as some people pronounced it, in vernacular speech, kie-ote. Up until that time, Americans arriving from Europe did not know what to think of it. Mark Twain comes along and, in a three-to-four-page comic rant about the animal, gives us a way to think of it as a cowardly, despicable little wretch that lives off carrion. A government agency called the Bureau of Biological Survey, which became the federal solution to the so-called predator question, began by focusing mostly on wolves, because that was the animal that the livestock industry wanted to eliminate.
A lab was created called the Eradication Methods Laboratory. It began working on various kinds of poisons, like strychnine, to wipe coyotes off the face of the continent. What ensued was the most epic campaign of persecution against any animal in North American history. In a nine-year period between and , this agency killed approximately 6.
One of the remarkable things about this campaign is that, at the time it was launched in , there had been no scientific studies of coyotes. No one had any idea what they ate.
The hate campaign directed at the animal just assumed it fed on all the classic game species: mule deer, pronghorns, bighorn sheep, and livestock sheep and calves. Finally, the agency began to fund scientific studies of coyotes.
What they discovered is that coyotes actually ate rodents, rabbits, fruit, all sorts of vegetables, some carrion, and mice, but had almost no impact whatsoever on the large game animals the Bureau had been arguing was their chief prey. By the late s, the American Society of Mammologists was coming out in position papers against the campaign. The agency just kept at it. The coyote evolved with an adaptive, evolutionarily derived strategy for surviving under persecution.
Coyotes evolved alongside larger canids, like wolves, which often persecuted and harassed them and killed their pups. As a result, both jackals and coyotes developed this fission-fusion adaptation , which human beings also have.
This enables them to either function as pack predators or as singles and pairs. And the poison campaign was one of the things that kept scattering them across North America. One of the other adaptations they have is that, whenever their populations are pressured, their litter sizes go up. The normal size is five to six pups. When their populations are suppressed, their litters get up as high as 12 to 16 pups. You can reduce the numbers of coyotes in a given area by 70 percent but the next summer their population will be back to the original number.
They use their howls and yipping to create a kind of census of coyote populations.
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