57 Fun Facts About Coyote

What does the coyote's scientific name, Canis latrans, mean?

Barking dog fits the animal biologists call the most vocal of North America's wild mammals, with a repertoire of yelps, barks and howls.

The word 'coyote' is a Spanish borrowing from which language?

Nahuatl, the Aztec language, called the animal coyotl; Mexican Spanish trimmed the ending, just as tomatl became tomate.

Coyotes in which region carry wolf ancestry that makes them unusually large?

The Northeast is home to the eastern coyote, whose ancestors bred with wolves; it is noticeably bigger than coyotes west of the Mississippi.

A typical coyote weighs about as much as which dog?

A border collie is about right: a coyote is often likened to a German shepherd in looks, yet it weighs only about half as much.

How does the IUCN classify the coyote?

Least Concern, because adaptability let coyotes outlast the extermination campaigns of the early 1900s and stay common and widespread.

Coyotes have spread south through Central America, and in 2013 they were first recorded beyond which waterway?

The Panama Canal fell behind them as coyotes moved into cleared, deforested land to the east. The dense Darién forest is now the last barrier between coyotes and South America.

Which Eurasian animal fills roughly the same ecological niche as the coyote?

The golden jackal is a mid-sized, adaptable canid much like the coyote. It is also on the move in the same way: since the 1970s it has spread from the Balkans across much of Europe.

Until about 1900, coyotes were largely confined to which part of North America?

The western plains and deserts held nearly all coyotes until about 1900. Cleared forests and the removal of bigger predators then opened the East, and they now range from Alaska to Central America.

Which endangered wolf carries so much coyote ancestry that its species status is disputed?

The red wolf came out as mostly coyote in a 2016 genome study, which fuelled a dispute over its legal protection. A 2019 National Academies review still judged it a valid species.

Why are coyote-dog hybrids, known as coydogs, so uncommon in the wild?

Their breeding seasons rarely line up, because coyotes are fertile only briefly each winter. A dog father also wanders off instead of feeding pups, so the few coydogs born seldom survive.

Black-coated coyotes owe their colour to a mutation that first arose in which animal?

Domestic dogs passed the black-coat mutation to wild canids through old hybrid matings. North America's black wolves owe their colour to the very same dog gene.

Which of these famously quick animals could a sprinting coyote actually outrun?

A roadrunner tops out near 20 mph, about half the 40 mph a coyote can sprint. The cartoons have it backwards: in a real chase the bird would lose.

How does a running coyote carry its tail, unlike a wolf?

Pointing downwards is how a running coyote holds its tail, while a wolf streams its tail straight out and a dog carries it up. Watching the tail is a quick way to tell the three apart.

Which author's portrait of a scrawny, always-hungry coyote inspired the cartoon Wile E. Coyote?

Mark Twain called the coyote "a living, breathing allegory of Want" in Roughing It. The cartoon's director read it as a boy and modelled his luckless, starving predator on it.

In 2007 a coyote strolled into a downtown Quiznos sandwich shop and lay down in the drinks cooler in which city?

Chicago diners kept eating and took photos while the calm coyote cooled off in the Loop shop. Officers removed it after about 40 minutes and it was later released unharmed outside the city.

What is the coyote's mating system?

Strictly monogamous pairs were all that a six-year genetic study of city coyotes found: across 96 pups, none had a father from outside the pair. Bonds ended only when one partner died.

After heavy culling, the surviving coyotes' litters become what?

Larger, because each survivor has more food and more of the females breed. It is a big reason why a century of trapping and poisoning has failed to shrink coyote numbers.

How does a lone coyote typically catch a mouse hidden in long grass?

With a stiff-legged pounce: the coyote stalks slowly through the grass, freezes once it has pinpointed the mouse, then springs into the air and drops on it much as a cat would.

Compared with wolf pups of the same age, how do infant coyotes treat their littermates?

They fight far more fiercely: by three weeks old, coyote pups bite each other with less restraint than wolf pups do. In one captive study they were also the worst at coaxing a littermate into play.

Which animal sometimes hunts alongside coyotes in a mutualistic partnership?

The American badger digs into burrows while the coyote waits above to run down whatever bolts. Between them a ground squirrel has no safe way out, above ground or below.

How do experienced coyotes kill porcupines?

They often work in pairs; young coyotes trying it usually end up full of quills.

Which crop are coyotes notorious for eating straight from farm fields in the American Southwest?

Watermelons offer sugar and water in dry country, and coyotes have been helping themselves to melon patches for over a century. Hunters by trade, they switch readily to fruit whenever it ripens.

Coastal California coyotes eat more marine food than their ancestors, likely due to which animal's disappearance?

The grizzly bear is the suspect: bone chemistry shows coastal coyotes ate no seafood while it was around. Today coyotes beside one seal colony get about a fifth of their diet from the sea.

How did Yellowstone's coyotes fare after wolves returned in the 1990s?

They fell by up to half on the park's northern range, where wolves killed coyotes at carcasses and crowded them off their territory. A separate study measured a 39 per cent drop in coyote density.

Before coyote pups can handle whole prey, how do their parents bring meat home to them?

Swallowed, then regurgitated: the pups get a soft, half-digested mush from the age of about two to three weeks. Both parents do it, and the father also brings food home for the mother.

In long-running tracking studies, what kills more big-city coyotes than anything else?

Being hit by vehicles is the leading killer, because coyotes range widely and have to cross busy roads again and again. Even so, city coyotes tend to outlive their hunted country cousins.

In 2026 a coyote was found to have swum to which famous island, over a mile from the nearest land?

Alcatraz got its first recorded coyote in January 2026, when one was filmed swimming up to the island. DNA from his droppings later traced him to Angel Island, a swim of about two miles.

Why have urban coyotes become more nocturnal than their rural cousins?

To avoid encounters with humans: tracking studies keep finding that city coyotes cut their daytime activity wherever people are busy. Away from people they are often out in daylight too.

A chorus like a dozen coyotes usually comes from what?

One family yelping in unison is usually all it takes. With howls, yips and barks at shifting pitches, a few coyotes can create the illusion of a dozen or more.

Which everyday sound is well known for setting coyotes howling, even in the middle of the day?

Emergency sirens and fire whistles can start a coyote chorus at any hour. Biologists exploit the habit: they play a siren or a recorded howl, then count the groups that answer.

Along the southern border of the United States, 'coyote' is slang for a person who does what?

Smuggles people across, for a fee. In Mexican Spanish a coyote is any paid fixer or go-between, from a paperwork middleman to a border guide.

What did an experiment with coyotes hunting rabbits in a test room show?

Visual cues matter more than smell, at least in the test room: coyotes finding rabbits leaned on their eyes first, their ears second and their noses last. Most people would have guessed the reverse.

In Native American folklore, Coyote is usually what kind of figure?

A trickster in most tellings: clever, greedy and forever landing himself in trouble. In other stories he is a culture hero who creates, teaches and helps people, sometimes as a man and sometimes as an animal.

Why does Coyote bring death into the world in Navajo tradition?

Without it there would be no room to plant corn, Coyote argues: if nobody died, people would soon crowd the earth. He settles the matter by throwing a stone into water and declaring that if it sinks, death stays.

The Aztec god Huehuecóyotl, 'old coyote', was god of what?

Dance, music and carnality were his realm: the 'old, old coyote' was the Aztec pantheon's party-loving mischief-maker, a god of song, feasting and physical pleasure.

Which older city's murals show forerunners of the Aztecs' coyote warriors?

Teotihuacan's murals show warriors in coyote costume, centuries before the Aztec Empire, for the animal stood for military might there. Aztec fighters kept the habit, going into battle in coyote-headed helmets and feathered suits.

What do wildlife agencies advise if a coyote approaches you?

Shout and wave your arms, and throw something if it keeps coming: the aim is to look big, loud and not worth the trouble. The one thing agencies say never to do is run.

Which unlikely bodyguard do some sheep ranchers graze with their flocks to keep coyotes away?

A llama grazed with the flock acts as a guard animal, and donkeys are used the same way. Studies of ranches that added one found fewer sheep and lambs lost to predators.

Which federal department runs Wildlife Services, the programme that kills tens of thousands of coyotes a year for ranchers?

Agriculture runs it, not the department in charge of parks and wildlife refuges. Its yearly tally of tens of thousands is a small share of the hundreds of thousands of coyotes killed across the country.

Coyotes are thought to share the colour vision of dogs, so which two colours do they struggle to tell apart?

Red and green look alike to dogs, which fail the same dot tests as red-green colour-blind people. Foxes have the same two kinds of colour cone, so wild canids such as coyotes are expected to see in blues and yellows too.

Wile E. and the Road Runner first appeared in which 1949 cartoon?

Fast and Furry-ous, released in September 1949, was meant as a one-off. Audiences took to it, so a second chase, Beep, Beep, followed in 1952 and dozens more after that.

Early model sheets identified Wile E. under what punning name, a nod to Cervantes?

Don Coyote, a play on Cervantes's Don Quixote. On screen he stayed nameless and silent until his second cartoon, Operation: Rabbit, where he talks, takes the name Wile E. Coyote and hunts Bugs Bunny instead.

From which fictional company does Wile E. Coyote mail-order most of his contraptions?

Acme, from the Greek for 'highest point', sells him the mail-order gadgets that blow up in his face in cartoon after cartoon.

Which pair created Wile E. Coyote and the Road Runner?

Chuck Jones and Michael Maltese, a director and his writer, hung every cartoon on one joke: the chase never ends, and nothing ever hurts the Coyote except his own traps.

Which musician voiced Homer's coyote spirit guide in The Simpsons?

Johnny Cash voiced the coyote that Homer hallucinates after eating fiery chilli peppers. The coyote tells him to go and find his soulmate, leaving Homer to wonder whether that is really Marge.

Which 1966 western's main theme imitates the howl of a coyote?

The Good, the Bad and the Ugly opens with Ennio Morricone's wailing motif, written to sound like a coyote's howl. Morricone and the director, Sergio Leone, had been classmates at primary school.

The Coyote, inducted into the Mascot Hall of Fame in 2007, is the mascot of which NBA team?

One performer, Tim Derk, wore the suit for The Coyote's first 21 years with the San Antonio Spurs, until a stroke in 2004 forced him to hand it on.

Copper the coyote was one of three mascots for which Winter Olympics?

Salt Lake City 2002 gave each mascot a word of the Olympic motto. Powder the hare was Swifter, Coal the bear Stronger, and Copper took Higher, after a legend in which a coyote climbs the highest peak.

Which state's flagship university fields athletic teams called the Coyotes?

South Dakota made the coyote its state animal in 1949, and at the University of South Dakota the teams say it the local way, in two syllables: KI-yotes.

Which parka maker drew years of protests for trimming its hoods with fur from wild coyotes?

Canada Goose trimmed its parka hoods with fur from trapped wild coyotes, and campaigners picketed its shops and shareholder meetings for years. In 2021 it pledged to give up fur altogether.

Only dire wolves and sabre-toothed cats outnumber coyotes among the Ice Age fossils from which site?

La Brea Tar Pits, in California, mired plant-eaters in sticky asphalt, and their struggles are thought to have lured in predators that got stuck in turn, which would explain why most mammals dug out there are meat-eaters.

Which of these is one of the coyote's alternative common names?

Prairie wolf and brush wolf are both old names for the coyote, and its nightly chorus of howls has earned it a third: the song dog.

In which Canadian province was singer-songwriter Taylor Mitchell killed by coyotes?

Nova Scotia's Cape Breton Highlands park was the scene, in 2009. A later study found that coyotes there lived mainly on moose, and being used to tackling big prey may explain the attack.

In Navajo legend, what was being set carefully in place when an impatient Coyote scattered the rest at random?

The stars were being laid out one by one in patterns when Coyote lost patience and flung the rest skywards. That is why only some form neat constellations and the others lie strewn about.

In Zuni lore, how does Coyote bring winter into the world?

By stealing light from the kachinas: Coyote and Eagle made off with the box that held the sun and moon. When the curious Coyote opened it, both flew up into the sky and took the endless summer's heat with them.

How are coyotes believed to have reached the island of Newfoundland in 1985?

By walking across the sea ice in winter, it seems: the first coyotes turned up on the island in 1985, unaided, and they have since made themselves at home all over it.

Ice Age coyotes were bigger than today's; what is thought to have shrunk them?

The giant mammals died out as the Ice Age ended, and coyotes lost both their biggest prey and their biggest rivals. The burly, heavy-jawed hunters gave way to the slighter, more omnivorous animals of today.