Coyotes Deserve Our Respect

A tribute with words and images

Coyotes—like this one I photographed along Yellowstone’s Lamar River—are one of my favorite animals. But many people take coyotes for granted because of their widespread presence. Yet that presence is a testament to coyotes’ incredible ability to survive our encroachment on their territory as well as a war we waged against them in Yellowstone and across the nation.

No one had experience managing a park or protecting its wildlife, when Yellowstone, the world’s first national park, was established in 1872. Protecting wildlife wasn’t even a high priority. Yellowstone was created to preserve spectacular scenery and grand geothermal features; coyotes and other animals just happened to live within the new borders. And besides, there was no money to hire staff to safeguard wildlife.

By the time wildlife protection was contemplated, park officials only considered keeping predators from the animals that humans hunted—bison, elk, deer, bighorn sheep, and pronghorn. To their minds, protecting wildlife meant killing coyotes and wolves.

In 1896 coyote control was recommended and poisoned animal carcasses were the weapon of choice. A few years later, the war escalated when the U.S. army, which had been put in charge of the park, actually deployed soldiers against coyotes. 

Thankfully, this war did not go unnoticed. By the late 1920s, people inside and outside the park were questioning such heavy-handed destruction of coyotes and wolves. Scientific organizations spoke out, saying that predators helped maintain ecological balance. This view that predators were essential and should be protected became National Park Service policy in 1936, and the sanctioned killing of coyotes and wolves in Yellowstone finally stopped. 

Still, over the course of that forty year war, more than 4,000 Yellowstone coyotes were killed. But that did not drive them from the park. In contrast, it only took seven years to eradicate the park’s 130 or so wolves. 

That remarkable coyote survival as compared to wolves results from the coyote’s diet, size, and reproductive ability. 

First, their diet: Coyotes are opportunistic feeders. In 1937 Adolf Murie and his assistants conducted a landmark study of coyotes in the Lamar Valley. They analyzed thousands of pieces of coyote scat. They found that coyotes ate twelve kinds of large mammals; twenty-four different small mammals; twenty types of birds, fish, and snakes; four kinds of bugs; as well as grass, pine nuts, rose seeds, strawberries, mushrooms, blueberries, and Oregon grape. They also found in the scat remnants of leather work gloves, twine, cellophane, tinfoil, and shoestrings.

Because of this diverse diet, it’s harder to poison a pack of coyotes than it is to poison wolves, which have less variety in their diet.

Next, their size: a Yellowstone coyote is medium-sized, like a Border Collie. A wolf, as the above photo shows, is much larger. Wolves stand a foot taller at the shoulder and can weigh four times as much as coyotes. While a coyote’s smaller size presents a harder-to-hit target for a bounty hunter with a rifle, it’s less of an advantage when dealing with wolves.

When wolves were reintroduced in the park in 1995, Yellowstone’s coyotes had no idea who the new canine in the neighborhood was. After a seventy-year absence, generations of coyotes had come and gone without a wolf in sight. But coyotes soon learned that their new neighbors sure could bring down elk. The reintroduced wolves, on the other hand, knew exactly who the coyotes were: competitors for hard-won food.

So when a hungry—and naive—coyote sidled up to join wolves at their kill, the wolf pack did what it does best: cut the competition, whether that rival is a wolf from another pack, a fox, a mountain lion, or a coyote. (Wolves rarely eat the competitors they kill.) 

Within a few years after wolf reintroduction, the Lamar Valley coyote population had been reduced by half. Yet today, there are probably as many coyotes in the valley as there were before the wolves returned. That’s an impressive recovery, but I wouldn’t expect less from the coyote, an intelligent, tough survivor. 

Finally, there’s reproduction. Put simply: the more coyotes we kill, the more pups the survivors produce. According to one study, a coyote population can withstand an annual loss of seventy percent and still generate enough young to replace that loss. 

This ability to recoup their losses helped coyotes during that national war against them. When the dust settled, coyotes, which before the onslaught had been concentrated in the Great Plains, now lived in every state except Hawaii. Today they have even taken up residence in large cities like Chicago, Washington, D.C., and Los Angeles, where packs have learned to avoid humans by hunting at night and not howling.

Unfortunately, increasing run-ins with humans have relegated coyotes to being viewed as little more than sneaky pests that eat our pets.  

Some visitors bring this disrespect for coyotes into Yellowstone. More than once, I have watched a visitor grow excited when seeing a coyote at a distance and mistaking it for a wolf. After I identified the sighting as a coyote, the visitor muttered something like, “Oh, only a coyote,” and walked away disappointed. 

But that visitor was lucky to see a coyote in a challenging environment similar to the one coyotes evolved in, where wolves, their much larger, very territorial, and dangerous competitors, reign.

For flourishing in this wolf-beats-coyote world, and for figuring out how to live with uncompromising humans, resilient and adaptable coyotes deserve our respect.

This Love the Wild is based on a chapter from In the Temple of Wolves. Thanks for joining me! If you haven’t yet subscribed, I hope you’ll do so. It’s free and brings a Love the Wild letter to your inbox each week. In addition to excerpts from my books, you’ll enjoy stories inspired by photos, a variety of podcasts, photo essays, opinion pieces, and more. With each, I hope to warm your heart and excite your mind as we share moments with wildlife and in wild lands.

I write, speak, and photograph to protect wildlife and preserve wild lands. My bestselling In the Temple of Wolves; its sequel, Deep into Yellowstone; and its prequel, The Wilds of Aging are available signed. My books are also available on Amazon unsigned or as eBook or audiobook.

All photos by Rick Lamplugh.