Coyote

Coyotes mostly eat small animals like mice and rabbits.

They also eat fruit, insects and leftovers. To catch a mouse, a coyote jumps up and pounces.

Coyotes are mostly meat-eaters: about nine-tenths of their diet is mammals, especially mice, voles, rabbits and ground squirrels. They also eat birds, snakes, big insects and animals that are already dead, and in fall and winter they eat lots of fruit.

To catch a mouse, a coyote creeps through the grass, sniffs it out, then leaps and pounces with its legs held stiffly together. For bigger animals, family members may work as a team. In suburbs, coyotes may even eat trash or small pets.

About 90 percent of the diet is mammalian, mainly small mammals such as cottontail rabbits, ground squirrels and mice; birds, snakes, large insects, carrion and seasonal fruit add variety. In Yellowstone, the National Park Service lists voles, mice, rabbits, other small animals and carrion, with only very young elk calves taken in spring.

Hunting is flexible. When mousing, a coyote stalks, locates prey by smell and pounces stiff-legged. Deer may be hunted in relays or driven toward a hidden pack member. Coyotes sometimes hunt alongside American badgers: the badger digs rodents out of burrows while the coyote catches those that run. A night's hunting covers about 4 kilometers.

Coyotes howl, yip and bark.

They sing most at dawn and dusk. Their calls tell their family where they are.

Coyotes are among the noisiest wild animals in North America. They howl, yip, squeak and bark, alone or in groups, especially around dawn and dusk. A howl can tell other coyotes where a family's territory is, or help family members find each other.

Coyotes are mostly active at night, and near people they are secretive, coming out mainly early and late in the day. They live as pairs with pups, and sometimes in larger family groups. They also leave scent marks to show where they live.

Animal Diversity Web calls coyotes the most vocal of North American wild mammals, with calls including squeaks, distress calls and howls built from rapid yelps and a falsetto howl. Howling announces territories, accompanies reunions of group members and tells them each other's locations; scent marks of urine and feces signal location, breeding status and boundaries.

Social structure varies. Coyotes are less likely to form packs than wolves and hunt alone, in pairs or as families. In Yellowstone before wolves returned, coyotes lived in packs of up to seven, typical where they are not hunted by people; since wolf restoration, pairs with pups have again become the usual unit.

Long ago, many people tried to get rid of coyotes.

But coyotes are clever, and there are lots of them today. Never feed a wild coyote. Wild animals should find their own food.

In the early 1900s, people tried to wipe out coyotes in the American West because they sometimes killed farm animals. Wolves and cougars were wiped out in places such as Yellowstone National Park, but coyotes survived because they are so adaptable. Today the IUCN lists them as Least Concern, and their numbers are increasing.

Coyotes that learn to get food by roads can grow bold around people and are more likely to be hit by cars. In Yellowstone, park staff scare coyotes away from busy visitor areas. The best way to help is to watch from far away and never feed them.

The IUCN lists Canis latrans as Least Concern with an increasing population trend (2018). Early-1900s extermination campaigns in the West, including Yellowstone, eradicated wolves and cougars there, but coyotes compensated for the losses.

When wolves were restored to Yellowstone in 1995, competition, attacks and lost territory cut coyote numbers on the northern range by as much as 50 percent, although more recent counts in the Lamar Valley show increases. Coyotes that learn to take food along roads become bolder and more likely to be hit; park staff haze them away from visitor areas, and the rare animals that remain a danger are removed.