The Town Coyote and The Country Coyote

If you have read any sort of fear mongering news article in the last decade you have likely heard about the “huge threat” of coyotes invading our cities. There are more and more stories out there about coyotes eating someone’s cat from their backyard and chasing their dog down the street, but how realistic is this threat of coyotes? An article titled “Space use by resident and transient coyotes in an urban–rural landscape mosaic” seeks to find out how much coyotes prefer living near humans.

A group of researchers in Rhode Island in 2012 set out to observe a group of both resident and transient coyotes and where they decided to settle in an environment consisting of both urban and rural areas. There were 24 coyotes that had claimed territory in the area they were observing (resident) and there were 7 coyotes living in the area that not yet claimed territory (transient). They put GPS tracking

collars on all of these subjects to see how they moved and used the land in this water locked area. The coyotes that were already settled in on the land were observed to mostly live in the more dense brush and to forage in the agricultural land. They were very rarely seen in urban areas. On the other hand the coyotes without territory were observed both living and foraging in the dense brush and occasionally straying into more urban areas for food. The researchers believed that the reason they didn’t forage in the agricultural area is because they didn’t want to mess with the resident coyotes, even though the agricultural areas had more prey for them.

This means that it is unlikely that coyotes are choosing to live near humans, rather they do not have another option. The coyotes in this study were unwilling to go into even the more sparsely populated areas of human development so it seems they would much rather live in rural areas. It is likely that the big scare a lot of people are having over the increased sighting of coyotes in urban areas is entirely preventable if we made more agricultural land possible for coyotes to forage on. So remember, if you see a coyote trotting down your lovely suburban road, they do not want to be there any more than you want them.

Finn, W. C., Mitchell, N., Pratt, R., Strauss, E. G., & Strohbach, M. W. (2012). Space use by resident and transient coyotes in an urban-rural landscape mosaic. Wildlife Research, 42(6), 461-469. doi: 10.1071/WR15020