Where Do Coyotes Live? How Coyotes Spread Across America

Where coyotes lived originally

Before European settlement, the coyote was mainly an animal of the open plains, deserts and dry shrublands of western North America and Mexico. It shared the Great Plains with bison, pronghorn and prairie dogs, and was rarer in the dense eastern forests, where wolves were common.

Early explorers called it the prairie wolf or brush wolf. When the Lewis and Clark expedition met coyotes in 1804–1806, the animal was still largely unknown to scientists in the eastern United States.

How coyotes spread across the continent

From the late 1800s onward, coyotes began a remarkable range expansion that is still going on. Several changes helped them:

• Wolves disappeared. People killed off gray wolves and red wolves across most of the United States, removing the coyote’s main competitor and predator.
• Forests were cleared. Farms, pastures and roads opened up eastern woodlands, creating the patchy habitat coyotes like.
• Coyotes are flexible. They eat almost anything, breed quickly and young animals can travel more than 100 km (60 mi) to find new territory.

Coyotes spread east along two main routes. One wave moved north of the Great Lakes through southern Canada and reached New England and New York by the mid-1900s. Another moved east from Texas and reached the Carolinas and the Southeast in the late 1900s. Coyotes are now found in every state of the eastern United States, including Florida.

Coyotes in Canada, Alaska and Central America

In the north, coyotes followed settlement and forest clearing into Alaska and most of Canada, reaching the Maritime provinces and Newfoundland. They avoid only the far Arctic, where snow and cold favor wolves and Arctic foxes.

In the south, coyotes have lived in parts of Central America for thousands of years, but they have expanded as rainforest was cleared for cattle pastures. They spread through Costa Rica and into Panama, and in 2013 they were recorded east of the Panama Canal. Biologists are watching to see whether they will reach South America.

What habitats do coyotes use?

Coyotes can live almost anywhere with food and cover. Typical habitats include:

They usually rest above ground in thick cover and use dens only to raise pups in spring. Dens are often enlarged burrows of badgers or woodchucks, rock crevices, or spaces under logs, sheds and culverts.

Urban coyotes: Chicago, Los Angeles and beyond

Coyotes now live in many large North American cities. In the Chicago area, the long-running Cook County Coyote Project has followed hundreds of radio-collared coyotes since 2000. It found that city coyotes keep small territories, become more active at night to avoid people, and even learn to cross busy roads with traffic.

In Los Angeles, coyotes live in the hills of Griffith Park and the Santa Monica Mountains and in neighborhoods across the basin. Coyotes are also established in Denver, Dallas, Toronto, Vancouver, San Francisco, Washington, D.C., and New York City.

Living close to people brings conflicts, mostly over pets and food left outdoors. Read are coyotes dangerous? for the real risks, and do coyotes live in packs? to learn how coyote families divide up the land.

How do coyotes survive in cities?

City coyotes change their habits more than their diet or appearance. Radio-tracking studies show that they shift much of their activity to the night, rest by day in small patches of brush, and travel along quiet corridors such as rail lines, rivers, power-line strips and golf courses. Many people living close to a coyote family never see it.

Urban coyotes also tend to live in stable family territories, and in some studies they survive longer than rural coyotes, because hunting and trapping are limited in cities. Their main causes of death in towns are collisions with vehicles and disease such as mange.

Where coyotes do not live

Coyotes are absent from Hawaii, the Arctic islands of Canada, Greenland and the far northern tundra. They are not native to Europe, Asia or Africa; in Europe and Asia, their closest ecological counterpart is the golden jackal, a smaller relative with similar adaptable habits.

Coyote range compared with wolves

The coyote’s range has grown while the gray wolf’s shrank. Where both live today, such as Yellowstone and parts of Canada, wolves limit coyote numbers. Compare the two in wolf vs coyote.