Cool! Thank you. ^-^
Coyotes are not pack animals, they are solitary animals that will occasionally display pack behavior when raising a family. The book is being rewritten on coyote behavior as we speak, urban coyotes are displaying behaviors in many ways that are still not well understood or heavily documented.
Coyotes are quite sensitive to scents (scentsitive?). They really do not like wolves, so buying some wolf urine and spraying it around your yard works well. Yes. There are stores that sell wolf urine, and I’m glad collecting it isn’t my job.
Strong perfumes or colognes are good, but ammonia is a lot cheaper. The problem with all of these scents, though, is that you have to reapply them periodically—and immediately after every rain.
Another good tactic is bright lights on a motion detector. Make sure the lights are at coyote eye level and that they shine in every direction an animal might approach from. These, of course, aren’t great if you have neighbors close by that don’t want flashing lights at night. Flashing Christmas lights will work for a little while, but the coyotes will get used to them.
Loud noises, also on a motion detector, are good, too. Products like Nite Guard Solar lights are easy to install. No wiring. Just stick 'em in the ground. A couple of companies (Guardian?) make repellants that use high-frequency noises that won’t bother humans, but I understand they make dogs unhappy.
There’s a product called Electronic Guard EG designed by the USDA Wildlife Research Center to protect sheep from coyote predation. It has lights and sirens on a timer. Again, not so good in an urban or suburban environment, but good out in the country.
There are even motion-based sprinklers that blast an area with water. They have the advantage of being pretty quiet and having no lights, but if your own dog wanders over there you have to deal with the wet dog smell 
As I said above, they may not have packs in the same sense as wolves, but they absolutely have family units with multiple adults and definite structure. Urban coyotes are a whole different world, though.
Speaking of the book being rewritten, I strongly suggest reading Coyote America by Dan Flores, a Professor Emeritus at University of Montana. There’s a lot of good research in that book.
I will certainly check that out. besides the English sparrow and the startling, I can’t think of any other north American animal that has increased its range so quickly. The feral pig ad wild turkeys have also widely spread out. I have to wonder of these two animals have contributed to the spread of the coyote. I was hunting pigs in South Texas a few years ago and noticed an unusually high population of bob cats. They were as common as house cats in the city. I have to think that the baby pigs were supporting the large populations of bob cats. Coyotes would fall into a similar niche I would think.
Not a coyote, but I saw a youtube ages ago that showed a dachshund doing this same thing. Pretty amazing.
Hunting feral hogs on private property in Texas requires no license. Their invasiveness has gotten so bad.
Okey-dokey. Here we go.
Rather than nitpick over word choices like “family group” vs. “pack,” I’m just going to call an organized bunch of coyotes a “group” in this post.
When you hear the coyotes singing at night, it’s not a hunting call and generally not a mating call. It’s a census. They’re checking on where other members of their group are, and also looking for surrounding groups. If yearlings is ready to go out on their own, they are likely to sing out, see where the responses come from, and find an unoccupied space to set up a territory of their own.
The point of that is that coyotes stay aware of how many other coyotes are around them. Even if their structure is looser than, say, wolves, it’s still there. In one of these family groups, there will be only one pair that breeds. Despite the obvious analogy to “alpha” wolves (scare quotes are because we’re learning that we’ve vastly oversimplified what an “alpha” wolf is and whether they really exist), we’ll just call these the breeding pair.
Typical thinking for an old-school rancher is that the only good coyote is a dead coyote. Even coyotes that haven’t threatened their livestock are perceived as bad, and they’ll hunt them down to kill them. I’ve heard many of them say they want to take out the biggest coyote “as a lesson to the rest of them.” That biggest coyote is probably going to be one of the breeding pair.
When one or both of the breeding pair is killed, pack behavior immediately changes and they all start to breed, which leads to a big crop of pups and often to the formation of one or more new packs. A fairly recent revelation is that in times of stress, litter sizes will increase. Instead of getting 2 or 3 pups in a litter, there can be 5 to 7 per litter.
When populations are really threatened, female coyotes will go into estrus twice per year instead of once. With a gestation period of only two months, this means two litters a year.
Net effect: You have a stable coyote pack in your area with one breeding pair and a half-dozen younger coyotes, including three females of breeding age. You kill the alphas. Instead of next year’s crop being 3 new coyotes, it’s 15. Hit 'em hard, killing all but one female, and she can put out two litters that size in a year. Instead of lowering the population and scaring them off, you’ve just increased the coyote population.
What if you wiped out all of the males in the area, leaving only one female? She’ll go hunting for a domestic dog or a wolf to breed with, thus producing coydogs and coywolves that are often larger and stronger than the standard coyote. As soon as there are enough coyotes (or hybrids) around, the coyotes will lose all interest in cross-breeding.
This is how an animal that only lived along the front ranges of the American Rockies a couple of hundred years ago now lives in all of the lower 48 states, plus large swaths of southern Canada and northern Mexico. The USDA has had programs in place for over a century to reduce or eliminate coyote populations, and it’s been an abject failure.
Where I grew up, they put out a bounty on coyotes. Offer some evidence that they were harassing your livestock or pets, and you could drop the coyote’s body off at the Sheriff’s office and collect $25. Back in the 70’s, that was serious money, and friends who lived on ranches would sleep with a gun, flashlight, and camera by their windowsill. Hear coyotes, light 'em up, snap a pick, and boom, enough money for date night. Like most bounty programs for coyotes, it succeeded in increasing the population, not decreasing it.
A side note: As I mentioned to @Omar_Little, urban coyotes are a whole different story. There are well-established coyote populations in Denver, Salt Lake City, Los Angeles, and many other large U.S. cities. I heard a great interview with a researcher who actually got permission to tag and release coyotes in Chicago rather than killing them. She said that there were over 1,000 coyotes living in Chicago at the time!
Coyotes are amazingly adaptable animals. The only critter that comes to mind that’s been more successful at thriving in and around humans without being domesticated is the Norway rat.
This is extremely cool and I’m delighted to have read it! Thank you for taking the time to share your expertise!
Coyotes have had some negative effects on urban life as well as some positive effects. By thinning down the populations of free roaming cats many songbirds and msall reptiles and animals have started making come backs. Rats happen to be on the list of small animals benefitting from the loss of cats. We have had a population explosion of rats in the Los Angeles and surrounding areas. It seems to have leveled off somewhat but is still a major problem…Rat snakes, and owls seem like natural replacements for the house cat niche. I have noticed a modest spread of great horned owls in my area and I think a program installing nesting boxes might be helpful.
Maybe not! It’s definitely less anthropomorphic than the usual story, which generally has coyotes contriving to lure innocent housepets away to murder them like a femme fatale in a Cold War thriller. But even in that scenario, why would they? Predators don’t like exposing themselves to risk—getting into a fight with another dog means an opportunity to get injured for no real reward. Coyote America, the book already mentioned, has this to say—
Despite the cat-killer urban legend, in city after city the science indicates that pets provide only about 1 to 2 percent of the average coyote’s diet.
—but any time it comes up in the news, or there’s a video of a coyote-dog interaction, someone always feels compelled to mention this canard. I have tried before to find someone who has witnessed this happening with their own eyes, instead of just something that everyone “knows” happens, or that they’re sure happened to a runaway pet or their neighbor’s dog or a friend of a friend, but it always seems to be fairly scanty.
Yeah, it’s extremely striking in this map from the Twin Cities Coyote and Fox Project how much coyotes avoid having anything to do with other coyotes.
My understanding is that coydogs are less common than people think they are? If for no other reason than their breeding season is short and, unlike domestic dogs, male coyotes are also only seasonally reproductive (sperm motility and testicular volume drops sharply after breeding season—LJ Minter and TJ DeLiberto reported a mean drop in the latter from 20.24cm³ to 3.9cm³.) Which, as you note, it’s not like they need the help; litter sizes over a dozen are not impossible, so they will rapidly repopulate.
(I assume any reticence to cross-breeding isn’t as true for coywolves? Coyotes and wolves may be more simpatico if their populations are stressed, especially given that all North American wolves have some coyote DNA in them, and vice-versa—a 2016 paper put the extreme bound of divergence as recent as 6,000 years ago. Presumably at least post-domestication, since North American wolves are more likely to be black, and melanism is as I understand it originally from dogs)
I mentioned upthread that there used to be a group of coyotes in the slope of the little canyon less than a mile from my house. I would hear their yipping at night. One morning I found the tail, head and pelt of my neighbor’s cat on my front lawn.
That’s a cool map! I hadn’t seen that before. Thanks for linking to it.
That is my understanding as well. It doesn’t happen often. Generally it’s when a coyote has wandered far out of its normal territory or when it’s the only survivor in a fairly large area.
The biggest issue with coyote/wolf crossbreeds is that it has to be perfect circumstances and perfect timing. Wolves are known not just to kill coyotes on sight, but in Yellowstone they’ve been documented tracking a coyote back to its den, and killing the mate and pups as well.
When I was in California, we used to hear coyotes singing a lot out in the canyon we lived in. Then we got a wolf hybrid (retired sled dog—half grey wolf/half malemute). The first time he howled back at them, they went silent immediately and we didn’t hear from them again for a long time.
Enlightened ranchers use livestock guardian dogs (LGDs) to live with sheep and goats and protect them, instead of trying to kill all the coyotes, for the reasons posted above. The LGDs are big enough to kill a coyote, but they rarely will. Rather, they roam around the perimeter of the herd at night, barking. Essentially announcing that this is their turf, bugger off.
The several breeds, which tend to merge and overlap, were developed in the mountainous areas of southern Europe and Asia Minor to protect flocks against wolves and were introduced to North America in the 1970’s by a dog biologist from Hampshire College in Massachusetts, who had been researching their role in the Caucasus. It took a long time to catch on, but now they are common on farms and ranches. They are not pets (and can’t be; they have to identify the sheep as their social group).
My sheep rancher friend in Saskatchewan brought them in when the coyotes moved in, and has a lot of interesting insights into the complex social relationship her LGDs have with the coyote packs.
I believe the relationships have been documented here:
I guess that sums it up …
The dogs do get to know the coyotes, and vice versa, and if there’s a shift in personnel it makes everyone restless until the ground rules are ironed out again.
And not let’s forget that if desperate enough coyotes will attack and kill adult humans.
As a general rule wild animals will virtually always triumph over domestic animals of similar size.
And, killing even large numbers of coyotes doesn’t really reduce their population. When their numbers are reduced they simply breed younger, more often, and have larger litters. Love em or hate em, coyotes are here to stay.
Yes, wild animal vs. domestic is like an active MMA fighter + combat veteran vs. an office drone who hasn’t made a fist since the third grade.
Wildlife vets even say wild animals heal from various injuries much faster than domestic animals.
Though another general rule is that wild animals are often much smaller than people think. Whenever there is a Bobcat sighted in my neighborhood, people will swear they are 50 lb mini-cougars.