Coyote Questions

A combination of natural resource regulations, wildlife reintroductions, and habitat improvement and restoration projects has enabled many wildlife populations in North America to recover from several centuries of unrestricted harvest, overexploitation, pollution and habitat degradation.

Examples here in New York include: valuable furbearers such as the beaver, river otter and fisher, whose populations were severely impacted by unregulated trapping; birds of prey including the osprey, bald eagle and peregrine falcon who suffered from pesticides; bobcat, harbor seals and gray seals, seen as competitors for limited resources (e.g. deer, fish) and subject to ‘bounties’ for many years; and Atlantic menhaden, whose population collapsed here in the mid-1960s as fishing pressure increased and fishing gear became more efficient.

Long Island, the largest island in the lower 48 states, has been the recipient of many of these “comeback species,” particularly the birds of prey, the semi-aquatic otter, marine mammals and fish. However, its closest point to the mainland — the highly urbanized metropolitan New York City area — poses a challenge for robust, expanding populations of terrestrial species, including the wily coyote (Canis latrans).

As a result of the extermination of the two of our three largest terrestrial carnivores in the east, the mountain lion and wolf, and a dramatic reduction in the population of the third, the black bear, a large ecological niche lay vacant. Sometime in the late 1800s, the coyote began to exploit that situation. Dispersing from their original range west of the Mississippi, coyotes first arrived in New York in the 1920s, crossing over from Canada into the St. Lawrence valley.

Along the way, they did something that contradicted what many of us learned in high school biology: they bred with the few remaining wolves in southern Ontario and Quebec, and the occasional domestic dog, and produced fertile hybrids. These Eastern coyotes are larger than their western counterparts, but just as wily.

Although they’ve been in New York State for a century now, the first documented breeding on Long Island was quite recent: 2016. That ended badly. As people started noticing the pups, they began to toss food to them, resulting in the coyotes’ loss of fear of people and habituating them to seek handouts. All but one of the two adults, one sub-adult “helper” and eight pups were “removed.”

But they are still coming. Today there are three pairs in Nassau County and possibly a pair on the East End. Their presence marks the beginning of the colonization of the last large, significant, coyote-less landmass in the lower 48 states: Long Island.

Accompanying their arrival are lots of questions from people unfamiliar with this animal. Here are some answers to common questions.

Since coyotes were never part of the Long Island landscape, even in pre-colonial times, shouldn’t they be considered a non-native, invasive species?

This can be answered by examining the non-native aspect of the query. Any plant or animal that expands its distribution and colonizes a new area naturally, on its own without being moved by humans, does not qualify as a non-native species. There are many examples of range changes in wildlife species in our lifetime that many readers will be familiar with.

Herring gulls and black-backed gulls, both northern species, expanded their ranges south and first nested on Long Island in 1931 and 1942, respectively. That was attributed to food sources at open landfills and garbage dumps. The northern cardinal is a southern species that expanded its range north, becoming well established as a breeding bird on Long Island in the 1940s. Some speculate that may have been induced by the prevalence of bird feeders. The red fox is a northern species that displaced the gray fox here as forests were cleared and fragmented. The opossum arrived here from the south in the late 1800s, and has continued a northward range expansion into southern Canada. The coyote’s range expansion fits with these other species that are considered native.

Do coyotes travel and hunt in packs?

Yes, some will travel and hunt solo, others will do so in groups, and it’s important to clarify exactly what the composition of those groups is. They are family units: mom, dad, pups, and perhaps a non-breeding yearling or two from the previous year’s litter.

Will coyotes prey on deer and reduce our East End deer population?

Initial research in New York examined coyote scats to determine their diet and how it changed over the seasons. A significant portion of the scats examined had deer hair. The obvious conclusion was that deer were a major component of the coyote diet. But were coyotes preying on deer?

That might seem like an odd question, but biologists knew that coyotes were scavengers as well as predators, and that a healthy deer could easily outrun a coyote. So they put radio collars on coyotes and tracked them over a year.

What they found was that the coyotes were mainly feeding on roadkilled deer until June, when they shifted to preying on fawns. For their first four to six weeks, fawns are very susceptible to coyote predation, and research has documented coyotes predation rates as high as 80 percent among fawns.

Despite that, a major study titled “Effects on White-tailed Deer Following Eastern Coyote Colonization” published in 2019 examined deer populations among six states over three decades following coyote colonization, and found that on the large spatial scale, deer numbers were still expanding.

I’m curious to see what happens here on the East End, where deer fencing is ubiquitous, and the wily coyote may learn to take advantage of the many dead ends that fencing creates for the fleet-footed deer.