Every evening coyotes bark, yap, and sing across the United States. City noise may drown them out, but they are present from sea to shining sea in every city and town living among us. Historically, coyotes only lived west of the Mississippi River and called the Great Plains, deserts, and mountains of the American West home. After Americans encountered coyotes, an all-out war began. Individual states and the Federal government wasted millions of dollars trying to eradicate them. The Euro-American assault on canine predators began with wolves, and we transferred that hatred to coyotes. However, coyotes are an almost perfect animal to withstand the onslaught, and they thrived while people extirpated wolves from most of their range.
Europeans viewed wolves as an enemy to “civilizing” the New World. Two years after the foundation of Massasschutes Bay Colony, they enacted the first bounty on wolves in 1630. Massasschutes wanted to encourage people to kill wolves, and the plan worked. By the mid-1800s, New Englanders had nearly eliminated wolves. In 1825 Missouri wanted to get rid of coyotes and used the same tactics that had worked on wolves. However, a few key differences between the animals prevented that.
Unlike wolves, coyotes don’t need a pack to thrive. They evolved a behavior scientists call fission-fusion, which means they can move between being a pack member and living alone. Wolves, in contrast, need to be a member of a pack to succeed in most cases. Since coyotes are more individualistic, they are harder to kill off. We still dispatched millions of them, but a runaway coyote can establish a pack much more straightforward than wolves. It's not just escapability that helped coyotes survive, however.
They also have an adaptable diet. Typically, they will eat small mammals that many people consider pests (it can be beneficial to have some coyotes around), various insects, and fruits and vegetables. Coyotes carved out a successful niche among stronger predators because they ate anything. Coyote pups listen to their parents about having a well-rounded diet! With this diet, they can live anywhere and flourish.
In the 20th century, coyotes were pushed out of the West and always found something to eat. Depending on food availability and the number of other coyotes, females typically have between three and seven pups a year. They are born in the spring to early summer. When a new pair of coyotes find an empty area, they quickly repopulate it. That makes it incredibly hard to eliminate a coyote population. Song dogs have remarkable traits that helped them survive the onslaught, but that doesn’t tell the entire story of our failure to control coyotes.
It’s hard to imagine today when a coyote casually strolls through New York City, but there was a black market trade for coyote scalps. In Kansas, for example, there were rumors that people across the state raised coyotes for the one-dollar bounty that began in 1877. Journalists would speculate about people raising coyotes whenever many coyote scalps were submitted. In Neosho County, for example, the Chanute Weekly Tribune reported in May 1913 that a man named W.F Wells discovered a few people in the area were breeding coyotes for the bounty. The story also claims that a Sunday school superintendent had raised coyotes several years before. In five years, he made 50 dollars before a neighbor stole his 1912 “crop of scalps.” Missouri’s conservation department estimates that between 1936 to 1973, the state paid out over two million dollars in bounty payments on coyotes. Spoiler, there are still coyotes in Missouri today. Cases of bounty fraud may be rare, but they highlight the folly of efforts to control these animals.
Many Native American religions revered coyotes as trickster Gods. The trickster archetype is fitting for an animal that has been fooling Americans into thinking they can control nature for nearly two centuries. We have spent so much time and money trying to remove a species as American as apple pie. They have lived among people since the first humans arrived in North America and aren’t going to stop anytime soon.
Sources
Coyotes Raised for Scalps, Chanute Weekly Tribune, 05/09/1913.
A Brief History of Extension Predator Control in Missouri. Dan F. Dickneite. University of Neberaksa 1973
Coyote America: A Natural and Supernatural History, Dan Flores, 2016.
Coyote Pup at Seedskadee National Wildlife Refuge, United States Fish and Wildlife, 08/1/14.