Coyotes Thriving Despite Pressures From Humans and Predators, Study Finds

The voices of the night, coyotes are incredibly resilient, even in the face of mounting environmental pressures.

A new study has found that the baying omnivores — the most successful predators in North America — are thriving and becoming even more successful, despite hunting, human development and competition with larger carnivores like pumas and black bears, a press release from University of New Hampshire (UNH) said.

In the study, researchers with UNH’s New Hampshire Agricultural Experiment Station (NHAES) give a detailed assessment of coyotes’ response to the threats they face in their ever-changing habitat.

“Once a rare sight in the northeastern United States, the eastern coyote has become a common presence across New Hampshire’s forests, farms and suburbs,” the press release said. “First arriving in the state in the 1940s from the Midwest, these predators have since spread throughout every county and are keen adapters to regular interactions with humans, livestock and larger carnivores.”

The research team used data collected from 4,587 camera traps set up all over the country by SNAPSHOT USA — a national project that uses coordinated camera arrays to collect wildlife data from across the lower 48 States.

To their surprise, the researchers discovered that the hunting of coyotes may actually help increase their numbers.

“Intensive coyote removal can obviously reduce populations in the short-term, but removal can also result in younger coyote populations with higher reproduction and immigration rates,” explained co-author of the study Remington Moll, NHAES scientist and assistant professor of wildlife ecology and management at UNH, in the press release. “In our study, we detected more coyotes in places where hunting was allowed. This change occurred over several years, suggesting that, on average, hunting did not reduce coyote abundance and perhaps increased it locally in certain areas.”

The findings of the study, “People or predators? Comparing habitat‐dependent effects of hunting and large carnivores on the abundance of North America’s top mesocarnivore,” were published in the journal Ecography.

The team found that larger carnivores had an influence on coyote numbers, depending on the habitat. For instance, pumas led to smaller populations of coyotes in more open environments, while the presence of black bears resulted in fewer coyotes in forested areas.

“Our work suggests that promoting the recovery of large carnivores, especially in certain habitats, is more likely to reduce coyote numbers than people directly hunting them,” said co-author Roland Kays, a research professor with the College of Natural Resources at North Carolina State University.

Kays said the study can help better inform coyote management strategies by demonstrating which factors have the biggest impact on their populations.

The largest number of coyotes were found in grasslands and landscapes that provide ample shelter and prey, like agricultural operations. Coyote populations varied in urban areas, depending on their scale. Smaller, local urban development had a tendency to reduce coyote numbers because of increased habitat fragmentation and human presence. Larger, suburban-scale development, on the other hand, led to thriving coyote populations, as they benefited from fragmented edges and habitats offering access to natural and human-modified resources.

The study noted large regional variations in populations of coyotes across the U.S., with lower numbers in the Northeast and especially high numbers in the Southwest. These differences reflect the influence of each region’s diverse geographical and ecological characteristics.

“Many of the ecological relationships we found were expected,” Kays said. “But now that we have quantified them and can map them out across the country, we’re able to provide the first abundance map of our country’s most important predator.”

The researchers incorporated data from the SNAPSHOT USA camera traps in one of the largest studies of coyote populations ever conducted. The data allowed them to look at the effects of hunting practices, suburban expansion, habitat type and competition with larger carnivores on coyote populations.

“The impressive SNAPSHOT USA project provides a yearly glimpse into our nation’s wildlife thanks to hundreds of researchers and the coordination by the Smithsonian and the North Carolina Museum of Natural Sciences,” Moll said. “By combining data from cameras with satellite-derived habitat metrics and advanced statistical models, we got an unprecedented look into continent-scale trends for this fascinating species.”