Coyotes turn up in 399 Louisiana records spread across 49 parishes, from the longleaf pine hills of Kisatchie National Forest down through the marsh rim of Bayou Sauvage National Wildlife Refuge to the barrier flats of Grand Isle. Few wild mammals in the state work so many kinds of ground.
A colonist that filled every niche
The coyote is a relative newcomer to the Deep South. Historically an animal of the Great Plains and the West, it expanded east across the Mississippi during the twentieth century as old-growth forest fell and the region’s wolves vanished. Louisiana’s patchwork of pinewoods, bottomland hardwood, pasture, and marsh edge turned out to suit it well. Records from Jean Lafitte National Historical Park and Preserve and Fontainebleau State Park District I near the lake, to Cameron and Calcasieu parishes on the coastal prairie, show a canid at home from inland hill to salt marsh.
Heard far more often than seen
Across the South the coyote keeps mostly to nightfall and first light, and its yips and howls carry far over flat, wet country. Most Louisianans who share ground with coyotes never lay eyes on one; the usual encounter is a slim, dog-like shape crossing a levee or a road at a distance, tail carried low. The record stays nearly level through the year with a modest April rise, around the weeks when pups are born in dens and the adults range widely to feed them. A coyote that holds its ground or approaches has likely been fed by someone, and it should be given room, never offered food.
Status in Louisiana
NatureServe ranks the coyote S5, Secure, in Louisiana, and the species is treated as native to its Louisiana range. USGS NAS does not list it as nonindigenous in the state.
Full species profile
