Maryland’s 360 coyote records reach 19 counties, but the weight of them sits in the suburban corridor: Montgomery County alone accounts for 109, with Baltimore, Anne Arundel, and Prince George’s counties close behind. Out west, Catoctin Mountain Park and Garrett and Allegany counties carry the record into the ridge-and-valley country.
A newcomer that took the suburbs
The coyote is a late arrival in the mid-Atlantic, having worked its way east and south during the twentieth century and settled Maryland only in recent decades. What it found was edge country without end: cornfields stitched to woodlots, stream valleys behind subdivisions, mown greenways full of rabbits and voles. Records along the Chesapeake and Ohio Canal National Historical Park and through the Mckee Beshers bottomlands show how readily it travels the state’s river corridors. It eats what the season offers, mice, rabbits, groundhogs, fruit, and carrion, which is exactly why it fits so well between farm and town.
Everywhere and almost never seen
For an animal this widespread, direct encounters are rare. Coyotes in settled country shift their activity into the night, and most Marylanders know them only as a distant chorus after dark or a narrow line of tracks in morning mud. The record runs through every month with a modest April crest, when pairs are denning and traveling far to provision pups. Any coyote that seems unafraid of people has probably been fed, and the correct response is distance, not curiosity.
Status in Maryland
NatureServe ranks the coyote S4, Apparently Secure, in Maryland, and the species is treated as native to its Maryland range. USGS NAS does not list it as nonindigenous in the state.
Full species profile
