Maine’s 445 coyote records cover all sixteen counties, from Hancock and Washington on the coast through the Aroostook farm country to Piscataquis and Somerset in the interior. Acadia National Park, Baxter State Park, and Katahdin Woods and Waters National Monument all appear, a canid equally at home on spruce coast and logging-road country.
Bigger than its western ancestor
The animal Maine calls a coyote is the eastern coyote, noticeably heavier and longer-legged than the plains coyote, the product of mixing with wolves as the species spread east across the Great Lakes in the twentieth century. That extra size changed its diet. Alongside snowshoe hare, mice, and carrion, Maine coyotes take deer, mostly the winter-weakened and the already dead, and they work frozen wetlands and deer wintering yards where a lighter canid could not. It is the largest wild canine most Mainers will ever share ground with.
A January chorus in the snow
The Maine record spikes hard in January, with more reports than any other month, and the reason is ecological rather than incidental. Midwinter is the breeding season, when pairs travel widely and howl to hold their ground, and deep snow writes down every crossing for whoever comes by on skis or snowshoe the next morning. Even so, most people who live in coyote country never see the animal itself; a glimpse across a frozen bog at dusk, then nothing, is the usual story. Distance and a fed-never policy keep it that way.
Status in Maine
NatureServe ranks the coyote S5, Secure, in Maine, and the species is treated as native to its Maine range. USGS NAS does not list it as nonindigenous in the state.
Full species profile
