Montana’s 388 coyote records span 45 counties, from Beaverhead and Ravalli in the southwest valleys through the Yellowstone and Gallatin country to Glacier National Park on the northern border. Unlike the eastern states, this is original ground: the coyote has hunted the Northern Plains since long before Montana had a name.
Home range, not new frontier
Early explorers on the Missouri called it the prairie wolf, and it remains the open-country canid of the state, trotting sagebrush flats and river breaks for ground squirrels, rabbits, mice, and carrion. Yellowstone National Park and the Upper Missouri River Breaks National Monument hold records beside the ranch counties of Fergus and Phillips, a map of an animal that never needed invitation. Where gray wolves hold territory, coyotes give way; wolves kill them when they can, and Montana coyotes living near wolf country stay warier and keep to smaller ground.
Two rises in a working year
The record climbs in May, when pups arrive in hillside dens and both parents hunt hard across open ground to feed them, and again in September, when the year’s young animals leave home and travel widely across the landscape. In between, the coyote is a fact of daily life that most people register only by ear, the evening chorus drifting off a coulee. Sightings are common at a distance in this big-sky country, but a coyote that closes the gap has likely been fed somewhere and should never be rewarded for it.
Status in Montana
NatureServe ranks the coyote S5, Secure, in Montana, and the species is native to its Montana range. USGS NAS does not list it as nonindigenous in the state.
Full species profile
