North Carolina’s 1,393 coyote records reach 87 of the state’s 100 counties, from Grandfather Mountain and Pisgah National Forest in the Blue Ridge through the Lower Haw River State Natural Area in the Piedmont to Dare County on the Outer Banks. It is one of the most thoroughly recorded mammals in the state.
A western canid that walked in
Coyotes are new to North Carolina by any historical measure, having spread east across the continent during the twentieth century and arrived from the west in the 1980s. The state’s quilt of farm, suburb, and second-growth forest suited them immediately, and Wake, Chatham, and Orange counties now hold the heaviest clusters of records. Their arrival came with a complication: in the northeastern counties, coyotes overlap the recovery range of the red wolf, and the two canids can interbreed, one of the central difficulties in keeping the rarer animal distinct.
The summer lull and the fall chorus
Reports run in every month but dip through July and August, when adults keep close to growing pups in the heat and shift their hunting deep into the night, then rise again from October into winter as the year’s young animals disperse and pairs begin calling ahead of the breeding season. Through it all the coyote stays a creature of sound and sign more than sight. Most North Carolinians in coyote country, which is now nearly the whole state, have heard the night chorus without ever seeing the singers, and giving any bold individual distance rather than food keeps it wild.
Status in North Carolina
NatureServe ranks the coyote S5, Secure, in North Carolina, and the species is treated as native to its North Carolina range. USGS NAS does not list it as nonindigenous in the state.
Full species profile
