North Dakota’s 209 coyote records tilt hard toward the badlands: Theodore Roosevelt National Park alone accounts for 96, and Billings County, which holds much of the park, leads the county list with 105. But the tail of the map runs to Burleigh, Grand Forks, and Stutsman, across the prairie and farm country of the whole state.
An original animal of the plains
This is some of the coyote’s oldest ground. It has hunted the mixed-grass prairie and the Little Missouri breaks since long before settlement, living on ground squirrels, rabbits, mice, and carrion, and it weathered every campaign against it. The badlands around the park and the Little Missouri National Grassland show the classic open-country pattern, but records from Fort Ransom State Park in the east and the Oahe country along the Missouri confirm the coyote works shelterbelts, stubble fields, and pothole edges just as readily.
No off season on the northern prairie
Coyotes neither migrate nor hibernate, and the record reflects it, thin through the deep-cold months of January and February, then building in May as pups are born and the adults hunt in daylight to keep a den fed. The summer rise, strongest in July and August, comes as the young ones leave the den and join the hunt, when family groups howl back and forth across the evening prairie. Winter or summer, the encounter is usually distant: a trotting shape on a skyline, a chorus from a coulee. One that approaches people has been fed and should be given space, not a meal.
Status in North Dakota
NatureServe ranks the coyote S5, Secure, in North Dakota, and the species is native to its North Dakota range. USGS NAS does not list it as nonindigenous in the state.
Full species profile
