New Hampshire’s 794 coyote records cover all ten counties, from Sullivan, Cheshire, and Hillsborough in the settled southwest to Coos in the far north, with White Mountain National Forest, Fox State Forest, and the Lake Winnipesaukee shore all represented. The animal reached northern New England only in the mid-twentieth century; it has made itself thoroughly at home since.
The eastern coyote, a heavier animal
What spread into New England was not quite the coyote of the plains. Moving east through the Great Lakes region it mixed with wolves, and the result is the eastern coyote, taller and substantially heavier than its western kin, with a diet to match. New Hampshire coyotes hunt snowshoe hare and rodents, scavenge winter-killed deer, and pull down deer themselves in deep-snow yards where the footing favors the predator. In summer and fall they turn readily to berries, apples, and corn, which is one reason they thrive from dairy country to the spruce woods.
October is the season of movement
Reports arrive in every month but crest in October, when the year’s grown pups leave their parents’ ground and travel widely in search of their own, crossing roads and calling through the cool nights. That autumn surge, not any change in where coyotes live, is what the record is registering. Direct sightings stay uncommon everywhere. Most New Hampshire residents in coyote country know the animal by its night chorus or its tracks in new snow, and the right answer to a bold one is distance and a tight lid on anything edible.
Status in New Hampshire
NatureServe ranks the coyote S5, Secure, in New Hampshire, and the species is treated as native to its New Hampshire range. USGS NAS does not list it as nonindigenous in the state.
Full species profile
