Coyotes are among the most thoroughly recorded mammals in New Mexico’s atlas, with 2,945 records touching all 33 counties, from the Rio Grande bosque through Bernalillo and Sandoval to the high caldera grasslands and the desert basins of Doña Ana and Hidalgo.
A generalist at home in every habitat
A coyote eats what the land offers: rodents, rabbits, insects, fruit in season, and carrion year-round. That flexibility explains the map. Records run from the basalt escarpment of Petroglyph National Monument on Albuquerque’s west side, up the cottonwood corridor of Rio Grande Valley State Park, to the meadows of Valles Caldera National Preserve and the Chihuahuan desert foothills of Organ Mountains - Desert Peaks National Monument, and the species works every one of those landscapes in much the same way.
Active in every month
Coyotes neither hibernate nor migrate, and New Mexico’s counts hold steady across the calendar. July posts the single highest tally, the season when pups born in spring are out of the den and traveling with their parents, but no month falls quiet. For all that presence, most New Mexicans never see one; a coyote here is usually a distant shape crossing open ground or a chorus of yips after dark.
Status in New Mexico
NatureServe ranks the coyote S5, Secure, in New Mexico, and the species is native to the state. USGS NAS does not list it as nonindigenous here.
Full species profile
