With 2,828 records, the coyote ranks among the most reported mammals in Washington’s atlas, and the map covers nearly every landscape the state has. King, Pierce, and Snohomish counties carry the heavy Puget Sound lowland totals, while Whitman, Spokane, and Okanogan counties hold the dry interior from the Palouse to the shrub-steppe.
Native to the open country, at home almost anywhere
Washington sits inside the coyote’s original western range, where it evolved as a predator of plains and shrub-steppe living on rabbits, rodents, and carrion. Records from the L.T. Murray Wildlife Area, the Olympic-Willapa Hills complex, and San Juan Islands National Monument reflect that open-country heritage, but the same animal now dens in city parks and greenbelts across the western lowlands, shifting largely to nocturnal hours where people are thick. That wariness is why even residents of the state’s biggest cities rarely see the coyotes living nearby.
No quiet month on the calendar
Unlike the hibernators and migrants in this atlas, the coyote record barely ripples through the year, with counts strong every month and April slightly ahead. The animal neither hibernates nor leaves. Winter breeding, spring pups, and the autumn dispersal of young coyotes simply trade places as the season’s main activity, and each phase keeps the animals on the move.
Status in Washington
NatureServe ranks the coyote S5, Secure, in Washington, and the species is native to the state. USGS NAS does not list it as nonindigenous here.
Full species profile
