Wyoming’s 2,238 coyote records are anchored by a single place: Yellowstone National Park alone accounts for 1,616 of them, with Grand Teton National Park adding 192 more, so Park and Teton counties dominate the map. Beyond the parks, records scatter through Sweetwater, Carbon, and Albany counties and the ranch and basin country in between.
Heart of the original range
This is not a species that colonized Wyoming; Wyoming is where the coyote comes from. The animal evolved on the plains and basins of the interior West, and sagebrush steppe, prairie, and mountain parks remain its core habitat. It hunts mice and rabbits in the open, works pronghorn and elk country for carrion and fawns, and dens in cutbanks and rocky slopes, a routine that plays out from the Teton Wilderness and the Absaroka country to the state’s driest basins.
Living alongside wolves again
For much of the 20th century the coyote was the largest wild canine in Wyoming’s parks. After wolves were restored to Yellowstone in the mid-1990s, coyotes there grew warier, yielding carcasses and open valley floors to the bigger predator and keeping closer to cover, and a coyote hunting an open meadow in full daylight is less common in the park than it once was.
A calendar built around pups
Wyoming’s counts crest from May through July and again in September, and that is family biology. Pups born in spring are out of the den by early summer, parents hunt harder and farther to feed them, and by September the year’s young are nearly grown and ranging widely. Winter quiets the record even though the animals stay active and breeding pairs turn vocal by February.
Status in Wyoming
NatureServe ranks the coyote S5, Secure, in Wyoming, and the species is native to the state. USGS NAS does not list it as nonindigenous here.
Full species profile
