Coyote
Canis latrans
— Where the name comes from
Coyote is the Nahuatl coyōtl, which reached Italian through Mexican Spanish: an Aztec word never translated, because no European language had the animal to name. The Latin latrans, “barking”, describes instead what struck Anglo-Saxon naturalists: the vocal repertoire of yelps, trills and broken howls that no wolf produces.
— Facts
- Group
- Mammals · Mammalia
- Order
- Carnivores
- Habitat
- Grassland, desert, woodland, city outskirts and city centres
- Range
- North and Central America, from Alaska to Panama; still expanding east and south
- Size
- 75–95 cm long, 8–20 kg
- Diet
- Omnivore — rodents, hares, carrion, fruit, refuse
- Lifespan
- 6–8 years in the wild
— Characteristics
- 01
It lives alone, in pairs or in small family groups, matching its social structure to the prey available.
- 02
It now occupies a range three times larger than the one it had before European colonisation.
- 03
Established packs have been recorded inside Chicago and New York, with territories taking in cemeteries and interchanges.
— What sets it apart
A century of extermination campaigns — poisons, bounties, rifles — has not reduced the coyote: it has multiplied it. When persecution breaks up the groups, subordinate females that would not have bred begin to do so, and litters grow from four to eight pups or more. It is a compensatory response to mortality, and it turns every attempt at elimination into a demographic incentive. Meanwhile the animal has filled the vacuum left by the wolf, and in parts of the east has interbred with it: the coywolf trotting through North American suburbs is an animal we made.
