Coyote 
Coyote 
Canis latrans Say 
Called also Prairie Wolf. 
Length. 4 feet. 
Description. General colour fulvous, grizzled with black and white 
hairs; under parts whitish; tail tipped with black. 
Range. Northern Mississippi Valley to the Rocky Mountains, 
with allied species south to teas and Mexico, and west- 
ward to California and British Columbia. Dr. C. Hart 
Merriam has shown that many of these coyotes are very 
different from one another, and as in many of our other 
larger animals, we find that instead of one wide ranging 
form of the older authors there are really several perfectly 
distinct species. The distribution of the various coyotes has 
not yet been satisfactorily worked out. 
Coyotes are small, slinking wolves that live in burrows on 
the plains, where they feed principally on jack rabbits, ground 
squirrels and mice. 
They are often called prairie wolves to distinguish them 
from the timber wolves or gray wolves. They combine the 
swiftness, shy cunning and greed of the wolf and fox tribes, 
but lack the ferociousness of their larger cousin, the timber 
wolf. 
Being active, healthy brutes, they undoubtedly enjoy their 
wild, unrestricted life of action and adventure, and are happy in 
their own way, except when suffering from unusually hard luck 
at hunting. Yet somehow they always look distressed and mis- 
erable, and their whining howl at night seems to express all 
the hopeless despair of some wretched spirit of the blind ‘‘ view- 
less wind” that whirls away before a storm ‘‘seeking for some- 
thing lost, it cannot find.” 
Like the gray wolf, coyotes hunt in packs at night, yap- 
ping and howling as they run. 
They often follow the hunter at a safe distance in the hope 
of picking up the offal of the game he has killed. The coyote 
is now rare east of the bunch-grass plains. In Arkansas, Mis- 
souri and Illinois, where they were once common, they are sel- 
dom seen. But in the Butte regions of the upper Missouri and 
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