I recently wrote about the interactions of a pack, which is a coyote family, as I found them traversing a park, headed to their “home” area in the morning. It is rare to see a family together, though two of them can be seen at times. It is more common to encounter a single lone coyote.
The reason for this is that coyotes hunt individually. This is because their food source in this area consists mostly of voles and gophers: small rodents which, as food, cannot be divided up among various hunters — these are crunched and then swallowed whole. In our area it might take more than one coyote to take down a raccoon, but raccoons are not the normal prey for coyotes — they are quite large and fierce fighters. We have seen skunk carcasses, and it is possible that more than one coyote shares in this.
Pack activity does occur in other areas when smaller rodents aren’t so prevalent, and when there happen to be larger prey around. Likely candidates are young deer or unprotected young farm animals such as lambs.
