More Burying Behavior

Prey to be buried

Here you have a video, showing a coyote burying something from almost start to finish. I snapped the photo to the left immediately beforehand — it was twilight and I could barely see, but my camera did well. The photo shows the size of the prey the coyote is carrying. It looks about the size of a gopher.

Then, under those extremely bad twilight lighting conditions I was able to video almost the entire sequence of the coyote burying his prey and covering up the evidence. The coyote began by poking his prey down into the ground as far as possible with his snout, and then used his snout to cover it up with leaves and debris. There was no “digging out a hole” beforehand in this case.

We have seen coyotes bury items for an apparent variety of reasons. Sometimes we’ve seen coyotes bury items they like to roll in: Burying Perfume Bottle or Another Burial. And, at other times, they bury prey that can be consumed later: Buried Rabbit Found or A Burial: Coyote Behavior. The absolute best observation was by a contributor, Heather, who saw a coyote bury a rock! Burying a rock.