Anyone tuned-in to coyotes over any length of time will become aware of how highly intelligent they are. If intelligence is defined as “the ability to acquire and apply knowledge and skills,” then coyotes demonstrate it in abundance through their ability to adapt, their perceptiveness, and their ability to meet and solve challenges. I put this posting together because, although I have always accepted their intelligence, I hadn’t thought about it in a cohesive way until a CBS interviewer put the question to me: “Tell me about their intelligence”. So here it is.
Their intelligence begins with their highly refined senses: vision, acute hearing, and most notably, smell — and remember that each of these is connected to highly developed areas of the brain that can finely interpret these. They are able to gather nuanced information and then finely manipulate, organize and remember that information for their own needs. If you look it up, you’ll find that a coyote’s olfactory lobe is more than twice the size of a domestic dog’s, enabling them to interpret a world saturated in scent. Smelling helps them detect threats, find mates, recognize rivals, *map* their territories, and accurately navigate their territories and beyond.
Please keep cats indoors: it’s a given, and not shocking, that they will opportunistically grab cats if circumstances are are right. Coyotes are both predator and prey, so they are always suspicious and looking over their shoulder for trouble, particularly from dogs, and ready to react.
Coyotes are generalists—just like us humans. Our species thrives not by fitting into a single ecological niche, but by adapting flexibly to many. Coyotes share this capacity: they can live in all climates from the coldest north to the hottest deserts; from arid desert to beach to mountain to riparian terrains, and among all levels of human population density, from ranches to city parks, to our densest neighborhoods. They are both predator and prey, which means they must think like both at the same time: they hunt in a dominant fashion, and at the same time they are continuously highly-suspicious of being hunted. In wilder areas, wolves, large cats and humans kill them. So they keep defensively aware of their surroundings and everything in it. As Jake Breeden put it: “Wolves and humans stride across landscapes as if they own a place, whereas coyotes slink, pause, and dart because they’ve seldom owned anything—except their ability to read the room.” Coyotes are always reading their environment—always strategizing and planning ahead.
Their GPS: They Absorb and Understand the Lay-of-the-Land and the Situations On It
They are great at mapping spaces and situations and have amazing memories for this
Coyotes are incredibly aware of the land — I call it their GPS system — and the situations thereon. They understand not just the geography, but the dynamic situations on those geographical locations which they move through. In San Francisco, for example, within their 2.5 square mile territories, they have a detailed understanding and memory not only for where everything is and how safe it is for them: parks, corridors, food sources, safe street crossings, and risky dog routes—but also that the dynamics of those areas change over the duration of a day and over longer periods of time.
Dogs are their chief nemesis in cities, but they have to watch out for ravens and crows and all corvids, and cars are their chief killers in urban areas.
They also remember meaningfully. Unlike humans, who often need notes to recall things, coyotes store what’s relevant: feeding spots, threatening individuals, the sound and appearance of specific cars, the daily rhythm of traffic, and even when spigots are turned on and can be relied on for water.
LEARNING: Curiosity and Dealing with Challenges: They Learn and Change by Watching and Trying
Coyotes are fast learners, mostly by observing and imitating. Sometimes it takes only two exposures—or fewer—for a coyote to remember which car feeds them, and where. I’ve seen them watch dogs dig to catch a gopher — when the dog leaves empty-handed, they hurry over to the excavated spot, having less work to do now. I’ve seen them spy on a a sibling burying food and then steal it and bury it somewhere else just for themselves. I read that they’ve watched humans unlatch gates and then attempted the same. They learn when it’s safe to cross roads, often looking both ways as they’ve seen humans and other coyotes do, and even use the traffic light to help them get across. They can adjust to changing conditions: so for example, when prey becomes scarce, they switch to berries or insects. They adapt by creatively trying something new and different. Lou has written about a lone coyote who, in the absence of regular rodent prey, has switched to crayfish fishing as the major part of his diet!!
Eating blackberries when prey is less plentiful and Crossing the Street with the light at a crosswalk.
You can read about cognitive tests where coyotes outperform domestic dogs in independent problem-solving, persistence, and creativity. Dogs are intimately connected to humans — the two have evolved together over thousands of years, so dogs look to humans for guidance, whereas coyotes think for themselves. This independent intelligence makes them wildly unsuitable as pets—but supremely equipped for survival.
I’ve seen them engage in purposeful deception: leading people or dogs away from dens, vocalizing from false locations to protect pups. I’ve also seen them *pretend* to be hunting in the distance when in fact they are assessing the threat from a dog or even a human. Deception requires insight, forward planning, and an ability to mentally model another’s perspective.
HIGHLY SOCIAL: Family Life is Immensely Interactive, Organized and Communicative
Communication through vocalization, eye-contact and body language, family life, hierarchy and care through mutual grooming are tantamount to their survival.
Coyotes live in families and form long-lasting bonds. They constantly interact interpersonally and have individual relationships with each other. They can *read* each other, and they communicate constantly using a variety of vocalizations —howls, yips, growls, whines, squeals, hisses, and much more —modulated with tongue, lips, pitch, and tone. They use these to express their feelings and intentions towards each other, as warnings, to *check in* and call to other family members over great distances, and to define themselves to any neighboring coyotes. They also rely on more silent forms of communication involving body language and facial expressions, which even we humans can sometimes interpret. By watching them carefully, it becomes obvious that their finely nuanced communication is complex and intentional. Their constant interactions reinforce hierarchy, cooperation, and cohesion within families.
Scent-marking is another key form of communication: they use it to define and and reinforce territorial boundaries through urine scent marking, the same way we use fences. But it’s also through smell that they can detect injury in each other and in other species which helps with their hunting. They primarily identify outsiders — along with their personal information such as gender, social status, health — through their odors.
Scent marking and use of odors are other forms of communication.
Coyotes recognize individuals: not only within their species, of course, but across species. They can distinguish particular dogs, cars, and even humans—far more reliably than most people can identify individual coyotes. And, by the way, ravens who are also highly intelligent and social can do the same — they can identify individual humans, even though we can’t tell THEM apart!
PLAY: They Play Creatively and Invent Games
Coyotes play and entertain themselves constantly!
Coyotes aren’t just practical. They play constantly! They tease and horse around, they invent games with sticks, balls, and found objects. They seem to like and be energized by novelty and dealing with it, and even by humor. Their play demonstrates creativity and imagination—they know the difference between “just for fun” and “for real.”
They plan ahead: choosing rendezvous spots and returning to favored hangout spots. Their actions show intentionality, not just instinct. In fact, it appears that planning is involved in a good deal of their activities. Have you ever seen a coyote trotting down the street? It’s not random: they know exactly where they are going and what they are doing — it’s planned out.
SURVIVORS: Evolving and Adapting in Response to Human Pressures
Coyotes have large neocortices—the outer brain layer associated with higher-level functions such as reasoning, learning, and decision-making. This helps explain their capacity for adaptation and behavioral plasticity. They think, observe, experiment, and remember—because they must. Survival demands intelligence.[Wikipedia]
Their intelligence is not like a human’s—after all, they have different bodies with different capacities, capabilities, and different needs, but it’s real, and robust, and magically suited to the world they inhabit. Despite constant persecution by humans (hunters and even our own government kills hundreds of thousands of coyotes every year), coyotes have expanded their range throughout the northern continent. In many places, their numbers are actually highest where they are hunted the hardest. They don’t just survive. They outsmart.
And perhaps that, more than anything, is why some humans dislike them: because they don’t yield, don’t disappear, and don’t conform. They adapt—and they persist.
