What makes coyotes so prevalent?

Coyotes — more often heard, hauntingly, than seen, more often misunderstood than appreciated — are mating now.

By spring, there will be pups and a family unit, yipping and howling at night, the few sounding like the many. By fall, the kids will be grown up and leave home, finding a new place to hunt and mate and vocalize.

That place? Wherever. They are the most adaptable predator around.

“They’re very smart and very social,” said urban wildlife expert Laura Simon.

Which is why coyotes — which only migrated eastward into the state about 70 years ago — are now found everywhere in Connecticut. They live in the woods, in the fields, in suburbs and cities.

“They live close by us,” said Paul Colburn, master wildlife conservationist with the state Department of Energy and Environmental Protection. “They are much more enterprising and opportunistic than other animals. They’ve learned to live the way we live.”

Colburn gave a Zoom talk about coyotes last week to the Northwest Connecticut Land Conservancy this month.

Paul Elconin, the conservancy’s director of land conservation, said coyotes show up with regularity on nature cameras set up at various spots on its 13,000 acres. He said he hears them at his home in Westchester County, when the windows are open and the coyotes are talking.

Bethany Sheffer, naturalist and volunteer coordinator at the Sharon Audubon Center, said she’s seen and heard coyotes are there as well.

“Both,” she said.

Nor are they only howling at a distance — Sheffer said she heard up close and personal yipping one night when she was checking on injured birds in the center’s avian rehab center.

Coyotes are the only canid predator native to North America. From the Great Plains, they’ve spread north to Canada and Alaska, south to Central America.

The coyotes we see in Connecticut are eastern coyotes. They have a healthy dash of wolf DNA in their genetic makeup with some domestic dog DNA thrown in as well. That makes them larger than their western counterparts.

Colburn said that unlike wolves, coyotes hunt in small family units — mother, father and offspring. The parents are monogamous and both share in raising their young.

One reason they are so adaptable is that they are omnivores. They mostly eat small rodents — mice, rats, squirrels, rabbits.

But they’ll also feast on roadkill carrion and, in winter, take down an ailing or injured white-tailed deer. In season, they’ll feed on fruits, nuts and berries. They have molars to grind as well as incisors to slash.

In the suburbs, alas, they can also nab small dogs and cats for a meal. They poach poultry pens and kill unguarded calves and lambs.

“We have a farmer on one of our properties that raises sheep, and coyotes are a problem for him,” Elconin said.

Colburn said people can guard against coyotes by keeping their small pets in at night, by not leaving pet food and garbage where coyotes can find it and by keeping their livestock well-penned. The DEEP’s factsheet on coyotes is at portal.ct.gov/DEEP/Wildlife/Fact-Sheets/Coyote

Urban wildlife expert Laura Simon said communities in the west have learned collectively to move coyotes along by harassing them — yelling, waving arms, making a fuss.

“Coyotes get the message,” she said. “They can be taught to stay away.”

Their howling, Colburn said, is just their way of communicating — to greet one another, to call pups home.

“Sometimes, they just do it because they can,” he said.

It only takes a few coyotes to make an unholy racket. But they can harmonize.

“When they all howl together, it sounds like a symphony,” Simon said.

Modern humans have not done well by coyotes. The federal government tried to exterminate them, killing about 6.5 million by trapping, shooting and poisoning.

Federal programs today now kill about 500,000 coyotes annually. Colburn said hunters and trappers in Connecticut kill 400 to 600 a year — about a 10th of the 4,000 to 6,000 coyotes in the state.

And yet, coyotes prevail — too smart, too wary, too wile-y, too adaptable. When the population gets low, the females have more pups. They repopulate.

“They’re still going, despite our best efforts,” said Michelle Lute, national carnivore conservation manager for Project Coyote, a California-based organization that advocates for human-coyote coexistence.

People are afraid of what’s unfamiliar to them. But coyotes, even in Connecticut, are as American as mom and apple pie.

“They’re quintessentially American,” Lute said. “They’re our Song Dog.”