Today I attended a lecture by Dr. Christopher Mowry who teaches at Berry College and founded the Atlanta Coyote project. The presentation opened with an image of a coyote (Canis latrans) standing inside Piedmont Park, which was taken in 2016. Coyotes belong to the Genus Canis, which is also home to the gray wolf (Canis lupus), red wolf (Canis rufus), and domestic dog (Canis lupus familiaris). While the gray wolf and coyote are agreed to be clearly separate species by experts, the red wolf has a lot of coyote genes. Both the red wolf and coyote are endemic to North America, meaning they are native and only found in that region. Sadly, the red wolf is now only found in the wild inside Alligator River National Wildlife Refuge in North Carolina.

Historically coyotes were a great plains species. They moved westward for two reasons in particular. The gray wolf is a natural predator of the gray wolf as is the red wolf. Due to the elimination of these predators the coyote was able to expand into new territory. But historically there was a region in which the gray wolf and coyote did live together, known as an admixture zone, where possible hybridization occurred. Urbanization also created an ideal habitat for the coyote, as it creates more edge habitat which increases their food supply of small mammals. For these regions, the coyote can now be found in every state, except for Hawaii.

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