About the Author: Jason Knight is a cofounder of Alderleaf Wilderness College and the author of The Essential Skills of Wilderness Survival. He has been teaching wilderness skills for over twenty years. Learn more about Jason Knight.
Gaits: Coyotes utilize a variety of gaits, including walking, trotting, loping, and galloping gaits. One of their favored gaits is an overstep trot, where front and hind feet on the same side of the body land close together, with the hind landing slightly ahead of the front. These trotting gaits leave a line of tracks that is very straight and narrow. When utilizing a trot, step lengths between groups of tracks often measure from 15 to 22 inches. The picture below shows a slow trot, where each hind track has landed slightly behind the front track.
Similar Tracks: Domestic dog tracks are often mistaken as coyote footprints. Tracks of domestic dogs are generally rounder, have blunt nails, and are less symmetrical. Another feature that helps distinguish coyote from domestic dog tracks relates to the negative space between the toes and pad. On coyotes, an X-shape can be drawn in the negative space, whereas on most domestic dogs, the negative space does not form an X-shape. For comparison, pictured below is a coyote footprint (on the left) next to a domestic dog track (on the right).
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Coyotes are the most widespread species of the dog family in North America, found in all of the United States, and most of Canada and Mexico. Coyotes have given me fantastic lessons in deciphering track and sign, especially in the tricky business of distinguishing wild dog (including coyote tracks) from the domestic dog.
Another big clue between domestic dog and coyote tracks lies in any scat you might find nearby. Domestic dog scat generally looks just like what we put in their bowls: highly processed brown mush. Coyote scat, by comparison, can be incredibly diverse because these animals are omnivorous opportunists. In one Missouri study of coyote scat, local coyotes were found to have consumed 47 different animal species and 28 different plants.* Thus, don’t be surprised if your coyote scat contains fur/hair, berries, nuts, garden crops, bone bits, grass, leaves, or dozens of other appetizing tidbits. Once while tracking in central California, I was consistently finding bright orange scats, which made perfect sense when I found out there was a huge carrot farm nearby.
On our walk along the Olympic coast, how could we tell if we were looking at a coyote track or a hiker’s runaway dogs? Look at the “coyote” column below, and from what you know of dogs as pets, see if you can guess how a wild dog’s characteristics would change because of domestication.
The points of comparison above are arranged with more common characteristics toward the top of the table. But keep in mind that every dog is different. A pet who spends most of her time lounging indoors will likely show more domestic-dog characteristics than a rural pet who spends most of his time in the woods chasing (and perhaps eating) squirrels. And of course, sometimes coyotes are playful and sometimes their digits splay. Take in all the evidence and try to create a story that fits with the landscape, rather than using the above chart as merely a checklist.
Many of Coyote’s wild-dog relatives have been hunted down or pushed out of many areas by humans, but coyote numbers have actually grown in the past couple of centuries. This is due to their intelligence and adaptability. If you want to find this animal, often known as a symbol of trickery and stubbornness, go out and walk the edges—the streamsides, the beaches, the transitions between forest and meadow—for that is where Coyote roams.
What Dog Tracks Look Like
Coyote Or Dog? How To Tell From Tracks
Coyotes are a part of the dog family, so it may be hard for an average person to differentiate between dog and coyote tracks. However, to a trained eye, it can be fairly simple to tell the two apart. There are subtle differences in the tracks between the two that if you know what to look for, you can tell them apart. When you find a track, it is important to look at more than one print to get an idea of what animal left the trail. At times, the track of dogs and coyotes look so similar that it may be hard to tell them apart just by looking at one print. We have the two different type of tracks summarised so you know how they differ.