By Dr. Hance Ellington, UF/IFAS Range Cattle Research and Education Center, Ona

Few animals generate as much conversation around the ranch as the coyote. Coyotes are nearly everywhere in Florida now — they reached the Panhandle in the late 1960s, expanded rapidly through the following decades, and are now established in all 67 counties. Worth noting: they aren’t an invasive or introduced species here. They spread into Florida naturally as the native red wolf disappeared, and the state recognizes them as established through that range expansion. They are here to stay. A lot of what we assume about them looks different once you put GPS collars and trail cameras on real animals, which is exactly what my lab has been doing across the state. Here’s an update on what we’re finding.

Know your neighbor

An adult Florida coyote weighs 25 to 40 pounds — closer to a medium dog than the large predator people sometimes picture. Our captures show males run about four to five pounds heavier than females. Coyotes raise one litter a year, roughly six pups in the spring, with both parents helping. And despite the “pack” reputation, they live in family groups, not packs: a resident male and female pair that may tolerate their own juveniles from previous years.

Their diet is the part that surprises people most. Coyotes are true omnivores — adaptable, seasonal, and highly individual. A statewide FWC study of coyote stomachs found the diet dominated by small mammals like rodents and rabbits (about 31%) and plant material such as fruit and berries (about 30%), followed by insects and human-associated food like garbage. Livestock shows up across diet studies, but only as a small fraction. In other words, a coyote’s living is mostly made on rodents, rabbits, bugs, and fruit.

The calf question

Many producers are convinced coyotes take calves, and those concerns deserve to be taken seriously. What the research so far suggests is that confirmed predation of healthy calves is less common than it can appear from the field. In UF/IFAS work that followed 711 newborn calves across five south Florida ranches, coyotes were not a confirmed source of calf loss. One reason perceptions run higher is scavenging: coyotes readily feed on animals that are already dead, so finding one at a carcass doesn’t always tell you what killed the calf in the first place. There are also biological reasons calves aren’t an easy meal — coyotes usually have abundant alternative food, and a defensive cow that can weigh over 1,000 pounds is a real risk to a 30-pound predator.

Smaller livestock are a different story. Coyotes can and do prey on goats and sheep, so producers running those animals have more reason for caution. And none of this means coyotes are irrelevant on a working ranch — it’s a question we’re now studying directly (more on that below).

Where they live, and why killing them rarely solves the problem

Not all coyotes behave the same way on the landscape. Residents hold a territory. Transients don’t — some are “local” animals waiting for an opening nearby, while others are long-distance wanderers covering enormous ground. We’ve collared individuals that traveled across multiple counties over hundreds of days.

Territory size depends heavily on the setting. Our collared residents held home ranges of roughly 140 acres in urban Broward County, about 1,350 acres on DeLuca rangeland, and about 1,900 acres in panhandle pine. Urban coyotes get by on a small fraction of the ground a rangeland coyote needs.

That transient system also explains why lethal removal is so often a short-term fix. One of our collared resident males was killed crossing a road in the spring of 2025, leaving his territory empty — and a wandering transient moved straight in and became the new resident within about nine days. Remove a resident, and there’s usually another coyote ready to fill the vacancy. This is why broad-scale removal tends to be expensive, temporary, and ineffective: vacated ground repopulates quickly, sometimes at higher densities than before. Targeting a specific problem animal that is causing verified damage is a different and more workable approach.

What we’re working on now

The real update is the research underway across three Florida landscapes — urban South Florida, central rangeland, and panhandle pine. A few threads are directly relevant to rangeland:

On the rangeland side, we’re examining how free-ranging cattle respond to areas coyotes use heavily — whether cattle behavior shifts around predator activity on a working ranch. We’re also studying how coyotes interact with other rangeland wildlife, including whether they target nesting wild turkey hens.

Movement data rounds out the picture. From over 345,000 hourly GPS steps, we can see that rangeland and pine-country coyotes are mostly active from dusk to dawn, shifting where they forage between open ground and cover depending on the time of day.

The bottom line for producers

Coyotes are a permanent, adaptable part of Florida’s rangelands, and the collars and cameras are helping us replace assumptions with a clearer picture. A few practical points hold up well: don’t give coyotes a reason to associate people and livestock with food — dispose of carcasses promptly and remove accessible food sources, since scavenging is what draws them in. Keep a close eye during calving season, and use fencing to protect smaller livestock where it’s practical. Recognize that blanket removal rarely delivers lasting results, because the landscape refills quickly. And remember that coyotes earn part of their keep — they help control rodents and rabbits, and by preying on raccoons and other mid-sized nest predators they can even benefit ground-nesting birds.

We’ll keep sharing results as this work develops. If you have questions about coyotes on your operation, reach out to the Range Cattle REC in Ona or find more at wildlifeontherange.com.

This research is supported by USDA NIFA and carried out with partners including Tall Timbers, Archbold Biological Station, Broward County Parks, and the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission.

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Dr. Hance Ellington is an assistant professor at the UF/IFAS Range Cattle Research and Education Center in Ona, FL where he is the head of the Rangeland Wildlife Ecology Lab. He can be reached at e.ellington@ufl.edu or 863-374-7049.

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