Coyotes (Canis latrans) are highly adaptable, medium-sized carnivores that now inhabit nearly every large city in the United States and Canada. To help understand how coyotes have adapted to living in urban environments, we compared two ecologically and evolutionarily important behavioral traits (i.e., bold-shy and exploration-avoidance behavior) in two contrasting environments (i.e., rural and urban). Boldness is an individual’s reaction to a risky situation and exploration is an individual’s willingness to explore novel situations. Our results from both tests indicate that urban coyotes are bolder and more exploratory than rural coyotes and that within both populations there are individuals that vary across both spectrums. Bolder behavior in urban coyotes emerged over several decades and we speculate on possible processes (e.g., learning and selection) and site differences that could be playing a role in this behavioral adaptation. We hypothesize that an important factor is how people treat coyotes; in the rural area coyotes were regularly persecuted whereas in the urban area coyotes were rarely persecuted and sometimes positively rewarded to be in close proximity of people. Negative consequences of this behavioral adaptation are coyotes that become bold enough to occasionally prey on pets or attack humans.

Coyotes (Canis latrans Say, 1823) are highly successful in urbanized environments, but as they populate cities, conflict can occur and often manifests in the form of incidents with pets. To better understand whether coyotes view pets as prey or, alternatively, as competitors or a threat, we conducted a diet analysis of coyotes in the Denver metropolitan area (DMA) by analyzing scats. We also examined differences in diet between high- and low-density housing and among seasons. We found only small percentages of trash and domestic pets in the coyote diet. The presence of pets in the diet did not coincide with the increase of pet conflicts in the DMA in December and January, supporting the hypothesis that coyote conflict with pets is primarily driven by competition or a threat response. Coyotes relied mostly on native plant and animal species, and rodents and lagomorphs were the most prevalent diet items. Coyotes consumed rodents and non-native plants more often in high-density housing and deer, corn, and native plants more often in low-density housing. Coyotes also consumed more fruits and invertebrates during summer and autumn and more mammals and birds in winter and spring. As human–coyote conflicts increase in urban areas, understanding how coyotes and other urban-adapted carnivores use anthropogenic resources may provide insight that can be used to promote coexistence between humans and wildlife.