Anyone who has lived in the city for a long time can tell you – over time, you stop noticing new surprises. Unicycling bagpiper. A changer on the subway. Colors that turn the streets into art.
Coyotes in big cities seem bold and fearless of new experiences. That’s according to a new study that researchers conducted in more than a dozen locations across the US, comparing the response of urban and rural coyotes to new stimuli.
The results were the same: urban animals did not budge when faced with new things. Javier Monzón, a biologist at Pepperdine University in Malibu, California, who co-authored the study, says: “Urban coyotes across the country take more risks than coyotes in rural areas.” That doesn’t mean they’re aggressive, it just means they’re not afraid of things they’re not used to.
The study was the first to look at urban and rural coyotes in such a broad area – 623 stations in 16 locations around the country. Although coyotes have lived in the western US for thousands of years, in recent decades they have rapidly expanded across the continent due to a lack of predators and abundant food.
It was also a way to ask a broader question about urban wildlife in general — because coyotes are everywhere, Monzón says. “One of the great things about coyotes is that they’re everywhere,” he says. “So it was a really good way to study how urban wildlife behaves differently than their rural counterparts.”
Researchers have set up camera trap stations, with remote cameras that are triggered by any warm-bodied animal that walks in front of them. In half of those places, they built structures with four poles and some string – a novelty for coyotes. Inside that small building, they put a lot of teaspoon of meat and scent cloth to attract the animals. Western urban coyotes spent 4 seconds closer to the bait site than their rural counterparts. Researchers said the behavioral gap is likely a product of less fear of harassment in communities, where recreational hunting is prohibited and coyotes face fewer threats from humans. Their findings were published in the journal Scientific Reports in December 2025.
Niamh Quinn, a wildlife ecologist at the University of California Division of Agriculture and Natural Resources, said the results did not surprise her. “Coyotes are incredibly adaptable,” he says. “They just go about their daily business of being coyotes among us, and they don’t pay much attention to us anymore.”
Coyote populations are increasing in cities across the US. A 2016 study found coyotes present in 96 of 105 cities surveyed. But many residents are struggling to find new ways to deal with predators in their areas, due to concerns about conflicts with people, children and pets. In 2019, a study by the National Park Service found that 20% of the diet of urban coyotes is made up of cats.
Monzón says the results of the new study could help cities manage their behavior better: while the gap between urban and rural coyotes was more pronounced in western cities, the findings were similar across all cities. That means that management practices that work well in one area will likely work in another.
Quinn says the biggest research question for him is whether sedation — making coyotes uncomfortable around people — actually works. It involves being big, bold and loud – using actions such as shouting, waving or using things that make noise – until the animal leaves the area completely. And it’s not at all clear that it’s working, he says. Sometimes it comes down to the individual. “You could drive a squirrel crazy and it would just look at you, and if it had a middle finger, it would raise it,” he says. Or you could poke a frog and it would tuck its tail between its legs and not look back.”
In order to test this, Quinn tries to trap coyotes, coyotes and fog half of them and measure how their use of space changes after that – in fact, see if they start to behave like rural coyotes.
Cities seem to have an effect on other species as well. As Monzón drives around Los Angeles, he sees crows sitting on the side of a busy road – seemingly unfazed by passing cars. He also notices squirrels or birds that are not so afraid of humans, and that makes him wonder. For coyotes, there is still an open question: “What we don’t know is whether this change is due to habituation,” he says, “or if it is due to evolution, like a genetic change, to be more courageous.”
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