What it means
The coyote is Scottsdale’s resident wild dog: gray-brown, lanky, the height of a medium dog and lighter than it looks, trotting across a golf fairway at dawn as if it pays dues. You will hear them before you see them, a burst of yips and howls from a wash after dark that sets off every dog on the block. You will see them on the Greenbelt in the middle of the city, along the Preserve edge, on resort lawns and, eventually, on your own patio wall.
Locals use the word calmly, because coyotes are no threat to people, and with one sharp exception: pets. A neighbor saying “the coyotes got another cat” is a normal sentence here. The desert wildlife field guide ranks coyotes as a real danger to cats and small dogs and almost never to people, and the dogs guide puts it more bluntly: a fenced yard is not a guarantee, and a leash is.
Where you’ll meet it
Everywhere, at dawn and dusk. The Indian Bend Wash corridor and its golf courses; the washes and trailheads of the Preserve, where trail cameras in the 2011 to 2013 survey caught coyotes more often than almost any other mammal; and late winter, when breeding season puts more of them on the move in daylight.
Where the word came from
Coyote comes from Nahuatl, the Aztec language, where the animal was coyōtl. Spanish borrowed it, the historian Francisco Javier Clavijero put it in print in his 1780 history of Mexico, and English picked it up from travelers’ accounts in the 1820s, with spellings that wandered for decades before settling. The scientific name, Canis latrans, means “barking dog,” for the vocal range anyone who has lived next to a wash can confirm.
How to say it is a regional tell. Three syllables, ky-OH-tee, is more common near the Mexican border and in the East; two syllables, KY-ote, is old cowboy country. Both are right, and Scottsdale, a cow town that became a resort, uses both.
The word also became a brand. When the Winnipeg Jets moved to the Valley in 1996 they became the Phoenix Coyotes, wore the famous multicolored kachina-style coyote on their sweaters, renamed themselves the Arizona Coyotes in 2014, and left for Utah in 2024; the Cardinals and Coyotes entry has the rest. “Yotes” outlived the team.
What it is not
Not a wolf, a fox or a stray dog, though a mangy coyote can pass for one. And in border news, a coyote is also a person who smuggles migrants across the Mexico line; context will tell you which one a headline means.
The fine print
Arizona Game and Fish’s 2007 Living with Coyotes brochure, which the Town of Paradise Valley still posts, puts adults at 15 to 30 pounds, females slightly smaller, with litters of two to twelve pups, averaging six, raised in a den. Coyotes eat whatever is around: seeds, dates and other fruit, carrion, rodents, rabbits, garbage, pet food, cats and small dogs. A Game and Fish biologist put the pet problem plainly to FOX 10 in 2023: a pet looks like a coyote’s natural food, a rabbit.
The department’s central point is that removal does not work. Take a coyote out of an area and others move in from surrounding territory and breed faster to fill the gap. What works is hazing: never letting a coyote get comfortable. Yell, clap, wave your arms, spray it with a hose, throw something toward it, shake a can of pennies, and keep at it until it leaves. Do not run, which triggers the chase instinct, and pick up small pets.
The law backs this up. Feeding coyotes is illegal in Maricopa and Pima counties under ARS 13-2927, with a fine of up to $300. Coyotes may be captured or killed only under a Game and Fish license or in defense of a person. Game and Fish’s own record is the argument: of eight coyote bites reported in Maricopa County between 1994 and 2004, all were attributed to people feeding them.
For a yard, the department suggests a wall or fence at least six feet tall with the bottom buried a few inches and a roller or wire on top; the standard Scottsdale block wall is about that tall with nothing on top, and to a coyote it is a step.