I live in rural western Indiana, about 20 miles from Illinois; we have a BIG coyote, deer, and turkey population. It's been my experience that about the only accurate thing you can say about coyotes is that no two of them show the same behavior.
Until about 6 months ago, my wife had a "coy dog"; her mother was a border collie and her "daddy" was a coyote. When she was still just a pup, (long before my wife and I ever knew each other ), there was a red fox that had a den right across the gravel road in front of our house; the fox had a litter of little foxes, and one day the wife sees Steamer across the road, playing with 2 or 3 little fox kits, (I think that's what they call them); for the next few months, Steamer spent more time with the foxes than she did at home.
We don't see a lot of coyotes, but we hear them almost every night, especially in the warmer months. Being "big" on wildlife photography, I spend a lot of time and energy tramping around in the thousands of acres of woods in the general vicinity of where we live; sometimes I would have needed a pretty decent rifle with a pretty decent scope to ever get a shot at a coyote; other times I could have probably killed one with a ball bat! Coyotes are....."unpredictable".......(and I can assure you, they will definitely impregnate your female "house dog" if you allow her to run! ) Another even more pressing reason NOT to allow a house "pet" dog to "roam", is ticks; our neighbor's big white German Sheppard contracted Lyme Disease from a tick bite, and their vet bills have been astronomical since. (Another reason why I use a lot of repellent when I'm out & about; ) Lyme Disease is BAD NEWS!
We also have a 20 lb. rat terrier named Peabody; (he thinks he's a 90 lb rottweiler ); until just the last year or two, every time I let him outside to do his business, if I took my eyes off of him for 2 seconds, he would dash across the road, into the woods, and you would not see hide nor hair of the little rat for the next 2 or 3 hours! Many nights, we could tell from their howling that there were a dozen coyotes within a stone's throw of the house, and I always expected that the coyotes would "get" Peabody, then my wife would "get" me!
For a long time I never even thought about taking a pistol with me when I go to the woods; I know a LOT of guys around her in the 11 years that I've been here, and just about everyone around here is either a deer hunter, a turkey hunter, a bow hunter......everyone here "hunts" something......and many of them have warned me about coyotes; even then I didn't get worried much about not having a firearm with me in the woods; that all ended about a year ago, when 4 or 5 different people reported (and SHOWED ) images taken by a trail camera of a mountain lion! Several of which were within 2 miles of my house! That's when I first started thinking about getting "something" to carry with me in the woods. (And if the opportunity presents it's self again, to try to help reduce the coyote population in the county. )
One thing IS for absolute certain, regarding coyotes; they are by far, the single most "adaptable" species of small mammal on Planet Earth! You could drop a hundred coyotes on parachutes out of an airplane, and regardless of where they all landed, every one of them would "make a living" and probably thrive! And no matter where they thrive, they can always "increase" their numbers faster than "we" can "decrease" them!
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