08/02/2026
I remember this well - I was actively involved in the leadership of the revitalized Sheep Producers Association of NL and Our Farm was expanding our flock. SPANL lobbied Government to hunt the coyote any time but were denied. Instead, our farm invested thousands of dollars and hours of our precious time away from our off-farm, day jobs to build and install predator-proof electric fencing. Those 2 did indeed become thousands. And, for the record, anywhere where coyotes have moved into, they’ve never been able to eradicate them successfully. Sad for sheep farmers. The bold one who walked right through our home yard last week shows just how comfortable they are here - sad to say this, but glad we are no longer raising sheep.
In the spring of 1985, people near the Port au Port Peninsula on the west coast of Newfoundland reported seeing wolf-like dogs coming ashore from the sea ice. Two years later, a pup was hit by a car near Deer Lake. It was a coyote. By the mid-1990s, the species had been confirmed across most of the island. Wildlife biologists estimate that as few as three animals made the original crossing.
Three coyotes walked across the frozen ocean from mainland Canada to an island where the wolf had been extinct since 1930 and colonized it in a decade.
Newfoundland is not a small island. It is the sixteenth largest island in the world, roughly the size of the state of Virginia, separated from the nearest mainland by the Cabot Strait, a body of open North Atlantic water that freezes in severe winters but does not always form a continuous ice bridge. The coyotes that reached the Port au Port Peninsula in 1985 almost certainly crossed from Cape Breton Island in Nova Scotia, where the coyote population was high and growing. The crossing distance at the narrowest point of the Cabot Strait is roughly sixty miles of ocean ice.
A coyote weighs thirty to fifty pounds. It is a prairie animal. It evolved on the open grasslands of the American West. It has no evolutionary history with sea ice, no adaptation for crossing frozen ocean, and no biological reason to attempt a sixty-mile walk across the North Atlantic in winter. But the coyote does not operate on biological reasons. It operates on a single drive: expand. Move into unoccupied territory. If territory exists and nothing is holding it, go there. The ice formed. The territory was on the other side. The coyotes walked.
The Newfoundland wolf had been hunted to extinction on the island by approximately 1930. For fifty-five years, the largest canid niche on the island was vacant. No wolves. No coyotes. Caribou, moose, snowshoe hares, and small mammals had no canid predator of any significance. When three coyotes arrived in 1985, they walked into a landscape with abundant prey and zero competition from their own ecological guild. The population exploded.
Today Newfoundland holds several thousand coyotes. They prey on caribou calves and snowshoe hares. They scavenge moose carcasses. They have become the dominant mid-sized predator on the island in less than forty years, filling a niche that the exterminated wolf left open for more than half a century.
Then the white ones started showing up.
In 2003, the first reports of white coyotes in Newfoundland emerged. Not albinos. Not leucistic animals with pink eyes and pigment loss. White-furred coyotes with normal dark eyes, normal noses, and coats ranging from pure white to pale cream. The Newfoundland Department of Environment and Conservation, which collects coyote carcasses as part of its research program, has examined over six thousand specimens since the species arrived. Six of those six thousand were white.
White coyotes do not exist anywhere else in North America in any documented frequency. The mutation appears to be unique to the Newfoundland population, which descends from a founding group so small that rare recessive genes that would be invisible in a large mainland population have surfaced through the founder effect. When a population starts from three animals, every genetic quirk those three founders carried has an outsized chance of appearing in later generations. Somewhere in the DNA of the original ice-crossers was a recessive allele for white fur. It took roughly twenty years and thousands of descendants for the math to produce a visible white animal.
The island's coyote story took another turn in 2012 when a hunter named Joe Fleming shot what he thought was a coyote on the Bonavista Peninsula. DNA testing confirmed it was a wolf. An eighty-two-pound gray wolf that had almost certainly crossed to the island from Labrador on sea ice, using the same mechanism the coyotes had used twenty-seven years earlier. The Newfoundland wolf had been declared extinct in 1930. In 2012, a wolf walked back across the ice, and a coyote hunter killed it because he did not recognize what he was looking at. Fleming later said he regretted the shot. He would not have fired if he had known it was a wolf.
By 2017, the provincial government had confirmed eleven gray wolf and eastern coyote hybrids on the island. The coyotes and the occasional wolf that makes it across the ice are breeding. The hybrids are larger than standard coyotes, and their behavior is described as somewhere between coyote and wolf, particularly in social organization, where they form more cooperative groups than typical coyotes.
Newfoundland lost its wolf in 1930. In 1985, a canid walked across the frozen ocean and replaced it. That replacement species now numbers in the thousands, has produced white individuals found nowhere else on earth, and is hybridizing with wolves that are crossing the same ice bridge. The island's canid story did not end when the last Newfoundland wolf was shot. It just went quiet for fifty-five years, until three coyotes decided the ice looked solid enough and the other side looked empty enough to be worth the walk.
Source: Government of Newfoundland and Labrador, Department of Forestry, Agriculture and Lands / National Geographic / CBC News / Product of Newfoundland.
