A coyote ran up behind a grizzly bear in Yellowstone National Park, clamped its teeth on the bear’s back leg for a split second and bolted. The bear, a young male tracked by park watchers as grizzly 1109, turned, let out a short warning roar and carried on walking.
The moment was filmed by Andrea Baratte, a wildlife photographer who works in the Yellowstone area, and her Instagram clip spread across social media this week. Her caption sets the scene: “This young grizzly bear 1109 was followed by two coyotes early this morning and could not catch a break.” She added that he “was never in real danger” and is “about 5 years old.”
What the clip shows
Two coyotes trail the bear through the early light. One closes the gap, nips at a hind paw while the grizzly faces away, then darts clear. The bear swings around, finds nobody within reach and goes back to his walk. A text overlay on the reposted version jokes that the coyote was “born a coyote” but had the “heart of a wolf.”
Viewers did not need to be told how lopsided the matchup looks. Under the video, one commenter recalled a pet malamute that nipped a black bear in a backyard at seven months old: the bear swung a paw and “missed him by an inch.” That dog, the commenter wrote, never chased a bear again.
The size gap, in numbers
The National Park Service lists Yellowstone coyotes at 25 to 35 pounds and 16 to 20 inches high at the shoulder. Bears, by the widely quoted range, run from roughly 200 to 800 pounds. Take the heaviest coyote and the lightest bear and the grizzly still outweighs its tormentor by close to six to one (200 divided by 35 is about 5.7). At the top of the bear’s range the ratio passes twenty to one.
That gap is why the encounter reads as a prank rather than a hunt. A coyote cannot bring down an adult grizzly, and it has no reason to try. Its usual menu, according to the park service, is voles, mice, rabbits, other small animals and carrion, plus only the very youngest elk calves in spring.
Why would a coyote bother a bear at all?
Nobody filmed what came before the clip, so motive is guesswork. What the park service does document is that Yellowstone coyotes live by scavenging around bigger carnivores. Its researchers describe coyotes timing their movements so they can feed on kills left by wolves and cougars, a strategy that balances the reward of a free meal against the real risk of being killed by those larger predators.
A grizzly ambling through a coyote pair’s range is both a threat and a possible source of leftovers. Hounding it along, keeping it moving and keeping tabs on where it goes fits that wider pattern, even if the ankle bite itself looks more like bravado.
History also shaped these animals’ nerve. Coyotes survived early-1900s campaigns to wipe them out of Yellowstone. When wolves were restored in 1995, wolves killed dozens of coyote pups and adults, and the coyote population on the park’s northern range fell by as much as 50%. More recent counts in the Lamar Valley show numbers climbing again.
Watching from a safe distance
The playful tone of the clip should not tempt visitors closer. The park service notes that coyotes which learn roadside feeding can turn aggressive toward people, and several coyote attacks on humans have occurred in Yellowstone. Staff haze habituated animals with cracker-shell rounds and bear pepper spray, and animals that keep posing a threat are killed. Keeping food away from coyotes is the single most useful thing a visitor can do for them.
As for grizzly 1109, the footage ends the way it began: a five-year-old bear walking on through the frost with two small shadows still following.
Further reading
Image: Yifei He from Bay Area, US, CC BY-SA 2.0 via Wikimedia Commons
This article was produced with AI assistance and reviewed by our Editorial Desk. How we work.
