Coyote Hunting Northwest Territories, Laws, Regulations, Season, & License Info

The short answer

Can you hunt coyotes in the Northwest Territories?

No — and this is the only page on this site where that is the answer.

Not “the season is short,” not “you need a guide,” not “check your zone.” There is no coyote season in the Northwest Territories for an NWT Resident Hunting Licence holder, a Non-resident Hunting Licence holder, or a Non-resident Alien Hunting Licence holder. The coyote harvest is a trapping regime, and it is reserved to Aboriginal harvesters and General Hunting Licence holders.

That is not an inference from silence. It is what the territory’s own table says, and it agrees with the Wildlife Act and the Trapping Regulations. All three are set out below, because a claim this categorical should be checkable.

If you were planning a trip, skip to where to go instead. Yukon is next door and open.

Classification, and the licence classes

What is the classification of coyotes in the NWT?

A fur-bearer, and only a fur-bearer. The distinction that decides this page is not what the coyote is — it is what the coyote is not.

The NWT makes its wildlife regulations species by species, and the coyote appears in exactly one of them:

¹

Everywhere else in Canada the coyote is small game, a furbearer that may also be shot, or — in Yukon — big game. In the NWT it is a fur-bearer that is not also prescribed as small game, and that single fact closes the door, because of how the Act is written.

“No person shall trap fur-bearers unless authorized to do so by a general hunting licence, a special harvester licence or a permit.”

“Subsection (1) does not apply in respect of species of fur-bearers that are prescribed both as fur-bearers and as small game.”²

Read the exception carefully. A fur-bearer that is also small game escapes the licensing restriction — that is how an ordinary licensed hunter takes a snowshoe hare or a red squirrel. The coyote is not prescribed as small game, so it does not escape. It stays inside section 45(1), and section 45(1) names three authorities: a General Hunting Licence, a Special Harvester Licence, or a permit.

What are the licence classes?

The NWT recognizes five kinds of harvester, and the summary sets them out plainly:^{3 4}

• AH — Aboriginal harvester, in the harvester's traditional area
• GHL — General Hunting Licence holder: "an Aboriginal person that is a member or eligible to be a member of an NWT organization listed in the regulations"
• RES — NWT Resident Hunting Licence: a Canadian citizen or landed immigrant living in the NWT for 12 continuous months
• NR — Non-resident Hunting Licence: a Canadian citizen or landed immigrant living outside the NWT
• NRA — Non-resident Alien Hunting Licence: neither an NWT resident nor a non-resident — which is what an American is

The General Hunting Licence is an Indigenous licence class. It is not a licence a resident hunter upgrades to, and it is not available to a visitor. Aboriginal harvesters without traditional harvesting rights in the NWT hold a Resident or Non-resident licence like anyone else.⁴

The season, and who it is for

What does the coyote table actually say?

This is the whole of it, from the section of the summary headed “FUR TRAPPERS ONLY”:⁵

Two rows. No RES row, no NR row, no NRA row.

That absence is meaningful rather than accidental, and you can prove it from the same booklet: the tables for other species do carry NR and NRA rows, with their own bag limits and possession limits, wherever those classes may harvest. The coyote table has none, and it sits under a banner reading “Fur Trappers Only” beside a list of the ten fur-bearer species the section covers — beaver, coyote, ermine, fisher, fox, lynx, marten, mink, muskrat and otter.⁵

The Trapping Regulations say the same thing in statutory form: coyote, GHL, zones D, R (except R/TC/01), S and U, 1 November to 31 March; and coyote, SHL, on the dates specified in the licence.¹

So is there a coyote season at all?

Worth being precise, because “no season” would be wrong. There is a coyote season in the NWT. An Aboriginal harvester may take coyotes year-round in their traditional area with no bag limit. A General Hunting Licence holder may take them from 1 November to 31 March across four wildlife management zones, also with no limit.

What does not exist is a route into that harvest for a resident hunter with a RES licence, or for you. This is a page about a harvest that is allocated, not about an animal that is protected.

Why it is written this way

Is this a conservation closure?

No, and reading it as one would be a mistake. Nothing in the summary suggests the NWT considers its coyotes scarce — the bag limit for those who may take them is unlimited, which is not how a jurisdiction writes a conservation closure.

What the structure reflects is that in the NWT the fur harvest is a trapping economy with constitutionally protected Indigenous harvesting rights at its centre, administered through registered trapping areas and group trapping areas rather than through a general hunting licence. Fur-bearers are allocated to the people who trap them. The territory did not close the coyote to sport hunters; it never opened it, because the coyote sits inside the fur regime rather than the game regime.

The same booklet shows the machinery: registered group trapping areas, harvesting areas defined per community, and a fur programme — the Genuine Mackenzie Valley Fur Program — that the pelts move through.⁵

Does anything about the coyote reach an ordinary hunter?

One thing does, and it is worth knowing if you are in the NWT hunting something else. Wasting a coyote pelt is an offence:

“It is an offense to waste, destroy, abandon or allow to spoil a raw pelt or hide of the following furbearers: Bear, Beaver, Coyote, Ermine, Fisher, Fox, Least Weasel, Lynx, Marten, Mink, Muskrat, Otter, Skunk, Wolf, Wolverine.”⁶

And the general access rule: holders of Resident, Non-resident and Non-resident Alien licences are prohibited from hunting in any territorial park, national park or park reserve.⁷

What if a coyote is causing a problem?

That is a question for an ECC officer, not for this page. Do not shoot one on the reasoning that it is a nuisance species elsewhere — the NWT has not given it that status, and the licensing structure above is what governs. Ring the nearest Environment and Climate Change office before you do anything.

Where to go instead

If you came here to plan a hunt, the good news is that the NWT is bordered by some of the most open coyote country in Canada:

• Yukon — next door to the west. Coyote is big game there, 1 Aug – 31 Mar with no bag limit. A non-resident needs an outfitter, and an American cannot use the special guide route, so budget for it
• Alberta — south. Year-round on private land and White Area public land, and a .22 LR is lawful. Non-residents need a guide or a hunter host
• British Columbia — southwest. Seasons by management unit, and a non-resident alien may hunt coyote unguided on an unrestricted licence
• Saskatchewan — southeast. No licence at all for residents; the non-resident answer is genuinely unsettled and the page says so

The Canada regulations index compares all of them, and covers the federal side every trip north shares — the firearm declaration at the border, the fee, and what a past conviction does. Suppressors are prohibited outright in Canada wherever you end up.

Coyotes in the NWT

Are there coyotes in the Northwest Territories?

Yes, and the regulations tell you where without needing a distribution map. The coyote’s harvest areas are zones D, R, S and U — the southern and western NWT, the Dehcho and South Slave country along the Alberta and BC borders and up the Mackenzie. Aboriginal harvesters may also take them in zones G and I, further north.⁵

Compare that with the ermine and the marten, which carry seasons across G and I as a matter of course. The coyote is a southern animal here, at the northern edge of a range that has been pushing up the Mackenzie for decades — the same expansion that put them on Prince Edward Island in 1983 and Newfoundland in the 1980s, running north instead of east.

The territory publishes no population estimate, and the unlimited bag limit for those who may harvest suggests it does not consider one necessary.

What does that mean if you are up there?

You will see them, in the south especially, and you cannot hunt them. That is an unsatisfying sentence for a hunting site to write, but it is the accurate one — and the alternative, a page that implied otherwise, is exactly the failure this site was rebuilt to avoid.

If you want to call coyotes, the calling techniques travel; the licence does not. Cross into Yukon or south into Alberta and you are in business.

A note on how this was checked. A negative answer deserves more support than a positive one, so it was verified three ways: the ECC summary’s own coyote table, which lists only AH and GHL rows; section 45 of the Wildlife Act, which restricts trapping fur-bearers to a general hunting licence, special harvester licence or permit, and exempts only fur-bearers also prescribed as small game; and the Trapping Regulations schedule, which is where the coyote’s seasons live and where the Big Game and Small Game Hunting Regulations do not mention it at all. If ECC tells you otherwise, they are right and this page is wrong — ring them on 867-767-9237 and tell us.