Coyote Hunting in Nunavut — Why There Is None, and What the Law Still Says

Are there coyotes in Nunavut?

Are there coyotes in Nunavut?

Effectively no. There is no coyote population in Nunavut, no breeding record, and no season.

The entire documented history of the species in the territory is two oral reports, both from the far west near Kugluktuk, roughly thirty and forty years ago — and even those come with a caveat from the biologist who collected them: “exact dates and written reports are absent.”¹

That is not a small population. It is not a thin population. It is two stories.

Is there a coyote season, bag limit or licence in Nunavut?

No. Nunavut’s Game Harvesting and Possession Limits Order sets annual harvesting limits for black bear, caribou, moose, muskox, reindeer, wolf and wolverine. There is no coyote row — not for residents, not for non-residents, not for non-resident foreigners.²

The wolf sitting in that table one line from where a coyote would go is the useful comparison. Wolves are here, they are hunted, and they carry a limit of two for a visitor. Coyotes have no line because there is nothing to allocate.

Could coyotes live here?

The treeline is the answer, and Nunavut is almost entirely beyond it.

The coyote is an animal of forest edges, farmland and open country with cover — it followed logging, agriculture and the removal of wolves across the continent. Nunavut’s mainland is tundra, and its islands are Arctic. Even the two Kugluktuk reports are noted as remarkable precisely because they were 40 to 60 kilometres beyond the tree-line.¹

For scale: the northernmost place coyotes are known to breed in this part of the country is the Yellowknife airport, about 900 km south of Kugluktuk, and the biologist who documented it described the city as “an urban island within the Taiga Shield ecozone” — open grassy habitat, rodents, hares and human food, surrounded by boreal forest.¹ That is the frontier. Nunavut is well past it.

The whole recorded history

What are the two records?

Both come from the same source — a wildlife biologist with the Government of the Northwest Territories, published in the Canadian Field-Naturalist in 2006, working from sightings solicited from wildlife officers, hunters and trappers across the NWT and western Nunavut:¹

• Around 1988 — a hunter shot a coyote 70 km west of Kugluktuk
• Around 1997 — two hunters saw a coyote southwest of Bloody Falls, on the Coppermine River

Both were reported to the author by a resident of Kugluktuk, and both are recorded as oral history rather than documentation. Kugluktuk sits at 67°49′N on the Arctic coast, in the far west of the territory near the NWT border — which is exactly where you would expect an animal pushing north up the Mackenzie system to arrive first.

Does that mean coyotes are moving in?

It does not, and the timing is the reason. If the two reports were 2018 and 2024 you would read them as the leading edge of an expansion. They are approximately 1988 and 1997, and nothing published since has followed them.

Coyotes have reached a great many places in the last forty years — Prince Edward Island in 1983, Newfoundland by 1985, across Labrador and up the Mackenzie into the southern Northwest Territories. In each of those places the record goes from a first sighting to a confirmed animal to an established population within a decade or two. In Nunavut the record stops.

What the law says anyway

Is the coyote mentioned in Nunavut law?

Yes — and this is the part that catches people out. The Wildlife Act defines big game as:

“(a) Canis — coyote and wolf, (b) Gulo — wolverine, (c) Ovibos — muskox, (d) Ursus — bears, and (e) Cervidae — including caribou, moose, deer and reindeer”³

The coyote appears again in the furbearer list in the same section, between the foxes and the weasels.³ So on paper, a Nunavut coyote is big game — the same classification Yukon gives it, and the strictest category the territory has.

So does that mean you could hunt one?

No, and here is the trap this page exists to defuse. A species appearing in Nunavut’s wildlife law tells you nothing about whether it lives there.

The proof is in the same documents. The regulation banning conventional steel-jawed leg-hold restraining traps on land names five animals: coyote, wolf, bobcat, lynx and raccoon.⁴

There are no bobcats in Nunavut. There are no raccoons in Nunavut. Nobody thinks there are. Those lists are drafted to be complete, not to be a distribution map — they describe how an animal would be treated if it were here, which is a different question from whether it is.

This is the single most useful thing on this page, and it generalizes well beyond Nunavut: finding your species named in a statute is not the same as finding a season. Look for the harvesting limits, the season table and the licence — and if the animal is missing from those while appearing in the definitions, you have your answer.

What would apply if one did turn up?

For completeness, because the framework does exist:^{3 5 6}

• Big game, under the Act's definitions
• Wildlife value of $500, grouped as "Wolf/Coyote/Wolverine" — the figure used for restitution, against $3,000 for a muskox or polar bear
• No conventional steel-jawed leg-hold restraining trap on land
• All portions deemed inedible — s. 77(3) says all portions of a bear, coyote, wolf or wolverine are inedible for the purposes of the Act, which is what lifts them out of the wastage rules that apply to caribou or muskox

None of that adds up to a hunt. It is the shape of a rule waiting for an animal.

How harvesting works here

Who can harvest wildlife in Nunavut?

Worth understanding even though it does not get you a coyote, because it is unlike anywhere else on this site.

Nunavut’s wildlife regime is built on the Nunavut Agreement, and Inuit harvesting rights sit at its centre rather than at its margins. Harvest is administered through the Nunavut Wildlife Management Board, Regional Wildlife Organizations and community Hunters and Trappers Organizations, working with total allowable harvests and basic needs levels rather than the season-and-bag-limit tables the southern jurisdictions use.²

A visitor hunts here through an outfitter and a community, on species that are actively managed and allocated — muskox, caribou, polar bear, wolf, wolverine, ptarmigan and hare. Non-residents and non-resident foreigners carry annual limits of one muskox, two caribou and two wolves.²

It is genuinely excellent hunting, and none of it is coyote hunting.

What should you do if you think you have seen one?

Report it, and do not shoot it. A canid on the tundra in Nunavut is overwhelmingly likely to be a wolf or an Arctic fox, and both matter — wolves carry a limit and a $500 wildlife value, and a misidentified shot is an offence with a real number attached.

If you genuinely believe you have seen a coyote, the local Hunters and Trappers Organization and the Department of Environment are the people who want to know. Two oral reports in forty years is a thin record, and the third would be worth documenting properly.

Where to go instead

Nunavut is not a coyote destination and never has been. Neither, for a visitor, is the territory next door:

• Northwest Territories — coyotes are present in the south, but the harvest is reserved to Aboriginal harvesters and General Hunting Licence holders. There is no season for a resident or visiting hunter
• Yukon — the northern jurisdiction that is open. Coyote is big game, 1 Aug – 31 Mar, no bag limit. A non-resident needs an outfitter
• Alberta, Saskatchewan, British Columbia — the nearest genuinely open coyote country, and among the best on the continent

The Canada regulations index compares all thirteen jurisdictions, and covers the federal rules every trip north shares.

Why this page exists at all. The plan for this site was thirteen Canadian jurisdictions, with Nunavut marked “check whether coyotes are actually there before writing anything” — because a page asserting a season that does not exist is the exact failure this whole template was built to prevent. The check was run on 11 August 2026 and the answer is above: two oral reports, no population, no season. The page stayed, rather than being dropped, because “are there coyotes in Nunavut?” is a real question with a real answer, and because the Wildlife Act naming the coyote as big game is precisely the sort of thing that produces a confident wrong answer somewhere else.