Viral video of car-top coyote in Tucson racks up 10 million views

The call of a Tucson coyote is echoing around the globe, thanks to a viral video of the animal howling from on top of a car at a local Ford dealership.

Patrick Irish Sr. had just started his 5 a.m. shift as a private security guard at the Tucson Auto Mall when he spotted the coyote perched on the roof of a brand new, all-electric Mustang at Holmes Tuttle Ford.

Irish often hears the animals calling to each other and even sees them occasionally running through the car lots near the Rillito River, but this was a first.

He said the scene almost seemed staged, with the coyote positioned directly under a street light and turned sideways to him in perfect profile.

“It looked like a Halloween decoration,” Irish said.

He is not supposed to have his cell phone out while he’s on the job, but he couldn’t resist just this once.

After a few seconds of filming, he walked toward the coyote and told it, “‘Hey, you gotta go,’” he said. “It was a good-sized, healthy looking thing. I didn’t want the rest of the family showing up.”

The animal jumped down from the Mustang and took off “as soon as we made eye contact,” Irish said.

It’s hard to know what the coyote was howling about. It might just have been bragging, though probably not about the great deal it just got on a new car, said Shawnee Riplog-Peterson, long-time curator of mammalogy and ornithology for the Arizona-Sonora Desert Museum.

“I think a lot of it is territorial, and by being up high on something, the message will carry farther, which is good for them,” she said. “They’re big on territory.”

Coyotes make up to a dozen different calls — from yips and barks to long, lonesome howls — and even the experts aren’t sure what all of them mean, Riplog-Peterson said. “Some people call them song dogs because they have so many vocalizations.”

The coyotes at the Desert Museum exhibit similar behavior to this one filmed at the Auto Mall, climbing up on two tall rocks in their enclosure to “check out the territory and see who’s coming their way,” she said.

When Riplog-Peterson showed the video to her fellow staff members, one of the veterinarians immediately referenced the famous “Everything the light touches is our kingdom” scene from “The Lion King.”

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Coyotes have dramatically expanded their kingdom over the past two centuries. The opportunistic omnivore’s range now covers all of North America, and it has adapted to live off the spoils of human civilization — namely our garbage, the fruit from our trees and occasionally our pets.

“They will seek out everything, because they can live off anything,” Riplog-Peterson said. “They’ve really become city slickers. They do just as good in urban areas as they do in rural areas.”

Coyotes don’t pose a significant threat to people, and there are a number of steps you can take to avoid conflicts with these common, native animals, she said. Understanding their behavior can go a long way toward living with them in harmony.

“They were here first. We need to be respectful when we’re around them,” Riplog-Peterson said.

Irish shot his video of the car-lot coyote back on Oct. 22, but he didn’t share it on Facebook until Christmas Eve.

The six-second clip really took off after KOLD News 13 anchor Mary Coleman got Irish’s permission to post it on X, the social media site formerly known as Twitter.

Since then, the footage has been viewed more than 10 million times on X alone and picked up by USA Today and other media outlets.

Irish began to suspect something was up when he went to show the video to a coworker and she told him she had already seen it on TikTok.

“But I didn’t realize it (went viral) until my boy told me,” said the retired Air Force master sergeant, who has lived in Tucson for the past 25 years.

Now if you Google “coyote howls on car,” the video of the Auto Mall serenade is the first thing that pops up.

“It’s all over the place,” Irish said.