Coyotes displace foxes. This is well documented.

Coyotes kill smaller canids — red fox, grey fox, kit fox, swift fox. Often they don't eat them. The carcasses are left uneaten, which is why the literature calls this interference competition rather than predation: the coyote isn't feeding, it's removing a competitor.

The numbers are not marginal. Across kit fox and swift fox populations, between 50% and 87% of verified fox mortalities have been attributed to coyotes. In the Great Basin, intraguild predation by coyotes is the leading cause of kit fox death. On the Naval Petroleum Reserve in California, the kit fox population fell roughly 66% between 1980 and 1985 as coyote abundance rose, with coyote predation identified as the primary cause of mortality.

This is a Canadian file too. COSEWIC's status report on the swift fox names coyotes as the principal cause of swift fox mortality in Canada. Of 89 Alberta and Saskatchewan carcasses examined between 1983 and 1992, 38% were thought to be coyote kills. A later study found 31% of radio-collared swift foxes were killed by coyotes.

Grey foxes are the clearest displacement case. A southern Illinois camera-trap study found coyote occupancy at 0.95 across the study area, with local extinction probability exceeding colonization probability for grey fox over two years — and grey fox declines across the midwestern US, including severe local extirpation, coinciding with high coyote occurrence. A 2025 analysis found a roughly four-fold decline in predicted grey fox occupancy across 99% of its study area.

Red foxes respond by moving. Red fox families avoid coyotes, and the Illinois work found foxes using moderately urbanized areas as refuge from them.

"Coexistence" describes what people are asked to do with coyotes. It does not describe what coyotes do to foxes.

Sources:

• Morin et al. 2022, Ecology and Evolution — https://doi.org/10.1002/ece3.9074
• Kit fox intraguild predation, Scientific Reports 2024 — https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-024-61692-1
• COSEWIC swift fox status report — https://www.canada.ca/en/environment-climate-change/services/species-risk-public-registry/cosewic-assessments-status-reports/swift-fox-2009/chapter-8.html
• Precipitous decline of a gray fox population, 2025 — https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2351989425000423