Emma Balunek was combing through hours of trail camera footage in northeastern Colorado when she saw something surprising. Amidst the swift foxes, pronghorn, ravens and endless golden eagles was an unlikely pair: an American badger and coyote.
The coyote stood still on the right side of the frame, watching as the badger scurried in from the left. They had come to a rock pile together on their way to hunt prairie dogs. “The badger handles the belowground work, and the coyote handles the aboveground work,” said John Benson, Associate Professor at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln and TWS member.
A conservation photographer on the hunt for a graduate research project, Balunek dug up everything she could on badgers (Taxidea taxus) and coyotes (Canis latrans) collaborating with each other. She found that Indigenous people have long known about the relationship, telling stories of badgers and coyotes that become unlikely friends. Westward expansionists also recorded the association in their journals in the 1800s, with a smattering of scientific publications and one-off observations in the last several decades. “That’s when I realized we didn’t know much about the relationship from a scientific standpoint,” Balunek said.
Working with Benson, Balunek has set up camera traps across five sites from New Mexico to South Dakota to answer questions about how, when and why the animals are cooperating. Although scientists have had long-standing interest and acknowledgement of the association, Balunek said there hasn’t been a large-scale focused research effort to try to document it. “We’re trying to get as close as we can to documenting the full extent of where [the association] occurs.”
Because Balunek couldn’t set up cameras everywhere that coyotes and badgers coexist in the wild, she decided to enlist the help of people like herself who might have seen the unlikely pair while spending time on the prairie. Prairie dogs (Cynomys sp.) and black-footed ferrets (Mustela nigripes), for example, are two commonly studied species that both live in the habitat where Balunek expects this relationship might occur. “Many researchers may have seen badgers and coyotes together, but it doesn’t really move beyond that,” she said. This is likely because the low number of observations makes the phenomenon hard to study, something she hopes to change by monitoring hot spots with her trail cameras and crowdsourcing opportunistic encounters from other researchers and citizen scientists.
More questions than answers
In her ongoing work, Balunek will map citizen scientist data, published records and her own observations showing where coyotes and badgers have been seen hunting together. She has set up an online form where people can submit historic and current observations through the fall of 2025. Balunek and Benson expect to see the relationship occur where the pairs can hunt small, burrowing animals like prairie dogs and ground squirrels in tandem, but they’re interested to see if the pairs hunt together in some places across this range but not others. So far, they’ve received submissions from Wyoming, South Dakota, Arizona, New Mexico, Colorado, Oklahoma, California, Texas, Montana, Oregon and even some from Mexico and Canada.
The researchers are hoping to uncover not only where associations happen but also how they change at different times of the day and throughout the year. Learning more about these factors could offer insight into how each species benefits—or doesn’t benefit—from the association. Some scientists argue that badgers get the short end of the stick, doing the dirty work while coyotes get off easy. “The badgers are digging, digging, digging; there’s dirt flying everywhere, and the coyote is just sitting in the back,” Emma laughed. “But [badgers] are so good at digging.”
A three-year telemetry study conducted in Jackson, Wyoming, published in 1992, showed that coyotes were 34% more successful in hunting ground squirrels when hunting with a badger. It was harder for the researchers to quantify hunting success on behalf of the badgers because they eat their prey while underground and are therefore out of sight to researchers. Scientists did note that the badgers spent a longer time underground when hunting with a coyote, though, so they assumed the badgers were more successful at capturing and eating their prey while there was a coyote standing watch aboveground to corner any fleeing prey.
Inspiring curiosity for the prairie
Balunek said that their preliminary results show that the animals hunt together year-round and are changing their normal daily schedules so they can hunt together. “If the badger is normally active at dawn and dusk and during the night but will hunt with a coyote during the day, that’s possible evidence to suggest that the badger is gaining something from this relationship,” she said.
Although the mutual benefit may seem too incredible to believe, scientists have documented similar interspecies cooperative hunting in other species, like the grouper fish (Plectropomus pessuliferus) and the giant moray eel (Gymnothorax javanicus) in the Red Sea. In a similar fashion, the animals use their complementary hunting styles: the moray eel flushes prey from coral reef crevices while the grouper chases down prey in the open water.
Benson said you have to consider the costs of the association, too. Badgers are notoriously fierce: “Both species have been documented killing the other,” he said, although on both sides this is usually adults preying on the other species’ offspring.
“It’s important scientifically, but also interesting from a storytelling perspective, to consider the risks that these animals are taking—which suggests there must be a decent benefit,” Benson said. “It’s probably some level of an uneasy alliance.”
Research is just part of Balunek’s project, though. Comentored by Michael Forsberg of the Platte Basin Timelapse, a project in partnership to the University of Nebraska-Lincoln that aims to inspire care for the environment through the power of story, Balunek is working to bridge the gap between science and the public. “It’s a really neat program where we can both learn something scientifically but also tell the story to a broader audience,” said Benson, who advises Balunek on the research side of the project.
Man-made rockpiles in Colorado, which first drew Balunek into the unlikely relationship of the coyote and badger, play a central role in many of her storytelling projects and trail camera videos. “The grasslands are one of the most endangered ecosystems,” Balunek said. “Using this interesting relationship is one way we can catch people’s attention and teach them about why the prairie matters.”
If you’ve seen the badgers and coyotes together, Benson and Balunek encourage you to submit your observations—past or present—here.
This photo essay is part of an occasional series from The Wildlife Society featuring photos and video images of wildlife taken with camera traps and other equipment. Check out other entries in the series here. If you’re working on an interesting camera trap research project or one that has a series of good photos you’d like to share, email Olivia at omilloway@wildlife.org.
