As social media manager for MidWest Outdoors, I run across a lot of cool and interesting pictures and videos throughout our social media platforms. One video in particular caught my attention when exploring through Instagram one evening. The video struck me as extremely intriguing and was curious to see what our Facebook following thought of it. What happened next took me by complete surprise.

At the time of writing this, the video has been viewed over 9.4 million times and has over 800,000 engagements. This is by far our most popular social media post of all time, so we placed it on our website for our MWO audience who may not have seen it on Facebook. We also did a bit of digging and found out that this is not the first time people have encountered ‘frozen coyotes,’ as you will see in the links below.  

(Video may be unsettling to some)

Everyone loves sharing their opinion on what they believe has happened to this coyote and we love hearing them! Here are some of our favorite responses from our comment section.

Other instances like this have been reported:

Craig Raleigh of the website wideopenspaces.com shared a similar video back in 2019. The video shows what looks like a coyote and fox frozen in time during an intense battle. It was also reported that the weather in Silver Lake, Minn. where this video was captured was a blistering -33°f (-65°F with wind chill). Given this info, was it the cold weather that did these creatures in, or was there something else at work? You can see the video for yourself here: FOX AND COYOTE BATTLE FROZEN IN TIME.

Another instance back in 2010 came from the little town of Silt, Colorado. This image shows a coyote frozen in his tracks….literally. Reports show that it was a also a very cold day in Silt, a balmy -28°F the day this photo was taken. You can read the article from ‘jayfrankwilson’ here: COYOTE FOUND FROZEN SOLID

So that begs the question. How cold is too cold for animals who are quite literally built to flourish in cold temperatures?