Baiting


Brownshoe, the home-made night vision is cheap if that would serve your purpose. You can put that outfit together, including a good IR illuminator for around $300. Just a thought.
 
deerslyr1, no not in ma.
6mm06, sweet set up. how do you shoot it----shoulder it? do you have any snow? any tracks in your area maybe just not at your site. one thing I have been thinking about is how much bait do you have out-- i think i said this in earlier post ... this years activity here seems up and i think it is because i have kept a good amount of bait out. when it gets low they seem to stay away when there is a lot it just becomes to irresistible.
since i shot the female monday no coyotes on the camera -- i checked her and she does not look like she has had any pups and is probably a yearling.
 

Dog Driller,

Yea, I shoulder the rifle as you normally would, and I'm also able to get a cheek weld on the stock. The only thing is the day-time scope needs to be mounted as far forward as possible to keep the bullet camera from being in your face. I don't have a problem with mine, but I did mount the scope forward more than usual.

Yes, just a little snow here, not much. We got less than an inch last night, but most of it has melted off now. We are supposed to get from 1 to 3 inches tonight.

No, no coyote sign at all, no tracks nor droppings. They just seem to have vanished.

As to the way I bait, I have experimented a lot with one way and then another, and had coyotes hit all of it. But, what I do more than anything is to put out small chunks of bait, scattered around the site. I have also used a whole carcass, and parts of it like the rib cage, and even now have been staking out leg bones that has some meat on them, but still no coyotes. I'm seeing an occasional fox - a red fox visited last night, possums almost nightly, but no coyotes. I used to attract a lot of coyotes, but not now. I honestly think we don't have many coyotes here at the moment. No one is seeing or hearing any much. Something has happened to them.

Thought coyotes are not visiting, I do get some good trail camera videos from time to time. Here's today's video of two Redtail hawks fighting over the bait.

Click the photo to see the video.




 
6mm06, you may be right, in my neck of the woods coyotes are always a constant but what they fed on will change... for example I have noticed this year our rabbit population has jumped a lot and coyotes are after them in a big way as a result in my area they have laid off the deer, previously during deer season there was always coyote tracks right behind the deer... not this year. in your area you maybe experiencing a big drop in their food sources and have shifted another area for a while. how are others doing locally .... getting any?
your scope setup looks really nice. right now saving my pennies for my replacement scope for my deer rifle and maybe a reflex type sight for my shotgun. as I stated previously I want get a coyote with a shotgun. and if I have to sit out a night and wait .... if I can get sequence goingof arrivals I need to see where I am aiming and I thought some thing like that might help .. not sure still investigating. also with a friends help--- he has the equipment -- i want to work up a 243 load with a 70 gr nosler
 

Dog Driller, I know of one neighbor who trapped a male coyote about two weeks ago. He told my son that some guys out the ridge a ways from me was putting a hurting on them earlier in the fall. That may account for some of the drop in numbers, but I can't imagine those guys getting many. Coyotes here just don't come easy.

Here is last night's Red Fox, stealing bait. This is typical for reds. They pack their mouth full of the small pieces of bait, much like a chipmunk, then take it off and bury it, then return and get more, over and over until all the bait pieces are gone. One night I watched one do this over and over through the home-made night vision scope. I haven't seen gray fox do this, only reds.

Click the photo.




 
deerslyr1, I don't remember if you are hunting from your home or using a stand, but with IR light being legal, sure sounds to me like an ideal setup for the homemade NV that 6mm06 is using.
 
6mm-06's set up is neat for sure . My bait sight is at my camp so would work there no problem ....but I already have and use a gen3 nv setup from high tech redneck. With it I can see 200yds+ with no moon. On moon nights it's more of how far away can you hit em but not a lot of open around here....
 
pretty quiet here since monday -- no tracks, no pics, no sightings, weather here over the weekend is for moderate temps --great for calling. Monday things change-- temps predicted to drop and when that happens the bait goes back out --frozen. right now with these milder temps cant seem to get a good freeze on the bait and the crows are stealing everything.
 
OK bare with me as this is the first time ive try baiting, Went crappie fishing Saturday and after fileting them i kept the heads and skin as well as table scraps from the week. I went and called at my first spot Sunday morning right at daylight, no takers, so about 8 am i went and got my bucket of bait and pored it out and drug a few fish heads around so the smell would get out over a larger area. Well from the photos the buzzards found the pile a little after 9


The next morning at 5:30 am some coons decided to come munch on some of the fish heads that night



Then an hour after the coons were there my first sign of coyotes,2 of them to be exact
In this first pic you can faintly see the eyes of coyote #2 in the back ground




Then that same night guess what came in to sample the scraps

a coon and a shunk at the same time



So i guess i need to rebait and get ready to go hunting
 
Chris, that bait sure didn't take long to attract some attention. Hope it works out for you, and welcome to the Baiting thread and PM. We like pics, so you're off to a good start.
smile.gif
 
I went out there and called that same afternoon about 4 til about an hour 1/2 after dark and called with no luck

No it didn't take long at at to hit that bait, i was totally shocked today. I wasn't expecting anything except buzzards my first week or so

Guess im gonna have to go fishing more to continue to re bait, lol

I'm headed to New Orleans to take my dad redfishing this afternoon thru Sunday. Ill take me some buckets along to save the carcasses hehe, they will love me

That camera is mounted on a tree right on creek edge down in a draw so they have tree line to conceal themself til they pop out to munch down, its really not a good spot for me to conceal myself without having a 150-200 yard shot, i didnt pre think that part. I may alter the bait site this weekend when i get back and see what happens, when i went to check the camera last night, i didnt get out there til shortly after dark and i could hear what appears to be 3 packs fire up howling and such so they are in the area.

How often should you call at one spot, this place is aprox 250 acres with houses aprox 1 mile away on 2 sides but nothing in the back for a few miles. Is it ok to call say in the morning and evening on the weekends or 2 mornings in a row?
 
Chris, I try not to call a place more often than once a month. If you call one and kill him, then you can probably call that place again more quickly. If you call multiples and kill part of them, the others are going to be a lot harder to call next time. You will probably need to set up in a different place and use different sounds. Exception to that is you can sometimes slip right back in the next day and call using lonesome howls and get the remaining one to come looking.

So I would say if you call morning and evenings on the weekends, you'll soon have educated coyotes that will only bark at you because you've been busted. Don't over call using coyote vocals or go in every time trying to locate them. Too much calling and too loud ruins more hunts than too little or too quiet IMHO.
 
I dont know if someone in the first 183 pages of this thread talked about this but i was curious if anyone has tried the "Bait n Blast" attractant from hunters specialty. If so how well it worked.
 
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Deerslyr, that's great to have a Gen 3 scope. I would love to have one, but for now will have to make do with the poor-man's version. I imagine hunting from your camp with the Gen 3 could be productive.

Chris, that's great with all the sudden activity at your site. I do think a 150-200 yard shot is a long distance at night, seems everything looks further away at night than in the day. As you say, you may rethink it. I believe you can change the bait site without causing any problems with them responding. I have done that several times over the past three years and had at least 4 different sites until I learned what worked best for me. You might even try moving it little-by-little until you get it where you want it, maybe not make the move too drastic, but just enough to have the coyotes move to each new place. As you already know, just consider the wind when positioning the site. Good luck with that.

Also Chris, you may have to decide what you shoot or don't, depending on what shows up, and / or what your game laws allow. If you are after coyotes, shooting the raccoon or skunk might cost you a coyote. Just a thought.

Many times possums and fox plague me with setting the sensor off during the night. One time a possum was at the site and suddenly it ran down the hill like it was on fire. I didn't know a possum could run so fast. Within seconds a coyote showed up. Last year fox kept me awake on and off all night, coming and going and setting off the alarm.

I like to keep the night quiet if possible, and sometimes it's just fun to video.

Here's some video I took recently, just playing around and watching the fox to see what he did. This was taken with the home-made night vision. The bait site is 60 yards, and in the first episode where the fox went up on the ridge and buried the bait, distance was somewhere around 75 yards. Just keep in mind the video you see is poor quality compared to what the LCD screen on the NV outfit sees. This will give you some idea of what it looks like.


Click the photo to see the video.




 
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