Way to keep the pressure on them guys. I haven't been posting much on this thread as most of my coyote hunting has shifted towards calling at night at a few local cattle farmer's properties. I've been playing cat-and-mouse with a few coyotes at one local property where coyotes killed the farmer's wife's lap dog a few weeks ago. Since then I've shot at 2 coyotes on the property. Both ~100 yds. Both looked like pretty good shoulder shots in the recorded video, but both sounded like misses and the coyotes ran off. In-between those two "misses", I killed 2 coyotes at a different property at about 200 yds. Go figure....
I have a mostly-burried pile of deer scraps in my back yard about 100 yds from the house. 2 nights ago a coyote visited twice. around 2am and again around 3am at different cameras on my property. I had a hard time sleeping that night, felt like i was awake half the night....and go figure I slept sound right through the alarms both times. Ugh. Yesterday afternoon I was working in my yard around noon and my phone buzzed. I checked it a few minutes later and it was a coyote entering my property! I ran in the house and grabbed my wife's .243 and a couple shells. I hurried down the driveway to where I had a view of where the coyote came in. I didn't see anything. I started making some squeeks on a catnip mouth predator call. Still nothing. So after a couple minutes I start walking down the driveway to where the coyote entered. Still nothing. Then I hear our guinea foul chickens start making alarm sounds (they are about 200 yds from where I'm at, through the trees and over a small hill). I ran through some trails back up to my back yard where I'd have a view towards the chickens, and also of another trail on the property that runs into the woods where coyotes often travel and also where the deer scraps are burried. By the time I got up there the chickens went quiet. The sun was shining bright and there was pretty severe contrast between sunlit areas and shadows in the trees. I didn’t see any sign of the coyote. I made a couple kitten-cry sounds with the catnip squeeker, and almost immediately a coyote popped around a corner at about 100 yds in the woods. Due to the light contrast I still had a hard time making him out. I zoomed the 3-9 scope from 3 to 6 and then I could see it clearly. I was squatting, bracing off a tree, but a little shaky from running up the hill, and I didn’t want to miss. So I risked a little movement and sat down, crossed my legs, and braced my elbows on my knees and my left hand and the rifle on the tree. This gave a pretty solid rest. The coyote moved a little bit when it saw my movement, but stayed where I could see it. It paused for a moment quartering towards me, and I didn’t hesitate. I let the 75gr vmax fly. The rifle is suppressed and I heard a solid impact. I think I blinked and by the time I opened my eyes the coyote was gone from view. I walked out there and it was laying right where I shot it. To my surprise, there was no exit, and no blood anywhere. It’s chest cavity felt like a water-balloon though. When I shot the coyote it was about 5-10 feet from the hole where the deer scraps were, and there was fresh dig marks around and into the deer scraps.
In the past 2 years I’ve shot about 50 coyotes with thermal, and only 2 or 3 with a daytime scope. It surprised me how foreign it felt looking at a coyote through a daytime scope yesterday.
