how did you get into coyote hunting

bohunr

bohunr

Well-known member
as for me i just dabbled with calling foxes. then found out there coyotes around. started with a red light and a huge 6 volt battery that clipped onto your belt. results were pretty poor but it was always interesting. getting out was very sporadic between work, children and other things to hunt.

years went by and i retired, did everything there was to do around the house, only thing left to play with or do was the wife....thats when she suggested i take up coyote hunting and let me buy what limbhangr10 suggested, almost 7 grand later and i am a coyote hunter :)
 
I was interested. Was hanginging out on a forum & got to be friends with Craig Hamilton. I lived in Phoenix, he was in Kingman, about 3 yrs away. Turned out he was recovering from shoulder surgery & couldn't do much so he spent a lot of time online & we talked a lot.

It also turned out that he was one fiend of a predator hunter, once he healed up I made a trip up & we went calling.

Oh man, did I learn a lot from him over those 3 days? We called & killed coyotes at a really good success rate, I even called in a bobcat using a cheap -I mean I had bought it years before in a KMart cheap- mouth blown rabbit call- & killed it. Been going whenever I could get access to land to hunt ever since
 
Early 90’s my younger brother attended some predator hunting seminar at a local sporting goods store. Whomever it was laid out his system for night calling and my little bro came home thinking it was easy. After he told me how easy it was going to be, we loaded up out 22 lr’s with CCI mini Mags, found some 12v light that would illuminate a good 25 or 30 yards with some red clored film we found and hit a property that we had saw a coyote (or dog?) track on once. We setup and got to calling. Not with a rabbit call, but some call our dad had purchased at some point for squirrel hunting. I want to say it was called “Mr Squirrel”. Little disc shaped stainless steel call that you sucked air through.

We sucked air through that thing until we almost passed out. We had some eye shine from several rabbits that were un-phased by our distress sounds. We couldn’t believe that no coyotes showed up?

My brother vowed to never try again, and the guy giving the seminar was obviously an idiot. I however, being more stubborn and weak of mind, kept on trying. Late 90’s I met a guy that really showed me a ton. Not with coyotes, but fox. I learned a lot from him, and became very proficient at calling fox. They became a relatively easy target, and i was murder on them throughout the early 2000’s. Coyotes eluded me for years. Lots of years! As lights got better. As I learned more about effective loads and patterning of shotguns, I really started focusing on killing coyotes. The game changer came when centerfire rifles became legal at night. L.e.d. Lights became an option, eyes could be detected and identification could be achieved at 100 yards or more. Coyotes were becoming more common and farmers started having troubles. I killed 1 or 2 and holy cow, Farmers started talking about the kid that killed a coyote!

They were few and far between, but every now and again, I would luck into one, and nobody else in the area was. The rest is history. As my success got better, so did technology. Tons of other people hopped on the bandwagon and it became harder to gain access to good spots. Even lost many for various reasons.

Today, it’s very competitive. I wish I could go back 20+ years just for the ease of access to land. Thing of the past for sure!
 
hunt0168 said:
................... I wish I could go back 20+ years just for the ease of access to land. Thing of the past for sure!
Click to expand...
How true! The resident mindset has changed so much. But, I can't say I blame them. Around here all the family owned, passed down thru generations, large acre parcels have been broken down into building lots and sold to the influx of NYC "people" and the past owners have moved away. More and more have arrived and brought their politics with them putting a big damper on the way it was.

Anyway....I found there to be a very large population of coyotes on the club I belong to and decided I'd like to give it a try. Many years ago, when fur was in vogue, and prices were very attractive, I trapped for many years with an attraction to fox and coyote as they were the harder to catch....and worth more.
 
The Verdigris river runs through our place and I started trapping coons and coyotes as a teenager. I'm 66 now. Standard wage for adult labor back then was $2/hr. A good coon or coyote was $15 or $20. Then fur prices doubled and competition got really high.
We also killed many shooting them across the hood of the truck. Wait for a snow, head West into the big pastures where nobody lived (had to leave at first light to beat the dog runners though) and kill enough to buy gas and beer for a month.
I had a friend who's dad had greyhounds and once in awhile he'd let me tag along. That man knew a lot about coyotes.
After I graduated high school my cousin and I bought a couple of hand calls, then we borrowed a record player, then we went together on a tape machine with a speaker attached with a cord. We managed to kill one once in awhile but we were not good at it.
Got married, moved to Southern Iowa to run a cow/calf operation and a couple of the neighbors had trail hounds. We spent every Sunday afternoon in the winter chasing them with trail hounds.
Moved back home a few years later and kept about a dozen snares out. That was fast, efficient and productive.
I guess I could have just said when I was a kid I pursued them about every way you could.😞
Then I got busy raising kids and all that involves. Small town kids are involved in everything and if your kid is involved so are you. Everything but deer and occasional quail hunting came to and end. Fur prices tanked and I quit trapping.
I had an uncle by marriage retire and settle nearby and we became hunting buddies. At the end of the last season we got to hunt together he said we ought to get one of those E-calls and start hunting coyotes. I told him to order one and I'd go in 1/2. He passed before we got a chance.
By then the kids were grown and out of the house.
The following January, while in the area farm and ranch store, I walked through sporting goods and saw a Primos Alpha Dog on sale and immediately thought of Bill.
I bought it, went home and got his 7MM Weatherby Magnum out of the closet and called a pair on the first stand. Didn't fire a shot because I didn't see them until they were on their way out 400 yards away, but I was hooked/screwed, you know.
I killed 9 that 2 months and spent the next summer watching Randy Anderson videos, reading and scouting when I could.
Somewhere along the line I stumbled across Predator Masters and that shortened the learning curve dramatically.
Now, like many, a small fortune later and I have a safe full of dedicated coyote guns and night optics, a room full of gear and a passion so intense that I hunt nothing else.
 
As a teenager I started hunting feral dogs for the game warden, my hunting partner and I were the only ones hunting rabbits on skis. We could get around on waist deep snow, this was pre-snowmobile times. Fox hunting became an off shoot of that and calling them a progression. When I got serious about trapping I carried a predator call with me and called some good spots for fox while running my line.

In the mid 80s jobs dried up in NW MN and I headed to WA, I didn't have time to run a trapline so started calling coyotes and have been doing it ever since.
 
My family were not hunters (besides rock chucks occasionally). My family lost 8 cats, and several ducks and chickens to coyotes in the first 5 years after we moved out into the woods around 2000. Shortly after we lost a cat, my brother and I put a baked turkey carcass out in the yard. We plugged in a 500W shop halogen light and aimed that towards the area. We put a beanbag on the peak of the roof of the garage, and laid on that with a 2million candlepower spotlight and my ruger 1022. Saw nothing in the first night of our stakeout. The second night, we were just getting set up, I hadn't yet climbed out onto the roof, and BAM BAM! my brother rolls off a quick 2 shots. He was shaking with excitement as he climbed back through the window into the house and told us what happened. A coyote had popped out of the bushes at about 90 yds and he nailed it. The double tap on the trigger was accidental. After it was hit it ran into some deep brush. The next day we found the coyote piled up about 50 feet from where my brother shot it.

Over the years we slowly refined our process for shooting coyotes. SKS and ar-15 racked up a large number of kills. My dad wired a lightswitch from his bedroom window to several spotlights in the yard. Many nights were spend camped out with a rifle at my parent's bedroom window. Then we discovered wireless driveway alarms as a way to notify us when coyotes came through. That was a big gamechanger. Then a few years ago I started dabbling with cheap nightvision. And a couple years ago I entered the thermal arena.

Now that I have thermals, suppressors, tripods, e-caller.....I travel around and do a bit of night calling (or day) whenever I get a chance. I'm currently at about 50% of my coyotes come from calling, and about 50% come from motion alarms detecting them when they pass behind my house. I think I got 27 coyotes last year.
 
For me it was about 30 years ago. But there were no coyotes here, only fox. I read about it in a magazine and thought it would be cool to try. Took a few years to get one to come to call but I was hooked after that. There were no fancy electronic callers or decoys so I made my own decoy. I sewed up a rabbit decoy that flopped around on an old RC transmitter/servo motor and used hand calls. I will never forget the first night I called in a coyote. I'd heard of guys saying they were seeing them every now and again but it was only rumor. The night I called in my first coyote, two came to call. I thought these certainly aren't fox and once I identified them I shot the closest one to me. Had it tanned and is hanging in my hunting room wall to this day. No one up here really hunts coyotes with the exception of a few gangs that run them so it's easy to get permission and now, 30 years later there's a ton of coyotes....sadly there are no more fox though. If I do call a fox in these days (and it's not often) I let it go! They have enough issue here with coyotes hunting them that they don't need the extra pressure from me.
 
Bought an e-caller many years ago and gave it a try during the daytime and had no clue what I was doing. Called in a bunch of bobcats but no coyotes. Couldn’t shoot the cats because the law was cats could only be called in with hand calls.

Fast forward many years later and I was using a Wicked Light and an AR on hogs, when the wife bought me a thermal for Christmas one year (iRay Bolt TH50C). I installed it and was a hog killing machine.

Went to check a field one night for hogs and walked up on 5 coyotes (young of the year) digging in the field. Managed to drop 2 of them and thought I bet I can call these in. I knew my son said they had a FoxPro at his plantation so I borrowed it the very next day because I figured it was better than my old caller. Again, I didn’t know any better so I went back to that same field and after some reading, I went with the pup distress sound. I started the caller and got a response immediately and could see 3 coyotes (pups) running in. Out of the corner of my vision I see a coyote rip across right in front of me at about 20yds heading straight for the caller!! Luckily I made a running shot and rolled it. Turns out it was the female of the group. I was HOOKED!

Over the next week or so with different set ups I was able to get the remaining coyotes in that group.
That’s what caused me to spend a LOT money and lost sleep over the last couple of years!!! If I’d never “happened” on those coyotes, I’d probably still just be trapping them.
 
Mostly hogs at nite but heard the yotes howling at daughter's place so decided to try it. Just one so far but they are around. Just put a thermal on the Henry 308W to try. If the weather gets better and I can stay away from the Docs, I'll go more often.
 
To make a long story short, I just wanted to. :giggle: I would see the occasional track or poop, hear a howl once in a while and knew a couple guys who would trap a few each year. So, I started down the "hole" in 2012.
 
It was something to do in the winter months after the other 'seasons' closed. Could also get some money for the coyotes if we were lucky enough to get one. After realizing you don't just go out and call in a bunch of coyotes, my hunting partner and I decided we need to get better. And that's how the addiction began.
 
Back
Top