Close coyote hunting

[HuntrofDogs]

Foster,in response to your statement about the coyotes answering back with yips and howls etc. and not showing up I can say with a good deal of certainty that you have alerted them of your presence,this has happened to me serveral times.That yip and bark response your getting is the coyote alarm cry and he is telling you and every other coyote in the nieghbourhood that all is not well.Some where in your set up procedure something has alerted them, they may have seen you walk in,they may have heard your vehicle,door slamming,talking,chambering a shell into your rifle,something you have done has set them off.A short while ago while walking in to set up we spotted a coyote on the edge of the bush we were going to call,unfortunately he saw us to.We sat down and called knowing we had no chance at him but thought we might get a another one to come,bad decision,as soon as we called the yipping and barking started from the coyote we had seen. When that starts pack up and move cause they are not coming.I have never had a coyote come in who beforehand had been yipping and barking.I have had numerous coyotes answer the howler and come in but its a totally different vocalization.See if you can pick your self up a good tape on coyote talk and listen to the howls and hoots they make.I hope this has helped in some way.Just a thought on setting up,we think nothing of walking in a half mile or more.Calling will yield poor results if you have an aversion about getting more than a hundred yards from your vehicle.

[foster]

I hope this has helped in some way.Just a thought on setting up,we think nothing of walking in a half mile or more.Calling will yield poor results if you have an aversion about getting more than a hundred yards from your vehicle.

Thanks everyone for the words of advice. Yes, you've all been a great help, especially this last part. You'll see why when you read on.

I've figured out my problem: I take my ATV deep into the forest to hunt coyotes. My bike is alerting them to my presence. Next trip out, I won't use the bike. I'll use the patented "B.L.T.S.," perhaps better known as the Boot Leather Transportation System.

For what it's worth, here's what I did on Saturday. Feel free to let me know what you think I did wrong or right. I'd appreciate the feedback.

Set up on the ground in a well-concealed uphill spot, upwind, along an old logging road covered in coyote tracks. Wind was about 5 mph, temp was about 30F, snow was about a foot deep, and it was dawn. Used a cottontail in distress call. Just for good measure, I put out a snowshoe hare pelt about 80 yards downwind on the side of the road. Called hard at first for 10 straight minutes, called intermittently after that, maybe three sequences every 15 minutes. The road ran east-west. On the south side was dense forest. On the north side was a clearcut.

Next stand: Put myself in a tree stand. Placed the rabbit pelt about 75 yards to the north of me, with the wind blowing towards the east less than 10 mph. It was about 11 a.m. and the temp was about 31F. Called for about 7 or 8 minutes straight, then called intermittently for another 30 minutes or so. There was a clearcut area between me and the bait. The bait was placed along a wood line. No coyote tracks in the immediate vicinity but there were several along a road that passed about 150 yards away.

Last stand: Set up along an old logging road that ran north-south in very dense woods. Wind was very light, out of the west. I was on the west side of the road in dense cover. Bait was on the road, north of me, in a big dip in the road, where you could see tons of coyote tracks, as if they had caught a mouse or something the previous night. Called with a howler and a rabbit-in-distress call for 15 minutes. (Gotta quit smoking, it's hard to call for that long with MY lung capacity.)

Someone else told me as well that my big mistake was taking the ATV into the woods with me. I won't make that mistake the next time. They also told me that when they're yipping and yapping back at me, they are merely laughing at me because they've busted me, so I think your advice is very valid.
It had snowed slightly the night before I went out and there were very fresh coyote tracks all over the place, includign some that showed two coyotes had started to respond to my calling but then turned around. Sounds like my calling could use a little practice as well, judging by that evidence!

Thanks again for your input and feel free to add more after reading this about how I set myself up.

[Andy L]

Depends on where you are. You walk a half mile in most areas around here, your a half mile, or less, from the next section road. What have you accomplished?

Think about it.....

Andy

[HuntrofDogs]

I'm not implying that you have to walk in a half mile to have a good set up.I guess the point I'm trying to make is this, walking in twenty five yards or fifty yards will suffice as long as you leave your mode of transportation far enough away so brother dog does not become suspicious.Foster,in my humble opinion I think you are calling to long.You want to try and imitate a rabbit that a coyote has caught and then lost.Do a 10 to 15 second call,then stop,then do it again,you want the dog to think that someone is catching the rabbit but cannot hold on to him.After your initial calls wait 3or4 minutes then try again.One other point ,don't hide your self to the extreme were you will compromise the view of the area your calling.

[Andy L]

I kinda thought that went without saying. Dont want your truck parked skylined behind your stand.

Honestly, alot of coyotes have met their demize using the road for a barrier. I have killed a ton of coyotes along I-44. They wont come from behind and they are used to eating/catching wounded animals from cars.

But, gravel/dirt roads work as well. They are hesitant to cross them too, do to road hunters, around here anyway. Get off the road a bit to use as a barrier and give the coyote a corridore to travel to the call where he can stay concealed and feel comfortable and cant wind you without being seen. Its a heck of a set up.

Too much driving vehicles, riding four wheelers or walking on a given area and your busted. They may come to the call, but chances are all your gonna see is tracks.

Andy

BTW, you may be staying too long. Unless Im in good bobcat country, I usually am only out of the truck 30 minutes total. Walk out, set up, call, walk back. All in a half hour. On to the next stand. (Unless there is some skinnin to do. )

As for calling time, there are two theories on that. I have and do use both. Depends on the setup. If the coyote looses the sound, he may start to use his nose to hunt. This is bad for you. I normally let it play for 2-3 minute intervals, with the same amount of quiet time. But, I have had alot of success with continuous calling too. When I do that I do vary the volume alot. Start soft, turn it up a bit, then back down. In open country, Ive watched enough of them to kinda visualize what a coyote responding may be doing and work off that on what Im doing with the call. Kind of a "feel" thing.

Thats another thing. If you get a chance to call some farmland type areas, fencerows and ditches, and set up where you can see the coyote coming for a long distance, you can learn a bunch in a hurry. Watch how they react to changes in your call and their body language. Seems they know more about coyotes than we do.

Andy

[L. Cooper]

All good advice so far.

While a half mile is not necessary every time, I like to get far enough from the truck that it is unlikely coyotes will associate my sounds with the sounds of traffic. Two things help, distance and time. I like at least 400 yards or more from the truck. I also like to park it behind a ridge or in a hollow to muffle sounds. I think more than 10 minutes or so and coyotes forget the vehicle sounds. We often just sit and wait a few minutes after the setup to let things forget what they heard as we moved in.

My favorite call setup is to just peek over a ridge of some sort to get a really good field of view and then call over the ridge. Approach sounds are deadened, the extra "altitude" helps hide scent and provides a good view, you can show only your head and shoulders over it and that can be broken up with low scrub, my shooting sticks are always long enough, and the call will travel long distances. But watch your back.

Seldom do we try one spot for more than 15-20 minutes. We have to be pretty certain something is around and heard us before we will wait much longer. Occasionally we have had success with longer waits, but not often enough to make it worth the time. Maybe we're just impatient. Sometimes it's just too cold to sit around.

A 30 second series of calls and then wait a few minutes is lots of calling. We seldom use baits or decoys as foster described because we don't want our scent spread around our location any more than we must. Wandering around just increases the odds of being busted.

The most quiet, unexposed, direct route planned with the wind in mind to allow us to get the sound of the call into the most likely coyote bedrooms is our thinking.

Then watch your back.

Calling from dense cover works for sure, but requires the coyote to get very close before YOU can see HIM. The odds climb in his favor as he gets closer. The advantage humans have is sight. He has ears, an incredible nose, and eyes almost as good as yours. If you allow approaches through dense bush he will use those senses, and you will call way more coyotes than you see. If you want proof, start taking walks in big circles around your calling location before you leave. You will find tracks of curious coyotes you never saw way too often.

Try to set up with much more open country around you. Allow yourself to see them coming from a long way. If you don't need binoculars to examine your farthest view, you are giving them an advantage. Until you are more confident, don't give them anything.

I have called coyotes by just lying on my back in a patch of what we call "badger brush" in open prairie, and sitting up slowly every once in a while to see what was happening. Once I sat up to see a coyote sitting about 20 feet away, ears cocked and head tilted trying to figure the situation. How he got there I'll never know, but there was a lot of very fast scrambling by both of us before he got away. Coyotes scramble very fast once they decide scrambling is necessary.

[Aktion]

Originally posted by L. Cooper
.

From your description, Action, I fear that although you haven't seen many coyotes, lots of coyotes have likely seen you.

Yeah, I don't see anything, except for some deer and an occasional fisher.

I got nothing this past weekend. But I did find a good spot, with a decent amount of range.

But I still like the idea amd the challenge of trying to bag them in the dense woods.

I guess full camo and no movment on my part might help.

Gonna try to get out one evening this week.

[L. Cooper]

Aktion, I do understand the desire for close encounters. The most exciting and some of the funniest stories all come from calling them in close. It is, however, the hard way to actually bag them in my opinion.

When I look back on it, I think most of the coyotes that got closer than 20 yards managed to escape in the ensuing exitement and confusion. Kind of like "The Keystone Cops Go Coyote Hunting" episodes. We never carry shotguns like the real close encounter guys advise. If we spot them on their way in at typical rifle distances, we most often connect.

[foster]

Wow, this is all great advice from guys who have been there, done that. I truly appreciate it all and will take it to heart. I probably won't get out again until the Jan. 22 weekend but I'll print this thread off so I can reference it.
Again, many, many thanks.

Couple more questions:
1) I understand how some of you guys use the roads as barriers because the coyotes are reluctant to cross or walk along them. However, where I usually hunt the roads always have coyote tracks on them. Always. Scat too. Do you suppose this is because the coyotes here are not pressured at all? Almost no one hunts them. I'm guessing since they can live hassle-free in this area, they don't mind walking the roads. But that's a guess. I'd like to hear your theories.

2) Where I hunt it is very dense brush. You can only see maybe 100 yards at the best of times but usually half that. However, there are areas that are clearcut by logging companies. The clearcuts are plenty big, but they leave little patches of 50-70 trees in one clump in the middle. Would it be wise to call from one of these clumps and expect a coyote to come across the clearcut? Or are my hopes too high?
Ha, that might be just a bit tooooooo easy if they would. But I never tried that because I didn't think they'd come in across open ground.
Cheers and thanks again.

[Andy L]

They will cross open ground, but given the choice, they will take a travel corridore for cover much easier. At least more often....

Andy

[Evan03]

i ounce wacked a coyte with 8 foot 2x4(2506) at about 10 feet rocky called it in with his eltronick call and a fur dangeling in the brush.

i watched this coyote make is way down alittle gully bounceing through the brush headed for the fure. then all the sudden it right in front of me. 10 feet at the most. swung my rifle around wich at that point felt like a 8ft 2x4

i was wearing brown carharts bibs and a brown oilskin coat with no scent masking stuff. everything still worked out right and the coyote would have walked right by me without ever even knowing i was there or smelling me untill it got further down wind.

about all i know of getn em in close is that rockys very good at it.

[L. Cooper]

Foster, I don't think roads bother coyotes much. In fact, once snow gets deep they will regularly use roads, snowmobile tracks, tractor trails, and even our own cross-country ski trails to make travel easier (coyote crap can ruin the wax job on your skis). They also obviously like to "mark" the trails with their own scat. The only reason we avoid roads is that we don't want someone driving down the road while we are trying to talk to an approaching coyote. I see no reason to think a road will bother your hunting, but traffic certainly will.

As far as clearcuts go, if you can get a coyote to hear your call from the other side of a clearcut, and he has no good route that will provide concealment to get to you, he will be quite willing to cross the open space to have a look. They all want to use cover if they can, but they all want an easy meal too.

The trick is to make sure your set up is undetected, that nothing makes the open crossing look/sound/smell dangerous, and that there is a coyote on the other side to hear your efforts.

I would look for a patch of trees that could be approached from downwind of the area you think holds the coyotes, and which you could use low spots and hollows to reach so you could avoid just wandering across the clearcut in plain view.

Clearcuts are often pretty messy. Can you just hunker down in the middle of one in some stumps or slash to break your outline and get a 360 degree view? With some appropriate clothing and a little "stuff" around you to break up your outline, it can take very little to make a successful set up.

[Andy L]

You know, I think alot of it is where you are.

I know that around here, roads make a HUGE difference. Probably because there is one every mile or so. And, there are alot of road hunters, including every farmer around, that carries a rifle and shoots out the window at every coyote they see. That does make em a little road shy, believe it or not.

Now, in Canada, I have never been there, but I would guess, the roads are a bit further apart, making road hunting a little harder. And, yeah they may cross roads. They do in the desert. Actually use the road for the shooting lanes out west quite a bit.

Alot of this is common sense. Where you are, work with what you got, giving yourself as much of the odds as you possibly can. If you got an area to hunt, check the wind first and determine from the direction and speed, where the best place to set up is going to be in relation to the area you think the coyotes going to come from. Then, when you set your stand, place your caller in relation to you to up your odds by blowing the sound to the coyote where he will have a corridore to travel to the sound and feel comfortable, while putting yourself in the best position you can to kill this coyote on his way to the call, at the same time blocking your downwind side with either a barrier or giving yourself a shot, should he circle on you.

After you have had some successful stands, you, I know I can, go into a strange area and watch the wind and choose good stand locations, without knowing much about the area at all.

I can gurantee you there are some vast differences in how you set a stand and how a coyote reacts to different things, such as roads, in different parts of the country. But the basics and the coyotes dont change. Just the terrain. The big woods of the Northeast, the farmland around here, the sandhills of of Nebraska and the desert Southwest are all great coyote hunting areas. And the terrain is drastically different. But the basics are the same.

Andy

[Nulle]

Eastern part of South Dakota has the roads every mile but out here in the Western section you can go for a long ways without finding one. Roads don't bother them around this area at all. Last weekend I had a yote 200 yards off the main road at 2pm and he just looked at me. There are always tracks along and on the roads.
Havn't done much calling this year with the mountain lions roaming around and when I get out again I will take my hand gun for a possible close encounter.
I call about 20 min tops and then move on. Most of mine have come in on a dead run but with the rabbit population hitting a high this year they may come in slower.

[Trapper_Stephen88]

I'm 16 and live in Warrenton, Missouri. I'd like to go coyote or fox hunting this year but I've never gone before and I don't know anyone who does. I homeschool so my school hours are more flexible throughout the season. Today I went scouting and found fresh fox tracks not far from a deer stand on my grandpas property (which is where I want to hunt). Now no one here hunts anything but deer, and there are very few houses around,and one road. I have been trapping for awhile now but haven't caught much, so I figured I'd try calling. Does anyone here live in Missouri? Warrenton is about an hour or more southeast of St. Louis (it's a small town but growing). I don't have any calls but plan to buy a cottontail mouth call. Anway any advice would be much appreciated. -Thanks