CALLIN' COYOTES

[mnhunter79]

Quick question for coyote hunters, what type of strategies work for you? tryin to get some new ideas to try, mine have been very unsucessful this year. thanks.

[Brunsvig_slayer]

What kind of calls do you use?

[mnhunter79]

cottontail distress, red dessert howler and the lil' dog, with and without the "barrel" on the red dessert.

[Tim_Anderson]

mnhunter,

Just read both your posts. I too have struggled in Minnesota(I'm from up in the Brainerd area). I know others have had some success, but I think overall we don't have a great population in many areas. In the areas that do have a good population (south and west) I think they get pounded pretty hard...called at and road hunted. Up here...yeah, there's tracks around, but there's so much woods, I don't have alot of confidence that there's anything within earshot in many setups.

For this reason, some buds and I made a trip out west. We had a great time, and found that many people were more than willing to let us hunt on their ranches. I think you would find this the case in western North Dakota, Montana, Wyoming, and Nebraska. Yeah, it's a long way to go, but worth it, I think. We're already talking about going back.

Pretty cool to get somewhere where there's a great population, and where they haven't been shot up everywhere. Don't get me wrong, they're still plenty crafty, and we learned quickly many of the things that can go wrong. But after struggling around here, it was refreshing to go west and find success right off the bat. And man, this stuff is pretty addicting, huh?

Mostly, we set up in open areas/bottoms where we had good visibility and could call/see for upwards of 1/2 to a full mile. And yep, they definitely came from that far! We usually started out with howling, and then went to the jackrabbit distress stuff. Then sometimes used the coyote distress stuff (ky-yi). We pretty much follow the Randy Anderson routine which he outlines in his dvd's. If you haven't seen them, I highly recommend it. It was cool to call in several pairs, and once, even brought in a four pack. We used many of the same calls as you listed you have. We also had some good success in the big CRP.

We did our best to play the wind in our favor, but a couple of times, the setup just did not allow, and we wound up calling yotes from way downwind because of a windy day. Still had success with that, you just gotta be ready to stop them and shoot them before they get in your scent wash.

It helped alot to have a guy watch the back door, as they often came from where we didn't expect them, and were always always trying to slip/circle downwind. We also had several "hang up" on us...they probably either saw the truck, or saw/heard us walking in. The biggest conflict our hunters had was how dang far we had to walk for every set...sure is big country out there.

I was using a sniper type rifle in a .22-250 with bipod. Pretty good gun for the first shot, but I struggled with it after that )when they were running), mostly from inexperience. My friends where shooting the DPMS AR style rifles in the .223, and pulled off some amazing shots at running yotes out to 350 yards just by watching where their bullets hit and compensating. Pretty fun to watch.

Not that I've given up on Minnesota. Just need to keep looking for the little honey holes, and hope to get an earlier start next fall when they're young and dumb.

Good luck. I'll try to get some pics up later.

Tim

[CAJ]

Tim. Glad you had a good time out west here. There arn't to many trees in your way here were there. Tlaked to some guys from the Scobey area, and they had a Helicopter in some of the ruff breaks last week to try and thin some out of a sheep ranch up there, The males have realy been running as of late so they did rather well when they were up. CAJ