Pond Boss Forums GENERAL QUESTIONS Wildlife Management Deer Season '23/'24 Comments

SetterGuy,

I used to have very hit and miss (mostly miss) with the rabbit call until my neighbor shared something with me. He told me that coyotes have a very good sense of distance and direction from their hearing. If a person calls too much, the coyote will know EXACTLY where the sound came from. He told me this. If a coyote hears the call once, it will have a good sense of the generally area from whence the call came but will not know precisely where. So he will investigate and search. The more a person calls, the more likely it is that the coyote will have pin pointed the caller's precise location and will be able to identify the caller before the caller spots the coyote. He told me to do this. Call once ... if there is a coyote in the neighborhood he will come into investigate. Give a coyote at least 15 minutes to come into view but wait no longer than 30 minutes. If no coyote, then assume none were close enough or hungry enough to come to the call and move to different spot or call it a day. He claimed that overcalling will ruin the hunt and educate coyotes. I had a lot of respect for him and followed his advice and although every hunt did not end in a kill ... a greater percentage did and I spent less time hunting.

Do any of you good coyote hunters ever work land where they perform prescribed burns?

Whenever I do a big burn, I almost always stay out after dark and walk the burn to put out any embers. Every time, the short grass areas beyond my fire breaks are filled with coyotes, and they are VERY close to me! I assume they are having a feeding frenzy on all of the ground critters driven or wounded by the fire.

I have seen them near my truck, and then hopped in to drive to the other side of the burn, and caught more coyotes in the headlights - where I NEVER see them unless burning.

I would think that on a full moon night, or with a thermal scope, you might be able to get a dozen coyotes at my farm?

(Just an observation from a non-coyote hunter that doesn't like his increasing coyote population.)


P.S. I assume full grown raccoons are too big for coyote predation? I get coyotes loping on my game cameras, but have never seen them even stalking the fat raccoons at my deer feeders every night.

Do you normally hear the coyotes howling at dusk in the distance? If so, did you hear them yesterday too, or did your rabbit call significantly change the coyote behavior?

I heard the coyotes howl almost every time I worked until dark at the farm this fall. They would start up on one side of me, and then there would be a reply in another direction. Sometimes I would even hear a third group.

However, the way that sound carries, I have no idea how close the coyotes were.

Deer season sucked. Early season I saw a lot of bucks that needed one more year to be legal. Later, I saw an occasional doe. I’m not much of a meat hunter. Saw no pigs.

My grandson saw some pigs at the end of the season.