Calling Coyotes Without Losing Your Permission

The coyote you're going to shoot is already downwind of you. He circled while you were still fussing with the caller volume, and he's standing in the fencerow at 80 yards with his nose full of your laundry detergent. You'll never see him. He'll be gone in four seconds and he'll teach every coyote on that section what your speaker sounds like.

That's the whole game. Not the rifle, not the call. Wind, patience, and a landowner who's glad you showed up.

Do the permission part first, and do it in person

Call the man before harvest, not the week you want to hunt. Knock on the door in daylight, in a clean truck, with your hat off. Say what you want to do, what you'll be shooting, and where you'll park.

Then ask the three questions most guys forget:

• Where are the livestock and the guardian dogs right now? A Great Pyrenees at 200 yards in gray light is a light-colored dog standing in a pasture. So is a coyote. Ask what color the dogs are and how many there are.
• Where are the property lines, and who's the neighbor? You need to know which direction you absolutely can't send a bullet.
• When's calving or lambing? That's when your help is worth something, and it's also when a truck door at 5 a.m. is least welcome near the calving lot.

Text him when you pull in. Text him when you leave. Every gate goes back exactly how you found it, including the chain wrap. If you can't remember how it was wrapped, take a photo of it before you touch it. That single habit has kept more permissions alive than any bottle of whiskey at Christmas.

And tell him what you saw. Not just what you shot. "Two coyotes crossed the creek headed for the corn, didn't get a shot, but they're using that draw" is the kind of report that makes a rancher think of you as an asset rather than as traffic.

Pick a stand for the wind, then for the sun

Coyotes come to a call downwind almost every time. Not sometimes. Plan your setup so that the downwind approach is the one place you can see, and everything else is at your back or blocked by something solid.

Simple version: sit with the wind in your face or quartering across, put a fence, a pond, a cut bank or a plowed field on the downwind side so he has to expose himself to get there. Face the open ground. Sun at your back if you can manage it, because a coyote crossing 200 yards of stubble into the sun is looking at a shadow instead of at a man.

Park a quarter mile off. Walk in quiet, and walk in the low ground. Don't skyline yourself on the way to the stand and then wonder why nothing comes.

Start quiet, and stay longer than feels reasonable

Most guys blow the call too loud, too early, too long. Start soft. A coyote 150 yards away in the fencerow can hear a lip squeak just fine, and a full-volume jackrabbit scream at that distance is a good way to watch a tail leave.

A stand that works:

• First two minutes, nothing. Just sit and look.
• Then 30 seconds of soft distress. Cottontail, woodpecker, whatever's actually native where you're.
• Wait two or three minutes. Look, don't scan with your whole head.
• Repeat, a little louder, for 15 to 20 minutes total.

In lightly hunted country, 20 minutes is plenty. Where coyotes have heard a lot of speakers, give it 30 and use lone howls or a pair of challenge howls instead of dying-rabbit music. February is when howls start carrying real weight, because that's breeding season and a strange coyote in the territory is a personal matter.

Then move a mile and do it again. Distance between stands beats time on any single stand.

A hand call costs fifteen or twenty dollars and teaches you more than a remote does, because you learn to read what the sound is doing. An electronic caller with a remote starts somewhere around a hundred and fifty dollars and gets expensive fast, and its real advantage isn't volume. It's that the sound comes from 40 yards away from your face, so the coyote is locked onto a speaker and not onto you. Set it upwind of your position with a small motion decoy if that's legal where you're.

Rifle, shotgun, and knowing exactly where the bullet goes

Open country, a flat-shooting .223 or .22-250 with a 2-10x scope covers most of what you'll be offered. Thick cover, creek bottoms, anything under 40 yards, a 12-gauge with heavy buffered shot is faster and safer than a rifle. A lot of guys carry both and leave one in the truck depending on the stand.

Safety on a coyote stand is different from safety in a deer stand for one reason: the shot is usually low, flat and fast, at an animal that's moving, in terrain you don't own. A varmint bullet carries well over a mile if it finds nothing to stop it. Before the first squeak, pick your backstop out loud in your head. That hill, that terrace, that bank. Anything past the ridge is off limits and you decided that before the coyote appeared.

Then there's identification, which is where night hunting eats people alive. A coyote and a farm dog can look identical through a thermal at 200 yards. If you can't say out loud what the animal is, you don't shoot. It's not a gray area. Every ruined permission I know of started with a dead dog and a phone call.

Night hunting rules vary more than anything else in hunting

Thermal and night vision are legal for coyotes in some states, restricted to certain seasons or permits in others, and flat illegal in plenty more. Artificial light rules, suppressors, shooting from a vehicle, calling on public ground, bait, whether a furbearer license or a landowner's written consent is required — all of it changes at the state line, and some of it changes by county.

Read your current regulations every single year, and call the local conservation officer if a line is ambiguous. They'd rather answer the question than write the ticket.

Be honest about what killing coyotes does

It helps a rancher in the short term and in a specific place. Remove the pair working a calving pasture in March and calves stop disappearing. That's real.

It doesn't lower the coyote population across the county. Pressure gets answered with larger litters and younger breeders, and the vacancy gets filled by the next animal looking for territory. Anybody who tells you he's going to wipe them out is selling something. Hunt with a purpose, at the time of year the damage is happening, on the ground where it's happening.

And use the animal if you can. December through February the fur's prime in most of the north, and a coyote skinned and handled right is worth something to a buyer or worth a lot on your wall. If you're not going to do that, at least drag it off the road and out of sight. A carcass left in a field entrance is the best argument a landowner will ever hear for saying no next year.

The thing that actually keeps you welcome

Show up in July with a bale hook in your hand and no rifle in the truck. Help stack hay for an afternoon. Fix the wire where you crossed it.

Guys who only appear when they want something stay guests. Guys who help become neighbors, and neighbors get the phone call in March when something's been in the calves.