Playing Percentages Pays Off Calling Coyotes

Playing Percentages Pays Off Calling Coyotes

By Troy Hoepker

The sea of blue-green sagebrush seemingly went on forever until it met the steep butte off in the distance and turned into a wall of rocky red earth mixed with grey and white lines of mineral deposits exposed by centuries of erosion. As I sat overlooking the huge landscape I could just imagine the Lakota warriors of Chief Red Cloud or Sitting Bull riding proudly atop that butte as they once did. I could envision the wagon trains making their way westward on the Overland Trail meeting the hardships of a vast, dry and desolate wasteland winding along a two-track wagon wheel path under the shadow of the snow covered peaks of the Sierra Madre Mountains in the distance. It was beautiful and dangerous all in one. Wild and untamed, it calls out to the adventurous spirit of the hunter who wants to see what’s over the next hill, the next mountain or beyond the horizon.

You could get lost and in real trouble out here if not prepared and careful. Or you could get lost on purpose while on the run like Butch Cassidy and the Wild Bunch gang of the old west did here in the late 1800’s. Maybe we were here to get lost too? Lost from the stresses of work and everyday life for a few days with only the beauty of our surroundings and the concentration of finding our prey on our minds. The only humanity we saw in three full days of hunting the backcountry was in the form of three or four pickup trucks on seldom traveled roads. You won’t see houses or buildings but you will see pronghorn, mule deer, snowshoe hares, sage grouse and if you’re really lucky, maybe a seemingly out of place elk herd or herd of mustangs living wild and free.

We were here to hunt the animal that was named “Sinawava” by the Ute people who inhabited the land before us. The Shoshone tribes that traveled the same area called them by a different name, “Et-sah.” I’ve called them plenty of names under my breath over the years, some of which can’t be repeated on the pages of this magazine after they gave me the slip.

A Coyote Destination Live
As you may have guessed by now, my calling partner, Travis, and I were not in Iowa but in instead in Wyoming hunting coyotes in the Red Desert. Known for its large coyote populations, the Red Desert country offers a diverse landscape of millions of acres of BLM land that you and I own. You drive from the burnt red, high desert soil, into flat sage brush steppe and continue into badland areas of multi-colored rock formations all surrounded by buttes, coulees and rim-rock ridge lines framed by distant mountains. The large coyote populations in this wilderness and the ability to literally hunt almost anywhere you wish make it a coyote caller’s dream destination.

I had just turned my head in time to see a coyote come bounding through the sagebrush over the hill from my south side and I watched as he made eyes on the area of the caller. He turned left and predictably worked the ridgeline towards the caller coming on a string. As he arrived due west of the caller, he turned right and made his way down the ridge adjacent to ours and above the caller below us. As he gained ground on the downwind side and entered the “death zone” of our trap. I muted the caller before he could get there. He stopped in his tracks staring where the sound had been, curious as to why it had gone silent.

He couldn’t hear the flip of the safety nor the delicate break of the trigger, but he felt the bullet and simultaneously hit the dirt as I heard the “WHOMPH” sound of a meat report hit my ears a second later. Within seconds, the coyote popped up and flopped and spun itself back up the ridge in a mortally wounded half dance, half run. Its erratic behavior made me miss my second shot, as was evident by the spray of sand blowing up ten feet into the air right next to the coyote now a tad over 200 yards away. I got off one more shot before he disappeared into the sagebrush but knew it was probably a miss as well.

We were unable to find that coyote after a good while of trying in the ocean of waist high sagebrush but knew he probably didn’t make it far. One thing I could take away from that particular hunt however, was that it doesn’t matter whether it was an Iowa coyote or a Wyoming one, some coyote behavior is universal, leading to predictable behavior that gives you success if you know how a coyote conducts his business. That coyote predictably went to the downwind side on a day with gusty winds and stopped on cue at the muting of the caller. Iowa coyotes will exhibit the same behavior. Coyotes demonstrate the same natural behavior tendencies a large percentage of the time and if you know those behaviors you can eliminate the mistakes that set them free.

A Set for Success
Coyotes can come from anywhere when we’re bringing them to the call. Pointing the gun at the caller is always wise, but in areas where cover presents a travel route within close proximity to your position, you’ll want to point the gun at the end of that cover. It could be the end of a waterway or a timbered finger, or maybe just an area of trees that juts out towards your position. Coyotes naturally hunt using the cover and the depressions of the ground to hide their approach. I always try and identify the closest possible point to me where a coyote can get without me seeing it and cover that spot with the gun while waiting. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve had a coyote use every last bit of cover on his way to me.

When hunting by yourself you may have faced the question of how to set up along a waterway, fence line or brushy draw? If you set up on one side, you can’t see the other at times. The answer to this question is simple. Set up on the downwind side of cover every time. When coyotes travel along cover they do so on the downwind side most of the time so they can smell prey and danger within the cover as they move. Therefore, they will travel to you on the downwind side and you will hopefully be able to see them when they do.

As wind speed increases, so does a coyote’s propensity to use it. The more wind, the more coyotes circle. Think about that when you are finding a suitable place to put your caller.

A coyote will circle to the downwind side a larger percentage of the time once you’ve introduced a coyote vocalization into the calling sequence as well. The reason that percentage goes up is because any responding coyote wants to know whom they are dealing with. Along those same lines, using a coyote vocalization can also increase the amount of coyotes that will keep their distance while still trying to get eyes on the scene. These are often times subordinate coyotes that we see but won’t come all the way in. After every hunt that involves calling a coyote it’s important to analyze the correlation between the sounds you used and the coyote’s behavior towards them.

Continuous calling brings on a higher percentage of coyotes that stay on the move as a general rule than sporadic calling does. If you want a coyote to slow his approach to you include some pauses in your calling. Adding some mystery and making the coyote hunt you ups the odds of the coyote making a mistake and becoming an easier target.

Position Your Electronic Call
Coyotes have the ability to pinpoint sound very effectively, therefore I like to hide the caller in some kind of cover instead of placing the caller in a location that is somewhat barren. If a coyote can clearly see that there is no fight for life, or another coyote in the location of the sound he heard from a distance, than it can force the coyote into a more fearful attitude of coming any closer. You want the coyote to close the distance in order for it to investigate the sound. An electronic caller sitting in the wide-open blaring sounds increases the percentage of a coyote hanging up.

Every coyote hunt is different and that’s part of why it never gets old, but there are some tendencies coyotes continually demonstrate. If you introduce the knowledge of how coyotes approach prey into your calling strategy for the locations that you hunt and play those percentages with your set up, I believe the percentage of called coyotes you successfully take will increase this winter.

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