windypants
Well-Known Member
Looks great Dave! Nice work.
Ramblings and Such From Hunting Coyote
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windypants
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Coyote U summer school is in session! By dumb luck I found the den. I went over to put a camera at a fork in the draw and walked right to it. I'd been by there many times looking for it, and it's in plain sight of one of my favorite coyote snipering points. But until the pups get the grass all wore down you can't see it unless you're right on top of it. It's less than 75 yards from where I got that picture of the pregnant female. It's easy to watch from a distance and close enough to the house that I'll be able to hear them well. I put the trail camera on it. Hopefully my scent there won't cause them to move.
I don't remember finding a coyote or red fox den that wasn't in a sunny place and most of them were on south facing hill sides. If they stay where they are you will have the opportunity to learn a ton from them. I have had them not move even after a guy walked right up and looked in the hole, but I have also made them move by just getting close to the den. So much depends on how cautious the coyotes are at the time. When I have been putting a lot of pressure on them and have them thinned down, they tend to be more cautious and thus spookier. Again, just another reason that I respect them and keep interested in them. Most coyotes I have met have more will to survive than a lot of people that I have met it seems. Love them, hate them or be indifferent they deserve respect for the way they parent and their will to survive in my eyes.
windypants
Well-Known Member
I saw the male come back over the hill toward the den, but he must have smelled me because he got nervous and left. I was searching that side draw he went out of this morning. But my activity is nothing unusual because I'm running around over there all the time, and shooting a lot near there. So we'll see what happens. I told them I was just fixing fence when I was there
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.This is some of my country. The picture with the pine ridge is where the den is. the pine ridge is about two miles out, on the back side of the ridge is a draw that is nearly 60 feet deep has a flat sandy bottom to it averaging 10 feet wide, along it there is a chunk of sandstone that has broken off and is setting about a foot and a half from the bluff. behind the chunk in the sand are tons of tracks and a hole that runs back into the bluff, that is where she had her pups hidden. Closer is wolf creek it is around 100 feet down below the ridge closer to me on the flat nearly a mile from me is an antelope buck that busted me slipping in through a saddle on the ridge I was on. He was down over half a mile from me I was quiet, but he still saw movement as I slowly made my way to make my stand. The other picture is of soldier creek where in the early 1800's three wood cutters from Fort Fetterman were killed by a band of natives. The soldiers were on the wrong side of the Plate River trespassing.
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It was an interesting morning yesterday, Walt and I got out the first thing we came across was a tom strutting his stuff for some hens, next we watched a pair of sand hills cranes doing their ritual and talking a lot. There were several antelope bucks being themselves and hanging out alone. The coyotes were receptive and talking from a long distance but staying near home and family. This morning I left Walt at home and went out to play with my rifle, I stiffened up the fore stock and bedded the action. It is now running just a little over an inch group at 100 yards with factory Hornady 95 grain loads. I loaded some 95 grain bullets with Remington 9 1/2 primers and 39 grains of Varget seated them .062 off of the lands so I will see how they do. It's all for the enjoyment of it at this time.
Was a good start to the morning here. For a few weeks now I knew I've had a coyote coming around the house mainly in the early AM. We've seen it only twice but just long enough to see it but have seen tracks a couple more times. Knew it was the same time frame because its been so dry here and fresh prints would only show after a rain and had to be AM cause it would rain overnight and quit before sunrise but prints would be perfect fresh within couple hours of daylight. Figured it may have been one I've missed in the past since it knew better than to cross in the open and stayed hid well lol. Well this AM the wife was up first and noticed our nieghbors (the deer that stay here by the house) were acting a bit restless while the dogs were out to potty. Up I went and got dressed and watched for a few but nothing showed and the deer went back to feeding. Thought it was a false alarm so I went out with the last dog to potty and sure enough, it came from the opposite direction and looked right at me and dog about 100yd away but on the other side of drainage channel. I froze and luckily the dog didn't see it. It turned and went about its thing and gave me a chance to step out of sight behind a trailer. Got me and the dog back in the house out of its sight and back out I went with the rifle. I was able to sneak back to the trailer where I could see it but it not me and sure enough it was still there. A couple days ago we lost a ram and with it being so hot I buried it in the compost/manure pile to keep the smell down and they rot away pretty quick in there. Well, this coyote is standing on top of this pile scratching and pawing and could obviously smell it. Last mistake it made! Can't believe it could smell that good. This pile REALLY stinks when you open it up and I buried it several feet into it. Turns out it's a male.
HRM Johnny
Well-Known Member
windypants
Well-Known Member
Good job! They are so secretive now, but you made the best of it when he made a mistake.
I honestly thought it was gonna be a female. The tracks it left just weren't very big and per time of day figured it had to be. I also knew it was only coming around about once or twice a week. I had got up early and sat and watched for it several times but it never showed itself. Thus dog had a somewhat unique look to it. Very dark with alot of black hair. Few weeks ago I spoke of one very, very similar to this one but it was about 3 miles from where this spot. Same one, who knows but if so it would explain it only being around every few days or so.
Well done 74honker. It's not more than a couple of years old the canines are still pretty well pointed. It doesn't appear to have been puppy setting as its tail is still well furred. They let the pups pull on their tail the same as our dogs do with their pups and that breaks the guard hairs off. It is amazing how good their noses are they can track things the same as a hound dog does and look at how drug K-9's can smell out the drugs or explosives that they have been trained to find hidden in sealed packages and even with cover scents around them. They are even training dogs to smell out cancers and diabetics with low blood sugar or high blood sugar, and people that are going to have a seizure. In Vietnam the LURRP teams learned to use pepper than CS powder to mess with the tracking dogs tracking abilities. Here they use the animals digging near pipelines, especially the coyotes, to detect leaking natural gas pipes because they add Cal-odorant to the gas so that it has a smell, that's the smell you get and stays on your hands when you fill your propane bottles, as well as seeing the buzzards circling above the leaks. When I was younger, I could smell the other people's body odors because of the foods they ate or the deodorants and other products they used. Still today I can smell a person that chews wintergreen snuff, smokes even if they smoke a pipe, cigars, menthol or plain cigarettes and I don't have a very good sense of smell compared to the canines. I have watched so many people starting out trapping for canines that used way too much gland lure and wondered why they weren't catching them but if you took the time to read the tracks you could see that they didn't need to get very close to know where the scent was coming from and were marking their area back away from the sets instead of coming to the set to make their mark, yup I've been as guilty of it as anybody else has. Mosquitos and ticks are attracted to some people's body odors more than others, it's not just your breath , if you eat bananas, they will come find you to bite you, for years people that raise cattle have used Sulphur blocks to keep lice, flies, ticks ect. from bothering their cattle. There are several natural insect repellents we just have to figure out what we like and works best for us.
I didn't think is was terribly old as you have pointed out. Tops were wore some but bottoms still pointy and from what I could see of its molars they weren't wore. Would a young single male roam a wide area alone? No one has seen or heard a coyote around here for a month or so. But I also know from your tutilage that they won't talk much right now anyway. I have heard some WAY distant from here and accross the river from here but thats been it for awhile.
Yes, if a male, pair without pups or even a dry single female doesn't have a reason to stay near a den with pups they will cover a large area. That is what makes pinning down dry coyotes that are killing so hard they don't always come back to the same place to rest and lay up for the off time. A lone coyote tends to be more cautious even if they haven't been messed with just more edgy and suspicious, they might be trespassing in another's area and just roaming around looking for food, company or a place to call home. Later in the year after the pups have left home even the adult pair will be covering more area and be more cautious hummm are they call shy or just more cautious, and not the pups of the year that tend to charge in?
Around here everything is call shy all the time. Main reason I've tried just mouth calls now. They're being harrassed 24/7 now. Some of the rich farmers buying thermal scopes and booze cruizin on a SxS with an Ecaller blaring from said SxS all night long during the winter. It's a surprise they even talk at all around here anymore. Which they don't much. I've went several times around some of the normal travel routes after a rain to find tracks and have yet to find any besides the one that I got this AM. Not saying I'm not missing any but just not the normal.
