Ramblings and Such From Hunting Coyote

[windypants]

I finished swathing the first cutting last weekend. Looks like we'll have some second cutting this year. Best hay I've cut in a while. These new discbine swathers are pretty hard on the fawns. They'll cut 3-ton hay at 10 mph. If the fawns are too young to run, I don't ever see them until it's too late. But it was getting late enough that most of them were running out ahead of the swather.

The pups have all left the dens now. Ive been out scouting for my elk permit mornings and evenings. Last night I was up on a high ridge with the spotting scope and there was a big male coyote up on another ridge above me about a half mile away. He was just laying up there and seemed to be enjoying the sunset and a beautiful evening too.

Heres a few pics from my scouting forays.

 

[HRM Johnny]

Great pictures. Thanks, Windy.

 

[74honker]

Awesome pictures! Someday I hope to look through a scope at an elk like that with a tag for it lol.

 

[DSheetz]

I got a call to see if I would do some work for a guy so I bought a few snares instead of making them. The first and third pictures show them ready to be simmered in baking soda to take the shine off and get rid of odors and oil ect. then after they have been simmered. The second picture shows a swivel and a piece of tygon tubing that they use to put on a piece of nine wire as a support and to fasten the snare to hold the animal. I don't use either of these when I make my snares as I find a swivel doesn't do any good, the cable is used up and bound before a swivel can work and I use 14-gauge wire pinched on the cable as my support wire. I find that a snare works best, and faster if it has no movement, it till the lock is set on the animal. The last shows the cam lock, a break away and a quick kill spring. The spring in the last picture is in the way of the lock closing properly so then in the forth picture you can see that a slight bend in the cable puts the spring at an angle away from the lock so it will not interfere with the lock closing. If I feel the need to use the spring, I use a small washer between it and the break away, I put a simple loop of around an inch in diameter, in the end of my snares instead of a swivel with a double ferule. I do use the s-hook break aways as that is the regulations in my state. I don't use the smashed nuts like these snares have I use a crimped aluminum cable stop on the ends of my cable. The way that I make and use my snares is what I have found to be the best way for me in my situation, after years of doing and studying it yours may be a lot different than my situation.

 

[DSheetz]

One of the ones that I make . This one is from the early2000's so the lock is rusty. It's eight foot long, 7x7 3/32 aircraft cable.

 

[DSheetz]

I'm going off topic here but I want to give a little bit of advice for others. If you are a Veteran or Active Duty, get connected with the VA as soon as you can don't wait till you are ready to retire from your civilian job. Don't count on them to keep track of your records for you, they don't do a very good job of it, especially if you weren't where they said you were.

 

[DSheetz]

Walt and I were out today. This old homestead was built in 1916. the wooden house was three rooms with a fireplace built out of native stones . The dug out behind the house was built in 1900, they dug down 4 or 5 feet laid up stones, put poles on the roof then laid sod on it. It was one room 20 x16 foot with one door and one window, the grandparents lived there till they got time and money to build the wooden house. It was built on the south side of the ridge out of the wind. I was out there one evening with 6 inches of snow one the ground and a full moon coming up over the ridge before the wooden house fell in and the stone walls were still standing on the dugout. what a post card that would have made. Walt and I found a calf in the wrong pasture this afternoon contacted the rancher who brought his dog and four-wheeler over to get it back with the mom, one of the things that I do while I'm out. That's why they pay me and keep calling me to see if I will hunt for them. It didn't take long to see why the guy before me that took over after I retired, got fired. He didn't respect the land or fences. I picked up a lot of his mess as I went along today and will pick up more as time goes on. I love being retired and not having a set schedule but will be okay with a slow pace and not hitting it hard every day, 10 to 12 hours a day seems good to me.

 

[74honker]

What a cool memorial to your grandparents. The history that land could teach a person and it obviously has to you Dave. Today the heat index here was around 110 to 115. I went outside for chores and let the dogs out and that was it.

 

[DSheetz]

the first picture shows how I attach gates to the post with chain so the wires don't break. The second one is one of my snares from the 80's with the Patterson knot and one of O'Gorman's whammies to fasten it to nine wire. the last two show how I set my fence snares

 

[DSheetz]

We have had some warmer weather this summer with more humidity than normal. One of the many things that I love about living where I do is the lower humidity we normally have; with our higher altitude we seldom stay hot at night, and I really enjoy that. We only got to 93 for a high yesterday but last evening by 7:30 it was already down to 73 with partly cloudy skies. Monday afternoon it was 96 but a thunderstorm rolled in and in less than 10 minutes it was down to 70 with gusty winds and some soft hail. We have had more hail storms this year than I can remember in one summer. If the moisture, we have been getting this year continues we will have some pretty deep snow again this winter. The area I was in yesterday had a pretty extensive antelope die off last winter. It's nearly August already and getting time for the antelope bucks to start marking their areas and gathering the does, they will be making their scrapes in the roads, taking a dump and peeing in it while scraping the dirt with their hooves. They will be making some pretty interesting sounds, some sounds like a chicken and some sounds that are hard to describe. If when you were a kid, you took a large button and string to make what was called a buzzsaw you can hear them make a sound like it made. I can't count the times that I have called in large antelope bucks by using my hand-held calls to make fawn blats this time of year. My granddad told me that when he was raising his family that he would shoot antelope anytime they needed meat then they would cut it up fry it in lard put a layer of lard in a 25-gallon crock then a layer of fried antelope in more lard till they had it all cover with lard and then put a cloth over it, because they didn't have refrigeration that is how they would preserve their meat. They then would get some meat out of the crock and refry it for the meal. There weren't many deer, antelope or elk around when I was younger, they had been eaten by people trying to stay alive during the depression and dust bowl era and then World War two. Most of the people that had learned to live that way of life are gone now as are a lot of their knowledge of it.

 

[windypants]

I got these pictures this morning while out scouting for elk. Would this be this years pup? Or a yearling? It seems too big to be a pup. It had just caught a mouse. I saw an adult soon after that had a full tail.

 

[DSheetz]

It looks like one of last year's pups. It's shed off pretty smooth. I enjoy watching them mouse it's so amazing to see how well they can locate a small animal in the grass with just their ears and nail them to the ground with their front feet. Several years I would find yearlings that were stunted by not having the mom and dad to feed them, when the new guys thought that they didn't need to take the dens but just kill the adults. It might have been they thought that the pups would die or maybe they thought that they needed to have job security and farm a few pups, or maybe they thought it was too much work to take the dens, I will never know for sure what their real reasons were, but I took a bunch of the dens that they left. You can tell by their ears and teeth better than by the size that their body is, by now the pups are nearly the size of the adults. The ears are thin, and they don't quite have all of their adult teeth yet. They learn to mouse by hunting bugs, grasshoppers and the like as they grow and start getting out of the den holes.

 

[windypants]

I heard two different groups doing their serenade this morning at about 4:30, in between moonset and sunrise. I've been seeing and hearing more now that the hay has been cut and some of the pastures are getting grazed down. They're hard to find in the tall grass.

 

[DSheetz]

I enjoy listening to the coyotes and seeing if I can understand what they are talking about, they aren't very different then our dogs. Walt my Jack Russell has quite a vocabulary, different barks, whines, whimpers meaning different things and asking me for different things. Short higher pitched whines at 9:00 P.M. is can I get my bedtime cookie, a longer whine is him asking for his ball, sharp short barks is telling me that he is hearing the Beagle that comes to visit the neighbor's, longer less high-pitched barks are that someone is out on the front sidewalk about to knock on the door, A frequent short high-pitched whine is I need to go outside for my relief. He uses different tones of growls as well high pitched, tells Bella he's had enough of her biting and tugging on him, lower pitched says he's enjoying playing, a really low-pitched murmuring growl says now I'm upset back off or I'm going to fight you, to other dogs. If we were to do like several of the older Government trappers did and keep live coyotes around, I'm sure that we would hear them doing the same types of sounds for similar meanings as our dogs do. I have listened to the coyotes often out in the field just to be able to imitate them and say what I think they were saying to get them to respond to me with my hand calls or to reply to them with the same as they were saying to me. That would be my reasoning for liking to have and be able to use handheld calls. Yes E-calls are handy to have and use as well as have come a long way and say a lot of things in coyote that are often explained by the seller. We need to understand when and where to say what they want to hear or not hear in each given situation. Often, we could use a handheld call better to our advantage, when we have a coyote or two talking to us, so that they don't hang up and or get afraid, paranoid or disinterested in us, if we take the time to figure out what we need to say back to them.