Coyote Range And Real-World Scouting: Cody Sanchez Part 2

Coyotes feel random until you zoom in on what they repeat. Aaron sits down with Cody Sanchez for week two of coyote hunting and gets specific about what “range” looks like in real timber country: tight home cores for established breeding pairs, big moves for transients, and why a single square mile can hold an entirely different group. If you have ever seen one coyote once and then lost the trail, this conversation helps explain what was probably happening on the landscape.

We also dig into coyote habitat and scouting without the fluff. On uniform timber company ground, “good-looking cover” is everywhere, so Cody leans on what is measurable: scat in the road, fresh tracks on muddy stretches, and the fastest shortcut of all, locating coyotes with howling. We talk about when coyotes get vocal, when they shut down, and why judging howl distance in steep, timbered terrain is harder than most hunters admit. A small change like gaining elevation and working top-down can make your locating way more accurate.

From there we move into predator calling strategy and how to structure a hunt day. Rabbit distress still kills, but we explain why pup fights, group howls, and other coyote vocalizations can flip a switch on a bored or hung-up animal, plus how coyotes get “educated” when one escapes. We finish with a practical take on run-and-gun, stand spacing, and why proximity kills more coyotes than perfect sounds ever will.

Subscribe for the next part, share this with a hunting buddy, and leave a review if it helps your season. What part of coyote hunting do you struggle with most: scouting, howling, or stand strategy?

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Transcript

Welcome And Week Two Setup

SPEAKER_00 0:10

Welcome back to the Blacktail Coach Podcast. I'm Aaron. And this week is week two of coyote hunting with Cody Sanchez. So let's jump into it. Thank you again for recording these with me. So locating and habitat and scouting. Let's start jumping into all that. So first off, what's what is the typical range of a coyote?

Pair Bonds And Daily Movement

SPEAKER_02 0:32

As far as like how far they'll travel and stuff like that. Yeah. I don't I think in our area, it's really not as far as people think. You know, a pretty good general rule, I guess, we've found throughout the log and road aspect of it, like that timber company land stuff. Every square mile, basically, you're going to have the potential to be running into a new group of coyotes. And so as far as how far they're traveling, I don't think it's as far as a lot of people think, especially in our country. You talk about like the valley ground too, where they're going to have to cross through a lot of different private properties and houses and roads and highways. And so they get laid up in certain little areas. They definitely will get out there. And I guess the range would speak to is it a paracyote, established paracyotes, or a transient coyote? A transient coyote that's that's searching for its partner. You know, there's been studies where they've traveled across state lines. I mean, they've traveled long ways, and established paracyotes usually don't get too far from that core area that they're calling home or theirs, as I would call it. So it just kind of varies where the coyotes at and what it's doing in its life cycle.

SPEAKER_00 1:36

Now, will they pair up for do they pair up for life? Yeah, they're said to be interesting. I did I didn't realize that. But they have to they're on the search. Yeah. Yeah, that could take them wherever. Yeah. And I I kind of wondered about this because I had mentioned in the last episode about seeing that one out in the yard, the bright white one, and I'd never seen coloring like that on a coyote. And it might have been a week later. I saw him cross the road. It might have been a half mile from where we're sitting right now. So he was really in the same area, but haven't seen him since, and I never saw him before.

SPEAKER_02 2:18

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 2:18

And so I just wondered if they just moved constantly throughout their life or what the deal was. Now, if they're paired up, how often do you see them actually?

SPEAKER_02 2:30

I guess a good a good little example would be at my house, I have a pair of coyotes that's living in there right now. Uh-huh. A lot of people ask how that's possible. But so I have this paracyotes that that I haven't messed with. I I I watch, they get when we butcher a cow or something, they get all the scraps or deer scraps or whatever, but that I kind of just basically watch and and kind of in a study in a way, I guess you could say. So we're going up on on over two years now where they've been in their established pair, and I watched them have their pups. They had four pups, and I watched kind of that that fall time, that pup dispersal time frame that I talked about happen where three of those pups left and one of them stayed. The dominant pair was still there, and they kept one of their pups, and the other three at least. That's pretty common. That happens a lot where they keep one back. Most nights I would say I get them on a trail camera or I see them. And during the day, they're usually kind of in the same area, this same little reprod patch that they kind of bed up in and live in. They're pretty much there every day. And they'll go out. And I've watched them some nights be leave that little face behind my house and down the valley at my house. It's I don't know, it's probably two miles straight down that valley. I've watched them go to where I couldn't see them anymore down that valley. And this is all through thermal. I'm watching them with a thermal. And I can see them just go down that valley. And they make their rounds. I've watched them come across the road two miles down the road, come across the road and in front of me in a vehicle, and then they're crossing back into our property line and going back up into that corner. So they make their rounds in there, but I think they kind of always make it back to that home area at some point in in the morning or in the daytime. Established dens and everything.

SPEAKER_00 4:17

Yeah, in a kind of a core area, yeah. Okay. So I might have just seen one. He might have just been a transient. Yeah, there's a good chance it's a transient. Do you always see them together as a pair when they're paired up? Not always.

SPEAKER_02 4:30

They they will split up and do their own thing. A lot of times you'll see them traveling together, especially this time of year, once they're paired up and breeding. They usually don't get too far from each other, just kind of like like the rut for they're kind of locked up together, and and coyotes are the same way. A lot of times when you're calling, you'll call them in together and things like that. Like yesterday morning we called in three pack of coyotes, and it was one mature adult male, and then one mature adult female and one younger female. And you could tell that the the mature adult female with the pair with that male, and it was a breeding pair, and the other one was obviously their one of their young from that year. Uh huh. And so they traveled together, they were together that morning, not always together like that, but happened to catch them when they were all together, and they all came together to the rabbit distress call. Okay. That that kind of tells me that they would all be, you know, in that situation, they would all be hunting together at that particular time. But it's not like they're always like that. There's a lot of times where even this time of year you'll catch them out by themselves.

SPEAKER_00 5:34

Okay. It it's interesting. So my family has a cabin down in Lake Tahoe, and they have I can't remember exactly how many, but they do have coyotes down there that are in that area. And that they my cousin actually recognizes each one and has named each one. They're the pets. Of course, they're throwing leftovers off the balcony, you know, the leftover pancakes and stuff. It's kind of a food it has turned into a food source, and they just look at them as pets, not like something that they're trying to hunt or anything like that. But I do know, yeah, they'll if they got a reason to stick around in there, yeah.

SPEAKER_02 6:13

Yeah, yeah. They're habitual and like anything, they're gonna go to a common food source and call that home.

Habitat Carrying Capacity And Backfilling

SPEAKER_00 6:19

Now, so yours are staying there if they're again, you said that you know you're throwing scraps out out to them, and but if they're out more in the wilderness on their own where there's not a I would say an ongoing potential food source for them, do they will they move around seasonally or is it they have their range and they just stay in that range?

SPEAKER_02 6:45

So yeah, I brought up my house there. Whether I was giving them scraps or not, there would be an established paracyotes living in that timber patch regardless, because the way a lot of our lowland country is laid out, you there's houses a couple miles up above me on a big highway, and then there's me down there, and there's houses all along the valley, and there's little strips of timber and pockets of timber laid out throughout that valley. Looking at it cover-wise is another thing they obviously need. So that's the only cover there, and there's gonna be a pair of coyotes that lives in that cover. When you talk about like that logging road country, you know, there everything is covered, they can be anywhere, and that's what we found is they can literally live anywhere. But what we did kind of find is throughout the years calling like the same areas, you will find coyotes that kind of re-establish, even if you kill a pair or something, they'll re-establish in those same kind of core areas. It might be that one day they're bedded up in this crick drainage, and two weeks from now or two months from now, whatever, they could be in a different crick drainage in the area, but it's still probably in that square mile I was talking about. Same area.

SPEAKER_00 7:51

And harvesting them out, other ones will just come in and take their place.

SPEAKER_02 7:57

Yeah, eventually it seems to work that way that they just kind of filter right back in.

SPEAKER_00 8:01

Yeah. Because it's certain at a certain point, we talked about off air about like the carrying capacity of the habitat. So, yeah, if there are fewer coyotes out there, yeah, more will move in until it hits that kind of that breaking point where there just can't be any more.

SPEAKER_02 8:20

A good way to look at it would be, and this is just from personal experience, but like if you looked at where I live, there's a like I was talking about, there's a highway above me and a bunch of houses up there, and then there's the valley that I live in, and a bunch of houses laid out in this valley, and there's this strip of timber along the in between. Well, those coyotes are living in that strip of timber. And we did remove we hunted that fairly actively early on and killed a lot of coyotes in that valley. And we were just curious to see, you know, like, okay, let's put this carrying capacity theory to the test here. And and we removed a lot of pairs, you know. We come home from a night of hunting and we're unpacking our gear, we look out there, oh, there's a pair of coyotes out in the field, we go out there and call them in, kill them. And after doing that for a year's time and removing a fairly large number of coyotes out of that valley, you kind of zoom out and look at Onyx, for example, and look at that patch of timber and what surrounds it. You know, I was getting fed coyotes back into that timber patch from across the highway above me, where there's another larger piece of timber up there in other outskirting areas. You start looking at where these coyotes could be possibly coming from. Yeah, you could take that same deal and do it in a farm that's butted up to Warehouser or some other forest company land where it's just like endless back there. You might find that it's gonna be a much longer time frame before you start to cut into that carrying capacity. There's just a lot more ground back there for us to just keep funneling back to that food source. So it all depends on the area and the habitat surrounding the area too, which kind of gives you that set carrying capacity. It's different for every area and what surrounds the area.

SPEAKER_00 10:00

Yeah. And if you're taking them out, harvesting out of that particular area, you're giving when they do get pushed out of a previous area where they were pups, and you know, they get to that age where it's time to move out, you've created an open space for them.

SPEAKER_02 10:16

So and another thing to think about, like as far as the benefits to managing the predator in that aspect, is not every coyote knows how to kill a lamb or a fawn. You know, they don't all know these things, and they learn it or are taught it at some point. And say you have a sheep farm here in western Washington, or the small, smaller piece of ground, and you got a like I was talking about, a dominant pair of coyotes that lives in that area that's called that area home, and they're actively learned to kill lambs, and when the lambing season rolls around, they key in on it and they're killing lambs, and you go in there and you remove that pear. Yes, another pear or a transient or other coyotes will re-inhabit that area, but they might not necessarily know how to kill the lambs, and so that's not a problem until it becomes a problem type of a deal. You know what I mean? So we've done that before where someone's had an issue. We go in, we kill these coyotes, we take them off the landscape. Coyotes have moved in, but they're not losing lambs anymore. So we took care of the coyote that knew how to kill lambs, type of a deal. It's like a dog with that learns a bad habit, you know.

Scouting For Tracks And Scat

SPEAKER_00 11:24

They just not everyone knows it, but but once they do, you yeah, you nip it in the bud and yeah, it's that same type of deal. You buy yourself some extra time. So are you because you have those set areas, are you scouting ahead of time before you got to do hunts, or do you at a certain point you had to have scouted? And so you might not now because you have your areas, I would imagine that you they're just like you say, you harvest and they're backfilled. But if you were gonna go out, so this for our listeners, if you were gonna go out and scout, what are you looking for if you're scouting an area?

SPEAKER_02 12:03

Well, I never stop scouting and oh never you never ends. I'm and like I said in the first podcast, I work in the woods in the winter months, especially, and so I'm up there constantly. And for me, it's sign, it's just simply sign because if you were to try to tell me, like, well, coyotes like to live in this, well, if it was Reprod or that's everywhere, you know. If you look at a piece of ground like Warehouse or Sarah Pacific or one of the timber company lands, everything looks the same, it's just a map of constant rotating tree farms. So you have those same things spread throughout the whole entirety of that land. And so the coyotes could be anywhere. And we found real fast that you don't ever really know where they're gonna be as much as we try to predict that. And I will say there's certain areas that I would say, like June time frame, for example, when they have pups that are now old enough to their eyes are open, they're out of the den type of a deal. These coyotes are starting to go back to being coyotes, they become really vocal again through locating. We found that a lot of times they are in those crick drainages, and it could be something that's laid outward. You got some 15-year-old stuff on let's just say a face or a hillside, and then you have a crick drainage that runs down through it, they've left an RMZ in there where it's taller standing timber in the middle of that. A lot of times we find those cows do bed up in that taller stuff in the middle of that. I feel like they they use a lot of that reprod and younger stuff to hunt in because there's a lot more vegetation in there, there's a lot more rabbits and mice that are gonna be in those pieces, and so that's gonna be more where the food is as well. Fawns in those areas, yeah. Exactly. It's it's all goes together, but yeah, and the reason I said like the June summer time frame is because they now have a den, they now have a more core area because those pups can't go miles and miles and miles, so they're gonna be more in an area, kind of locking them to something. Whereas in the wintertime they don't have pups. You're talking about a pair, and I I think I mentioned it in the last one where there could be a pair of coyotes that's that beds up in this straw today, and tomorrow they could be 800 yards over in this straw bedded up to the next day because that's just where they ended up. Whereas when they have those pups, they can't do that, they have to stay with those pups. Those pups can't travel that far yet, and so they're gonna be in that same core area, and so it kind of gives us a good data on where they're gonna be, and that's where like that locating plays in, where you could go in those summer months and drive around locating in the morning or at night or whatever, and mark down spots where you get howls and understand that those coyotes are gonna be somewhere close to that area the following day, mid mid-morning, where they're they've returned, they're backed by those pups, so they're gonna be there somewhere close by. So that's where you can kind of start to gather some data. If you were to go around locating like right now, yeah, you could go out and get some coyotes to answer you, but they might not be there by the weekend or whenever you plan to go hunt it. You're best off if you get a paracyotes to answer right now. Your best bet is to be able to hunt them right now, punt them right now, and you better be moving in on them. Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 15:17

Yeah. Okay. Not really there's not a habitat that you're looking for, and that makes sense because, like we we've talked about, you just you see them at everywhere.

SPEAKER_02 15:28

We've called them in big timber, reprod logging roads, clear cuts. I mean, just wherever they happen to be. And the more we've put that together, we always tried to go, we need to pin this down so we know exactly what to look for. But the more I thought about it and the more we've done it and realized it, it's really difficult to do that because we found that just they're gonna be where they're gonna be, and that could be anywhere. The like I said, as far as scouting sign, I mean, if I see an area that has a lot of coyote scat in the road or a lot of tracks on a muddy road, that that's gonna tell me that those coyotes are frequently traveling through that area. I know that they're gonna be somewhere in that area, and I can try to target that area.

SPEAKER_00 16:12

So that's what you're if you're going out scouting and to just say I'm gonna go scout for coyote, that's what you're looking for. The scat, paw prints, things like that.

SPEAKER_01 16:22

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 16:23

It's not necessarily habitat or yeah, yeah, I mean topography or anything like that. You're just looking for actual physical signs of them being there.

Howling To Locate And Its Limits

SPEAKER_02 16:33

Yeah, and then obviously the number one scouting tool would be howling. If you can get coyotes to howl, that's gonna cut all that down immensely because you now know where they're at. And there's a lot of difficulties that come with getting coyotes to howl. It's not just that every time you get a coyote to howl, you got them in the bag. It's there's a lot more things that go into that. I mean, if you were standing on a log and road and you know how our country is laid out, it's nothing flat about it. No, and it's so timbered. Judging we found out really fast that judging distance on a coyote howl is very difficult to do in our country. And if you were standing next to some timber or in a timber, whatever, and coyotes howl in a direction that you cannot physically see into or see where they're coming from, you know, we all ask each other, how far do you think that was? You know, there's maybe three of us together. How far do you think that was? Well, we can have three different answers. Okay. And we start looking at onyx and go, oh crap, where are they at? You know. So one little tip, I guess, that that kind of makes that a little easier is if you can get elevated, if you can get into a big clear cut somewhere where you're pretty high up, overlooking drainages and draws and ridges and stuff like that, to where if they do answer, you can physically see into the drainage, maybe, or the face that they're howling from. Okay. And go, okay, they're right there. You know, that helps you a little bit.

SPEAKER_00 17:54

Working a top-down strategy instead of trying to work up. Give you more of a visual, yeah. Yeah. This reminds me the way you talked about this, is uh and Alex talked about this with turkey hunting. It's he goes in and you've said it almost exactly. It sounded like the way he was describing it, but he goes the night before he's gonna go out and does a shock gobble. And that is just him doing a gobble to see what response, to see if there's anything in the area. And that doesn't mean that you're going to get anything because it just lets you know that there's something in the area, and so it sounds similar to that that you're just going out to find, okay, is there even anything in this area responding to that? And when are they not howling again?

SPEAKER_02 18:39

Usually I would say coming up here pretty quick. Okay. Once they start having pups, there's a little time frame in there where they really shell up and they're pretty quiet and they're solitary, they don't want to answer. Sometimes they'll answer if you step on their foot, you know, like really close and like boom, they're right there, and they're usually pretty pissed off. Uh-huh. But yeah, they generally try to keep to themselves when those pups are really small. So a couple of months, I'd March, April, May, June. If you wanted to to put a bubble on it, I would say mid-March to mid-April.

SPEAKER_00 19:09

Okay. That they that doing that, trying to locate through howling isn't necessarily going to work.

SPEAKER_02 19:16

It's not that it's not necessarily going to work, it's just not going to be as easy. You can as effective. You could struggle with it. And I would say that even throughout the whole winter months, you can struggle with finding vocal responses. The coyotes around our area is all I can speak to, but the coyotes around our area are most vocal starting in like that June time frame through the fall. September's a great time. A lot of guys hear them when they're out elk hunting or whatever, but coyotes are really vocal all through those months.

SPEAKER_00 19:44

Yeah.

Calling Skill And Educating Coyotes

SPEAKER_02 19:45

And then it starts to taper down when you get into that coyote pear breeding time frame. And they will vocalize, obviously, they vocalize all year. And there might be someone listening to this going, Well, you're howling end of March all the time behind my house. They will vocalize. It's just if you're gonna go out in in our country from our experience, you find a little bit tougher to get responses sometimes. Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 20:31

Now, can you train them if you we'll talk more about the I would say the gear of calling, but I think of bad turkey calling, bad elk calling, bad predator calling versus good predator calling. Is this something that you need to be wary of with coyote that if you're going to call, you need to make sure you're doing it well? Like being a proficient caller, you mean? Yeah. Or is it if you're not doing it, if you're not really thinking about it and trying to make sure you're doing it as best as possible, are you shooting yourself in the foot with your hunt?

Building A Hunt Day Game Plan

SPEAKER_02 21:09

Not necessarily. I think that's the kind of the beauty of a closed read rabbit distress call. Anyone can pick it up and who's to say how a rabbit's supposed to sound when it's dying, you know. So anyone can go and blow on one of those things and it's gonna sound pretty awful. And and you know, to a predator, they're not gonna be able to tell the difference in that aspect. It's kind of hard to mess up like a rabbit distress call. A howl would be a little more difficult. You'd have to want to try to get that at least to somewhat sound like a howl to be more effective. You're gonna be a little bit better off. I would say coyotes are gonna respond generally a little better to a group or a pair howl versus like a single howl. So if you were out howling with a diaphragm, for example, or an open read coyote howler by yourself, you're still gonna get some answers. Um, it's gonna work. But I would say to to take that to the next level would be to have a buddy next to you, and then you both are going at it, sound like a group of coyotes, they seem to answer a little better to the group howls. But as far as like being proficient, yeah, as long as you can make sure it sounds like a howl, and then the dying sounds like a fawn or a rabbit, you know, as long as it sounds pretty awful there. Yeah, yeah, you're not gonna you mess up where coyotes are really bad is they learn really fast, they're extremely smart, but they're adaptive. So, like bad experiences, negative experiences. So if you were to call them in and they win you, or if you were to call a pair of coyotes in and you kill only. One well, you just handed that other coyote a very large learning education. Yeah, education. Yeah. That's where I think things can cart start to kind of get to messed up as far as like making mistakes goes. Another would be like if you call them in and they came into a rapid distress call and you killed the one and the other one got away. The beauty of it is now you could move in, and that coyote's not uncallable. You know, there's still a million different distress type sounds you could go with, or there's a lot of coyote vocals you could go with, especially when we start talking about electronic calls and the amount of different sounds on those calls. It really allows you to have more options on what you can do when you make a mistake like that.

SPEAKER_00 23:14

Yeah. Okay. So I'm trying to think. See, I can edit all this out. This was great about this. So actually, let's talk about the hunt day. Or, you know, I also have down here the hunt y the year. But what does your hunt day entail? What does it look like? You're gonna go out hunting today. Wha what is it? You wake up in the morning, what next?

SPEAKER_02 23:41

Well, usually I I have an area picked out in my head the night before where I want to go, and there's a couple different styles of day calling, I guess that I would put it in two different categories where if you were gonna go into say a walk-in area, it's more of a ridge system or something in between two valleys, like a piece of walk-in ground. I might call that a little bit differently if there's a if there's houses around in the valleys below. I'm not gonna expect those cats to to vocalize as much. They just I think habitually they've just kind of shy away from helling during the daytime just naturally because of all the human presence. And so I might go through that area and for example, it would be a certain distress sound on my call at a certain volume that I know penetrates a certain distance. So, for example, uh one of my favorite rabbit distress calls on a Fox Pro electronic call, volume 30, we estimate to penetrate about 350 yards in a lot of that thicker stuff that we're in. And so I would attack that area where I'm gonna go into that walk-in gate, I'm gonna hit it with good wind where the wind's gonna be in my face the whole time I'm walking, or at least in a favorable direction that I'm walking, and I'm gonna play that rabbit distress sound along with maybe a pup distress or a fight sound, and my stands are gonna be a little shorter because I'm I know I'm only reaching a certain distance there, and I'm just gonna draw a bubble around myself as I'm going through this area, and I'm calling just gonna call through that whole area, basically turning over every stone at that point, just calling through an area and eliminating where a coyote would be bedded up because I don't know where it's gonna be bedded up. Now, if it was okay, we wake up in the morning and we just decided we were gonna go up into some warehouse or ground or we were gonna go deep into a walking gate where we're gonna be in there several miles when there's no houses involved at this point. We're gonna be looking to howl in the mornings, you know, whether that be a half hour before daylight or just right at daylight, we're gonna be ripping our first howls. But we're just gonna be trying to locate at that point. Okay, ripping howls and hoping that something strikes off and gives us a direction of where we're gonna go. We've debated in the past whether, okay, we got a group to answer right at daylight. Like, hey, let's just move on. We'll drop a pin, we'll move on and go try to locate some more while we still got this early because it seems like as the morning progresses, you know, the chances of them howling starts to go down, you know, once you start getting beyond like that 10 o'clock point. So we've kind of talked about okay, well, let's just take advantage of this early part of the morning and go around and try to locate some more, kind of lay us out for the day, and then come back and revisit all those. So that's a potential option. I think that's more effective in that summer time frame where they're gonna be held up because if they howl right at daylight, by the time you get back in there, say at 10 11 in the morning, they could be a long ways from that spot where they howled. We found out.

SPEAKER_00 26:33

So yeah, well, that's 10 11. You're talking like five, six hours after sun out.

SPEAKER_02 26:38

Yeah, and so they can be a long ways from there. And if they're not gonna howl again, boy, you're good luck finding them. So yeah. So you're always best off if they answer just to go right after them, get right in on them, and that you know where they're at and go after them right away. But I would say that you know, that summer time frame, if they answer you, they're generally gonna be pretty close to that area. And there's a chance that you get them to answer again. I located some coyotes last summer. Oh, yeah, I think it was June, July maybe, I can't remember, but I located some coyotes in the morning. I was on one side of a of an area, and they were a long ways from me, but they were across this giant draw, and I had a long ways around to get to them. Well, they answered me over there, and I made a mental note of it and dropped a pen, and I went throughout my morning calling different areas. Well, it had been like I think it was like two o'clock at this point in the afternoon, sun was up, it was pretty hot and summertime, you know, and I thought, well, I better go and revisit those ones that answered me this morning. They're probably gonna be in that same spot because we're back to that, like I said, summer time frame. So I made my way back over there before I was gonna go home and I dropped down in there on them. And like I said, it was about two, two in the afternoon, hot, sunny day. I got right down in there where they had last where I'd last heard them howl, and I ripped a hell, and to my surprise, they were right in the same spot, and they cut me off and were fired up that I was in there and came running on a string. So in that time frame, you you know, in that time of year, I guess you could potentially revisit some howls if you get something to answer in the morning. But yeah, so as far as like a day, that's kind of how it's laid out. You know, we're gonna go around locating and and just kind of make a decision from there whether we get something to answer or just go after it right now. And and then, you know, like this time of year, after the answers stop, like if it's now mid-morning and we've got all that we could as far as the morning answers, we'll just go around and we will do some blind calling, whether that just be finding a nice gravel road into a big reprod with a big drainage or something in the bottom, we'll go call into those two because there's a chance of a bobcat being in there or a coyote, so you just never know. Blind calling is a a strategy too.

SPEAKER_00 28:46

So do you think maybe during the summer, and I'm just thinking of the heat, that or do you think or have you seen that coyote will hunker down just because of the heat, they don't want to be moving around as much, or does heat just not matter to them? They'll be up moving regardless.

Sound Selection And Triggering Responses

SPEAKER_02 29:05

We found that I I thought that too. And you know, maybe they are because sometimes you're unsuccessful and you you wonder if that's why. But we've definitely, like I said earlier, that those coyotes came bombing in. Of course, I I triggered a more protective maternal response, you know, because I got them to howl, they vocalized, they were pissed, they had pups, and then I went into a pup distress fight sound, and they were obviously kicked in into a different mindset, so that you know, disregarded all the heat and everything. They were pissed and they were coming. It's kind of like getting a bull elk pissed off, you know, type of a deal. So I mean it really doesn't matter if you're keen on what they want to hear at that point in time. I think it it's kind of relevant, whether it's hot or raining or whatever the case may be, it's as long as you hit the right trigger at that at that time, they're coming.

SPEAKER_00 29:53

So there's a and I didn't quite realize this, that there's a number of different sounds. I and me, I just thought predator or not predator, but like a prey, wounded rabbit, and I didn't really even think about howling or anything like that, that all you would do was wounded rabbit. And that's probably if you're just starting out, that's like the the go-to basic. I would quite possibly that you do that, and as you get more advanced, you might be adding things in, but doing the pup, that wounded or the fighting pup call, yeah. That that makes sense, but I wouldn't have I wouldn't have actually thought about that and like how to use that and when to use that.

SPEAKER_02 30:38

Yeah, so I'm a big rabbit distress guy, I've always been that way. Uh-huh. I always believe that the rabbit kills more coyotes than anything, and that's just kind of the way I've always been, and my calling strategy is kind of tailored towards, but I will say that coyotes are super vocal. They're one of the most vocal animals in North America, and there's that big family aspect dynamic to coyotes, too. I mean, you think about your dogs when there's a litter of pups and their puppies, they're always fighting and wrestling and chewing on each other, and coyotes are no different, they're even more aggressive, you know. So that pack mentality, that established hierarchy and all that gets set into them at an early age, and so they know what fight sounds are. All coyotes know what fight sounds are, they have all done it their whole lives like anything, or when there's two dogs getting into it on the street fighting, the other dog maybe walking by, they're gonna go get into it too. It's just part of their nature, is how they are. And so those types of sounds, those coyote vocal sounds, are super effective because it's it's hitting a different trigger response. Okay, because coyotes might hear the rabbit distress, and we've learned this through thermal hunting because we can see the coyote's reaction. You could be playing, I don't know, an adult cotton tail distress sound, and a coyote might pick his head up and look over, and he's five, six hundred yards out there in the hayfield or something, and he might look over and be uninterested. And then you could switch to a baby cotton tail sound, a more squeaky sound. All of a sudden he picks his head up, turns his ear sideways, just like your dog would, and boom, he's come running right in. Or maybe you go from the adult to the baby and he looks but doesn't pay any attention, and all of a sudden you howl and he comes running right in. Or you play a pup fight and he comes running right in. So it's just a every coyote's a little different, every coyote's got a different personality, and you just have to hit the right trigger. And so that's why using a different array of sounds is gonna up your advantages.

SPEAKER_00 32:27

Yeah, okay. So that's actually good to know. Just have just a bigger tool bag, you know. The more tools you have, the more jobs, the easier to get the job done.

SPEAKER_02 32:37

Yeah, and you can replicate a a lot of these sounds on these hand calls and diaphragms. I mean, you can do a really good pup distress on on a diaphragm or an open read call, and you can do fight sounds and stuff like that where you're growling, and you can do all those types of things on those calls too. So, you know, just uh to say you had to have an electronic call is not necessarily true. You can do a lot of these with that too.

SPEAKER_00 33:00

Yeah. Well, I remember back very long time ago, I was walking around in a new housing development that they were building down Salmon Creek area with Dave and his wife. We were all down there, and he just started doing this noise with his mouth, like a almost like a kissing noise. He's like, Yeah, I saw some uh coyote pups down here. And he starts doing this noise. And I mean, within two, three minutes, we had about four of them come running out out of the brush into the onto the road, and they all froze because they looked at him like you're not what we were thinking you were, and then they all tore off back into the woods and stuff. But yeah, it is possible to create some curiosity. Yeah, the kiss of death.

SPEAKER_02 33:45

That's uh that's been a super effective sound for us, too.

Stand Time Run And Gun Proximity

SPEAKER_00 33:48

Okay, and do you change we talked about howling like it might not be as effective during when they're with their pups or something like that. But there are times, but is there any time where you might not use something because it just is out of place like time of year for a call?

SPEAKER_02 34:09

Not really. I think I would go about the same. My sequence doesn't really change. I'd go about the same anytime. Because all those fights and breeding, they're labeled as breeding fight sounds and stuff like that. They make those sounds year-round. Yeah. So yeah, in all reality, I I pretty much use everything year-round.

SPEAKER_00 34:26

And and I think we'll wrap up on this. When we you and I first met at the show here in Portland, I had mentioned like a lot of what I heard is is kind of a run and gun that you call for 15 minutes if you don't get any response, you move on to the next spot, call for 15 minutes, don't get any response, move on to the next spot. But that I and I'd said something about if you want a bobcat to come in, you'd have to call for 45 minutes to an hour, but you've seen some different behavior from bobcats.

SPEAKER_02 35:00

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 35:01

That you said that one out of ten times you'll have a bobcat come running in almost immediately.

SPEAKER_02 35:09

Yeah, I mean, I think uh most of the bobcats that we've called in, they come in no different than a coyote. They'd hit the road or wherever they're coming and they're hauling butt to get into. And I think there's only one bobcat that I can really remember that just came in. We watched it from 400 and some yards walked down this gravel road, and he never left a walking speed all the way till we called him up to 20 yards. But other than that, I mean most of the time they come running in too. So I think it all just plays into their densities, and we talked about that a little bit, but I think there's more coyotes on the landscape, and I think that if they're there, they're within earshot and they're willing to come, they're gonna come in pretty fast. And I mean, there's been some things where guys that kill more bobcats than we do in different areas across the country. I've talked to or listened to where they're able to see the bobcat and how it's reacting, and so this is where I think some of that can happen is that bobcat's coming in to a certain sound and they lose interest really fast, and all of a sudden he stops and he sits down. If if you're in our country, you can't see the cat, so you can't see that happening.

SPEAKER_00 36:18

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 36:18

But if someone's sitting out there for 45 minutes and they're just playing through all these different sounds and going through a sequence and just going and going and going, that bobcat could be doing that exact thing, but you just can't see it. And so all of a sudden here he comes and it happened on the 43-minute mark or whatever. Yeah, that's how long you have to sit. Well, you could do the same thing in 10 minutes if you were just sorting through sounds, or in my mentality is that I'm out there to make the most amount of stands that I possibly can in the time that I'm out there, because the more stands you make, the more chances you have a calling something in. So I I've always kind of felt like I'm just gonna make more stands versus putting all my half my morning into two stands. You know, I'm gonna make more stands, more opportunities. And how far apart would you say your stands are? It depends on what I did. If I was doing like a bunch of vocal, if I did a stand that had multiple group owls and vocals and fights and all that included with the rabbit, I might move a little further. You know, we might be going wherever I think I'm reaching out at that earshot range. So I might be moving a mile or half mile or more than a mile or whatever it may be in that situation. If it's if it were we're going back to that walk-in situation where I'm covering a certain area, I have 200 yards, 250 yards, and I'm sitting down to make another stand. And on those type of stands, I'm gonna be shorter stands, you know, maybe like only eight minutes, but I'm not gonna go very far in between stands because I'm really just trying to X off that area until I find the cat that's willing to catch on a trigger for that eight minutes.

SPEAKER_00 37:47

I'm just going over where I've done deer sets and thinking about would I just do a spot? And this is what I was thinking when they were talking about doing the run and gun when I've talked to people that they're going back out, getting in the car and driving a couple miles away or something like that. But if you have a long enough like logging roads that maybe go back two, three miles, you could just be doing it walking a few hundred yards at a time, setting up and just keep walking until you're going further back. Yeah. And then maybe reversing that process coming back out because by the time if it's four hours later, by the time or five hours later, by the time you come back out or something.

SPEAKER_02 38:27

Yeah, because if you looked at a lot of our ground, if you looked at like a ridge or a face or something, there might be four or five drainages laid out throughout that whole face. And those coyotes could be in one of them, but if you're in this one and they're two drainages over, they're not hearing you, or if they do hear you, you might be out of effective range where they're willing to come to the call.

SPEAKER_00 38:48

Yeah.

Wrap Up And Listener Request

SPEAKER_02 38:48

And proximity kills a lot of coyotes, and you just got to get right in that bubble. And so if you make a stand here and you think, well, they probably heard me, it's only 800 yards over there. Well, a coyote to travel 800 yards in our country is a lot, you know. Yeah. And so if you get in the truck and you drive a couple miles, you just drove right past him, you know what I mean? So in a lot of situations, you kind of have to look at all that factors in because they don't just come running in all the time, and maybe three sets in all of a sudden now here they are. And the drainage they came out of, if you look back on the map, you're like, man, they were right there the whole time, but they weren't coming in. And now that we got 150 or 200 yards from that draw, they came in. So it's yeah, it's one of those things you pick up over time that they don't always travel a long ways, and that's kind of the beauty of some of that bigger open country like Eastern Washington or something. We've seen kits come from a thousand yards out because they can in that country, it's a little different.

SPEAKER_00 39:43

Now, how close are you usually bringing them in for your shot?

SPEAKER_02 39:46

For here, it's uh pretty close because we're using only shotguns, shotguns, so it's yeah, it's inside 40 usually.

SPEAKER_00 39:52

Yeah. Okay, and we'll get into talking about weapons and ammo and all of that type of stuff in the next episode. But I think we're gonna wrap up there. So if you could like, subscribe, follow, heart, all the things your platform asks you to do, leave a comment. Really appreciate it, and we will talk to you next week.