Home Forums Hunting & Shooting Predators and Varmints What do you do with dead coyotes?

Bait for other coyotes.

Beginning coyote hunters worry about the wrong things. Beginners worry about the call and the gun. Those two things aren't problems, a good hand call and about any firearm can do just fine. The calling, the actual sound isn't that important when coyote hunting. Coyotes respond to sounds for any number of reasons, hunger, curiosity, maternal or territorial. If there are coyotes in the area getting a coyote to respond to a call isn't hard. If there are coyotes around getting a coyote to respond to the call in such a place and in a manner in which you can kill it is the hard part. That's called the set-up or the stand. And it's no different than calling gobblers. Gobblers that can smell you from long distances. You can sometimes find a hot two year old turkey gobbler or a group of jakes and call them easy peasy. Same for young of the year coyotes. Coyotes in October and early November come pretty easy. It is the four year old gobbler that will give you a fit and it is the same way for mature coyotes. Now you better plan on using wind direction, cover and terrain to your advantage, make decent sounds, don't fidget and move around and be able to shoot when the time comes. Kill old mature coyotes consistently and then you're a coyote hunter.

and to that point^^^^ I've always said that calling coyotes is easy. Killing them is slightly harder.

Calling Coyotes ain't hard if you are where they are or they are where you are, always hunt the wind and set up where you can see, once your set sit still, any gun will work and a couple of hand calls will get you started, pelts are no good here, i have a big hole on the South ranch i throw them in, I hate going to see what Buzzards are flying over, here about 1 out of 10 times you see buzzards there's a dead Illegal, and that ruins my day. Rio7

I've never hunted coyotes and have never seen one on this particular tract of state forest land, only their turds and foot prints, so I know they are there. But back in the late 80s and 90s, I regularly hunted some paper company land about 40 miles south. I called in several coyotes with turkey and squirrel calls. No one believed me when I told them. They all said "there are no coyotes in Virginia" and said it must have been a dog or a fox. I knew what a coyote looked like. Sure enough, our game agency started to acknowledge there was a growing population of coyotes in that area. Now I see them in the city, on historic park land, running across the roads near our airport, and my neighbor swears we have one in the neighborhood. They're everywhere now.

Similarly, I shot one in Caroline County around 1994 or so while groundhog hunting. I should have taken it to a taxidermist, but my ex was doing a good job of keeping me broke, so . . .

I won a gun club raffle for taxidermy work.

That's a cool mount.

" I also don't have a dedicated varmit gun. I have deer rifles and .22LRs and that's it."

Definition of a perfect coyote gun : The one you have in your hands when you get a chance to shoot a coyote.

But some guns are more fun than others, like my .243 Win shooting 55 grain Hammer Hunters at 4100 fps!

If they are laying within view of the general public then I will toss them behind some brush or somewhere else out of sight. As hunters we already have enough people against us and there is no point in leaving them out where others see them and possibly generate negative feelings about shooting them.

drover

Leave 'em where they lay.

Here's my new call.



I set it up last night on my property and tested the remote from 100 yards. Works perfectly. Damn, you can crank the volume up really high. If my neighbor hadn't been out and seen what I was doing, I might have teased him with it. He's the one who says there is a coyote in our neighborhood. And there may be. Several people have told me they've seen one. I've only seen foxes.

When I unboxed it, I discovered the remote takes a 12v A23 battery. Never even heard of an A23 battery. Had to run down to Ace Hardare where luckily they had some.

Around here the furs looks nice but still no buyers so they are buzzard food if the other dogs don't get them first.

November till March I skin them. We have multiple buyers who come to town over the winter months. Prices go up and down like everything else. It’s never cost me anything to go after them. Some years it puts a few more guns in the safe.

I had a nice mature male with a prime January coat tanned for cabin decor.

I have a neighbor that teaches a trapping class for young folks through Alaska Trappers Association. I try to get a few critters for the kids to practice skinning.

I teach em to bleed all over the desert.

Organic carpeting.

There are plenty around here, but dealing with a dead one has yet to be a problem. If they smell anything like a red fox, mostly I’d stay upwind as I walk away……