Greetings,
The dog days of summer are being ushered in with a whimper… this past week Mr. El Nino has brought cold fronts and rain showers to my neck of the woods… I have been taking advantage of these weather patterns… I hunted ever day this week after work except Wednesday, due to a steady down pour of rain… my spree started Monday with 2 productive stands…
Directly before, a moment or two after and during these fronts, I have found success with distress calls… still the majority of them have been responding to vocals… pup howls, pup distress along with Kiyi’s have been very lethal… all the recent rains have really made the foliage grow, it presents a challenge to just see the coyotes... with some of these coyotes, all I could see was their head and neck to shoot at…
Just before dark between misty rains I got lucky and hit this damp dog double… I made it back to my truck and put on a dry shirt, chugged half a gallon of water and used the brush from my ice scrapper to remove the stickers all over my pants… I cranked up the AC and on the radio played a song I had not heard in years…I remembered a time, in my younger years hearing this song while partying at an abandoned oil site with friends, drinking Jim Beam 7 year old straight out of the bottle and throwing empty Mickey’s Grenade bottles at cows… we were stupid kids… anyway I had to turn the volume up and surprisingly I still remembered sum of the lyrics… they went sumthin like this;
“Howling in shadows
Living in a lunar spell
He finds his heaven
Spewing from the mouth of [beeep]
Then when he’s found who he’s looking for
Listen in awe and you'll hear him
Bark at the moon.
Hey, yeah
Bark at the moon
Hey, yeah
Bark at the moon
Whoa Whoa Yeah..."
(Ozzy Osbourne)
...... BARK AT THE MOON
Sorry I got a little side-tracked… that song immediately came to mind after connecting on this next coyote…
Anyway, the first of June I set up on this spot and killed a single coyote... shortly after the shot another coyote started barking at me in the tree line… he was just out of sight as he moved along the fence line barking at me, however he would not show himself… I described this hunt in a previous post called “weary Coyotes in heat…”
I went back to that same spot… the wind was shifted a little but other than that pretty much the exact same set-up… I let off a lone howl and it was almost like a re-run of my last stand… if it was not the same coyote that survived that stand, he definitely had the same behavior… he started barking at me from inside the tree line… I barked and challenged him as he moved along the fence line barking back… just out of sight… this went on for a good 15 minutes then all went quite… I started cussing myself for coming back to this spot so soon and not using different antics… I set up in front of the same cedar tree and hung my call on the same branch in the same thicket… I figured I just burnt this spot to crisp… all I could picture was him coming across the fence after dark and smelling my set-up… I figured I just gave him a master’s degree in education to the call…
Funny how calling coyotes can go from low disappointment to euphoria in a split second… as I continued cussing myself I just happen to notice a dead log in the fence... I took a closer look thru my scope and that log had pointy ears…
Here are a couple pictures of that log;
this is another coyote I could only see head and neck when I shot…I even called in an out of season bobcat on this stand…
Tonight I had my first needle tooth of the year to come into the call… I did not know he was this small when I shot him… he appeared out of nowhere in tall grass, close and downwind… I shot fast, racing for him to catch my bullet before my scent…
By my standards I am having good luck for this time of year… I have not had a string of days more productive since winter… The set-ups have all been the same, different… some have been coming in from points unexpected and some of times they are just there…but most of the time they are not…
If you have taken the time to read thru all this, I thank you for your attention…
Bark at the moon…
jeREMy…
The dog days of summer are being ushered in with a whimper… this past week Mr. El Nino has brought cold fronts and rain showers to my neck of the woods… I have been taking advantage of these weather patterns… I hunted ever day this week after work except Wednesday, due to a steady down pour of rain… my spree started Monday with 2 productive stands…
Directly before, a moment or two after and during these fronts, I have found success with distress calls… still the majority of them have been responding to vocals… pup howls, pup distress along with Kiyi’s have been very lethal… all the recent rains have really made the foliage grow, it presents a challenge to just see the coyotes... with some of these coyotes, all I could see was their head and neck to shoot at…
Just before dark between misty rains I got lucky and hit this damp dog double… I made it back to my truck and put on a dry shirt, chugged half a gallon of water and used the brush from my ice scrapper to remove the stickers all over my pants… I cranked up the AC and on the radio played a song I had not heard in years…I remembered a time, in my younger years hearing this song while partying at an abandoned oil site with friends, drinking Jim Beam 7 year old straight out of the bottle and throwing empty Mickey’s Grenade bottles at cows… we were stupid kids… anyway I had to turn the volume up and surprisingly I still remembered sum of the lyrics… they went sumthin like this;
“Howling in shadows
Living in a lunar spell
He finds his heaven
Spewing from the mouth of [beeep]
Then when he’s found who he’s looking for
Listen in awe and you'll hear him
Bark at the moon.
Hey, yeah
Bark at the moon
Hey, yeah
Bark at the moon
Whoa Whoa Yeah..."
(Ozzy Osbourne)
...... BARK AT THE MOON
Sorry I got a little side-tracked… that song immediately came to mind after connecting on this next coyote…
Anyway, the first of June I set up on this spot and killed a single coyote... shortly after the shot another coyote started barking at me in the tree line… he was just out of sight as he moved along the fence line barking at me, however he would not show himself… I described this hunt in a previous post called “weary Coyotes in heat…”
I went back to that same spot… the wind was shifted a little but other than that pretty much the exact same set-up… I let off a lone howl and it was almost like a re-run of my last stand… if it was not the same coyote that survived that stand, he definitely had the same behavior… he started barking at me from inside the tree line… I barked and challenged him as he moved along the fence line barking back… just out of sight… this went on for a good 15 minutes then all went quite… I started cussing myself for coming back to this spot so soon and not using different antics… I set up in front of the same cedar tree and hung my call on the same branch in the same thicket… I figured I just burnt this spot to crisp… all I could picture was him coming across the fence after dark and smelling my set-up… I figured I just gave him a master’s degree in education to the call…
Funny how calling coyotes can go from low disappointment to euphoria in a split second… as I continued cussing myself I just happen to notice a dead log in the fence... I took a closer look thru my scope and that log had pointy ears…
Here are a couple pictures of that log;
this is another coyote I could only see head and neck when I shot…I even called in an out of season bobcat on this stand…
Tonight I had my first needle tooth of the year to come into the call… I did not know he was this small when I shot him… he appeared out of nowhere in tall grass, close and downwind… I shot fast, racing for him to catch my bullet before my scent…
By my standards I am having good luck for this time of year… I have not had a string of days more productive since winter… The set-ups have all been the same, different… some have been coming in from points unexpected and some of times they are just there…but most of the time they are not…
If you have taken the time to read thru all this, I thank you for your attention…
Bark at the moon…
jeREMy…
