For You Beginners: A Guide to Voodoo (as applied to coyotes)

Kizmo

New member
For You Beginners: A Guide to Voodoo
(Note-click on the green links for more information.)

Never before in my tenure on Predator Masters have I seen such an influx of beginners. Not a day goes by nowadays that a newcomer isn’t introducing him- or herself in a post. I think that’s wonderful. Any forum, or any human endeavor for that matter, that doesn’t replace its attrition rate of old timers with new blood is doomed to extinction. One needs to look no further than the current political swing of red to blue states for a sad example of this phenomenon. Today’s “newbies” (or children) are tomorrow’s old timers (or voters). Raise them right. The hand that rocks the cradle rules the world.

Along with these introductory posts, and indeed, more common than they, are the posts of newcomers with titles along the lines of “What Did I Do Wrong?” or “Please Help!” or “They Howled, but They Never Came!” Sadly, many of these seemingly desperate posts are sparsely replied to. I’m always amused when the Search Feature Police chime in. Nothing stimulates intelligent, probative discussion like their strident admonition to “Use the search feature!” . If all we did was to use the search feature, then PM would quickly degenerate into a stagnant graveyard of archived, outdated information, no better than those old World Book encyclopedias gathering dust in your parent’s closet. Everybody didn’t participate in that 2009 thread about when and where to use a full body decoy. Some folks who didn’t might have another opinion that’s worth sharing. Heck, some of the people in that thread may have changed their minds about things since then. If all we did was to use the search feature, we’d still be stuck in the ‘90’s (or whenever PM was founded).

Even more perversely, some members (most of whom are, fortunately, now ex-members), rather than taking the opportunity to educate a newcomer and help out a fellow human being, will post some flagrantly wrong piece of advice. One can only speculate as to the motivations of such individuals. If it’s a joke they’re playing, they’re playing it at the expense of someone they don’t even know, and they won’t be there for the “punch line” when the unsuspecting newcomer plays the warning barks to start off a stand. I can only presume that such behavior arises out of their boredom or dissatisfaction with their own lives, and is the online equivalent of pulling wings off flies. It’s something to do besides sit there.

On the other end of the spectrum are the replies that are well meaning and honestly intended to help. These salt-of-the-Earth people are doing their dead level best to help a guy (or gal) out. However, like everything else in life, it’s buyer beware. Sometimes, certainly not even most times, even the most well-intentioned advice is flat-out wrong (like when your brother-in-law told you that you really should get some Enron stock in your portfolio). Not everyone is equal in their “ability” (for want of a better word) as a predator hunter. We’re not all Byron South or Tony Tebbe.

“Ability” as a predator hunter is tough to define. In a good year, I’ll kill 20-30 coyotes in Georgia. In places like New Mexico, you can do that in a good weekend. Does that mean I suck? Well, maybe. Maybe not. When you consider that Georgia doesn’t have 10% the coyote population that New Mexico does, that 20-30 doesn’t seem so bad. Give me a handicap like they do in golf, 200-300 coyotes a year is pretty good anywhere. Maybe not Byron South/Tony Tebbe good, but those guys do this for a living. So what factors go into defining one’s “ability” as a predator hunter? The first is experience. The two main components of experience are time spent hunting and number of encounters (successful or not) with the animal you’re hunting. One learns from successes as well as failures. The other piece of the puzzle lies within the individual. A successful predator hunter should be able to observe keenly, draw accurate conclusions from those observations, and have an open mind. These are the building blocks of learning anything. All the experience in the world doesn’t help if one is unable to learn from it.

Having gotten through all the preliminaries, we come to the crux of this post. People often say things that they believe sincerely, but are completely without merit, because they do not question their own beliefs. Remember what I said about an open mind? Well, some folks don’t have one. I remember when I started turkey hunting in the early ‘80’s. The old timers then told me to take my box, yelp three times no louder than a gnat fart, and set that call down. Any deviation from that sage advice would have every gobbler within a mile heading for the hills and telling every other gobbler along the way to beware that a hunter was in the woods. That first season I followed that advice to the letter. These were the old timers, for goodness sake. Guess what? I didn’t kill squat my first turkey season (other than the one I ran down and shot, but that’s another story). I spent that fall and winter listening to turkeys for myself and observed that they yelp a lot more than three times in a day, and oftentimes make quite a racket. My observations led my open mind to the conclusion that I should just try to sound like the turkeys do. Got my limit the next season, so my conclusion was accurate. From that experience I drew another conclusion: sometimes, sometimes old timer’s advice ain’t worth the paper it’s printed on.

The American Heritage Dictionary’s fourth definition of voodoo is “Deceptive or delusive nonsense.” I think that pretty well describes (albeit a little harshly given that they were trying to help me) the advice I got from those old time turkey hunters. You might call it superstition. Or hogwash. It’s no different from me telling you that I go outside every morning and clap my hands three times to scare the Florida panthers away. I know it works because I’ve never seen a Florida panther in my yard. You are likely skeptical, and that is a good thing. My belief is based upon my failure to keep an open mind, thus allowing the persistence of an inaccurate conclusion of cause and effect which was formed by my imperfect observations. Were I possessed of an open mind and keenly observant, I would note that my friends and neighbors also do not harbor Florida panthers in their backyards despite not attending to the ritual of clapping three times each morning. Unfortunately, because I "know" this works, I persist in my folly. Emerson once said “A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds…”. I couldn’t agree more. Basically, when you think you "know" something, your learning about it is over.

Finally, after all that bloviating, here are the things that I see most often posted here that I believe are utter voodoo, in no special order of importance. In other words, if you’re asking me “What did I do wrong?”, my answer (based on my 36 years of predator hunting and a BS degree in biology) is: “It wasn’t any of these things.”

1. White lights vs. colored lights. Ken Scurry posted a video from the 2013 World Predator and Hog Expo of ten of the pros and what their preference for light color is. It speaks for itself. WHAT COLOR LIGHT DO THE PROS USE? All preferred white lights except Todd Woodall, who preferred red. And the reason Mr. Woodall prefers red lights? The fact that biologists at the zoo use red lights to study their captive nocturnal animals. With all due respect to Mr. Woodall, I believe he has made a flawed observation leading to an inaccurate conclusion. While it may (or may not) be that red lights are less disruptive to a nocturnal animal’s behavior, he is basing his conclusion on observations of captive animals, at close distances, in a situation where it is extremely desirous for the animal to survive. These zookeepers want their animals to live, a situation that is in complete contradistinction to the logical desires of any member of a predator hunting website. In short, you can’t kill what you can’t see, and animals see your light whether it be red, green or white. They may not perceive the color the same as you, but so what? They see it nonetheless. Pick the one that lets you see best, which is generally white. The operation of the light, keeping it steady and keeping the animal haloed until right before the shot is taken, is far and away more important than its color. You also really really do want to see that $2500 black angus that’s 80 yards behind the coyote you’re shooting at.

2. Scent blocker clothing, scent destroyer spray, cover scent, etc. The T.V. show Mythbusters did a segment on trying to hide from a bloodhound's nose which I think illustrates this point rather well. Guess what? They couldn’t hide their scent from a bloodhound, and you can’t hide yours from a coyote either. A coyote’s nose is fantastic. You and I cannot begin to even conceive of what it is like to have a nose like that. It would be like trying to describe color to someone who’s been blind all their life. You dose yourself down with vanilla extract (the active ingredient in many “scent destroyers”), you’re just going to smell like a vanilla coated human to a coyote. I don’t think coyotes like vanilla well enough to want to check you out. What you must do is set up so that you can see a long distance downwind of your position, because that’s where the coyote is going to go as he (almost) inevitably circles downwind of you. This usually means setting up in a crosswind. If you hunt the wind right, it doesn’t matter what you smell like. Note the lit cigarette in my buddy’s hand (as well as his camouflage pattern).

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3. “Educating coyotes” or “overcalling” a place. Nothing gets my dander up more than this topic. I can’t tell you how many times a beginner who only has one 250 acre farm has been admonished not to “overcall” it, lest he “educate” the coyotes. Said beginner, should he heed such advice, presumably sits alone at home many nights or weekends watching T.V. and eating Cheetos when he could be out hunting.

How exactly DO you “educate” a coyote? It is generally accepted that learned behavior in mammals can be explained by one (or more) theories of conditioning. In these models, a stimulus (ie. the sound of a dying rabbit) is applied to an animal (in our case, a coyote), leading to a response (the coyote goes and checks out the place looking for food). Every time he finds a meal this way, the stimulus-response conditioning becomes stronger (ie screaming rabbit sound = food). Some responses are conditioned (learned) and some are unconditioned (“instinctive”). Conditioned responses, just as they can be learned, can be “unlearned” by undergoing extinction. If all of a sudden the coyote ceases finding food when he hears that screaming, eventually he will stop going to check out that sound. It will no longer signify food to him. It should be noted, however, that even behaviors that have undergone extinction may undergo spontaneous recovery. One day that coyote may find a screaming rabbit, and he may then revert to his previous behavior.

Whether or not a coyote’s coming to a rabbit call is conditioned or unconditioned is debatable. In any event, at some point in his life, the coyote has come to understand that that screaming sound usually means food at the end of the auditory rainbow, and, if he’s a really smart coyote, he knows he’d better boogity on over there in a hurry lest a competitor get to it first. Unlike the situation in modern human society, dumb, slow individuals in the coyote world don’t tend to last very long.

Let’s say that, one day in the life of our theoretical coyote, he hears that screaming rabbit and finds at the end of his journey, not a hasenpfeffer dinner, but you, a wiley coyote hunter with his trusty bang stick. What’s going to happen then? Well, if you shoot and kill him, our story is over. A dead coyote is not an “educated” coyote. But what will happen if you don’t kill him? What if you shoot and, God forbid, miss? Well, he’s heard what he thought was food, and then there was this tremendous noise that scared him because he didn’t know what it was, so he left. We have no idea what coyotes think about the sound of a rifle shot. Maybe they think it’s thunder. I don’t know, and neither does anyone else, because the coyotes ain’t talking. What I DO know, however, is that his (relatively) primitive brain is unable to even grasp the concept of a firearm, much less be able to identify what a firearm is. So, this time, that dying rabbit sound that has for all of his life up until this point in time signified food, didn’t pan out. Do you really think that he’s going to abandon a lifelong behavior that has helped him survive on the basis of one strange encounter? Of course not, just like your new puppy is not going to be housebroken on the first dozen attempts.

Let’s say, on the other hand, you shoot and wound him. Not a mortal wound, just a brisket shot or graze his back. Now you’re telling a different story. He’s heard a rabbit and, upon checking it out, experiences pain. Pain is a negative stimulus that is a great educator. I’ll bet it only took you once to learn not to put your hand on a hot stove. Same with the coyote. It doesn’t matter that he doesn’t know what that booming sound was. He heard a rabbit and somehow that rabbit kicked his [beeep] without him even seeing or smelling that rabbit. I wouldn’t be surprised if that coyote doesn’t swear off ALL rabbit sounds, even those made by real dying rabbits.

Another aspect to the myth of “overcalling” a place has to do with predator population density and home range size, both of which vary markedly depending upon geographic area. Our coyote population in Georgia is about 10% of that in New Mexico. Coyotes aren’t native here, and our endemic heartworms , plus frequent outbreaks of canine distemper and parvo (as I’m suffering through now), keep their numbers down. Also, for comparison, the average size of a coyote’s home range in Georgia is 17 square miles (10,880 acres), whereas in Montana it’s 72 square miles (46,080 acres). What that boils down to is this: if you’re that beginner, hunting that lone 250 acre farm, the odds are that the coyote you see there Tuesday night is going to be miles down the road Thursday night. Of course, the home ranges of individual coyotes overlap, so that other coyote that was miles down the road Tuesday night just might show up in front of you on Thursday night IF you’re not at home watching TV and eating Cheetos because some well-meaning but misinformed person admonished you not to overcall your place. I have personally called up radio collared coyotes 8 miles from the site where they were trapped. Even down here where they have relatively small home ranges, coyotes cover a lot of ground.

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4. I used the wrong call because they howled, but they never came. Well, that’s just what they do. The scientific name for coyotes is Canis latrans which, literally translated, means “laughing dog”. I would probably have named them “howling dog” or “talking dog”, but I didn’t discover them, so I didn’t get naming rights. In any event, sometimes, as a predator hunter, “laughing dog” is a pretty apt description, since they sure seem to frequently laugh at my feeble attempts at killing them. As their scientific name infers, they are a vocal species of canid, and sometimes they make a LOT of noise. Sometimes they do this when you are calling. Even more often, they do it when you’re not even there. Don’t be discouraged. You aren’t hungry 24/7 and neither are they. I have rarely killed coyotes that I have heard on a stand, especially when they howl in packs. In my experience, they are usually talking OR walking, but not both. I will tell you this, though, with all the certainty of the networks predicting elections before the final returns are in: if a coyote howls at your rabbit call, he is coming. I think this is akin to a beagle baying at a rabbit or a coon dog after a coon. It doesn’t happen that often, but when it does, be ready.

Well, I’m tired of typing and need to get back to work. The bottom line is, as someone here on PM once said (wish I could remember who): “Coyote hunting isn’t chess, it’s checkers.” Quit overanalyzing, be observant, keep at it, and, above all, keep an open mind. Sooner or later, things will click.
 
I've been hunting/shooting coyotes and foxes since about 1965 and still don't know all there is to know. Beginners or veterans Knowledge never stops.
 
Excellent writeup, thanks for taking the time! I couldn't agree more with the information you've provided.

I've been hunting yotes off and on for 15 years and I'm always learning something new.
 
Excellent post Sir! They gotta eat, and sooner or later that hunger will overcome the "education", so stay after 'em! They might be more cautious than before, but if they are hungry they will come
 
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