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

Very much something that was needed to hear, and I'm positive I'm not the only one that needed to hear it! I appreciate it.
 
Very well written... As for myself, I know "I don't know"... I think a lot of misunderstanding on coyote behavior stems not only from lack of experience or inability to keep an open mind, thus remaining teachable... But to the simple fact that coyote defies generalization... His indomitable spirit paired with his individuality has allowed him to rise in the ranks as one of the worlds most successful canids... In fact areas he is persecuted most, with our traps, bullets and poison are areas he not only survives... He thrives while finding reason to sing...

"frequently laugh at my feeble attempts at killing them"... I thought I was the only one who recognized him laughing at me walking back to my truck after a day's hunt... I have thought "how complex can their vocalizations can be?" Keep it simple, right? Howls in winter are mating calls, in the fall they are locator calls as the pups answer in unison... About the time I tell myself to not over think it, I remember I can't believe anything he says anyway... After all he is the trickster
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Kizmo, This is a superbly written piece. Even so, there are some points that are just as debatable as other information on this site. There are also other points to which I will whole heartedly agree.

I would agree that admonishing a person to not over call their 250 acre parcel of land is unjustified if this is the only land available to them. However, advising them to go hunt it often and have them expect anything other then dismal results does not help either.(I know you did not say that) You can absolutely over call an area and condition coyotes to be call shy. It does not even take much to do this. Tony Tebbe, who I have great respect for in all things coyote, as I believe you do also, Talks about managing the land he has available as to not over call it. He also just a month ago hunted in a charity contest, which they won, and talked about test calling areas to make sure the coyotes were not call shy. It is a "real" dilemma.

As to the conditioning of coyotes. Coyotes, as other canines, are naturally curious but cautious. As such, socialization plays an important role in their behavior. That deals with all aspects of their existence including the socialization of how, when, where, and what to hunt and what to fear. Although it is agreed that a coyote has no idea that the sound of a gun is anything other than a, massively unpleasant, loud noise.(Take the sound you hear x's 20) It is none the less a negative association to a stimuli. For proof ask any canine trainer why you condition a dog to a gun. It only takes one shot to ruin a bird dog, but many to condition it to a positive experience. There is some biological train of thought out there that says a coyote aggressively responding to a distress cry has been socialized to understand that means food. If they do not have that socialization they will be much more cautious to respond. These more cautious animals would also be easier to condition to be call shy.

As it relates to coyote density, over calling and ranges, there is something more important to consider than the size of their range. That is the location of their core area or areas. Although they may have a range of say 25 sq miles in a given state. They spend the vast majority of their time in a relatively small portion of their range. It is why howling locating at specific times is so effective. If that home area rests squarely on your 250 acres it would be very easy to not only over call but to push the coyotes out of that area.

I whole heartedly agree with your observations of coyotes vocalizing. I have stated before that I use vocals a lot. I hunt coyotes 7 months of the year and vocals get my nod 4.5 to 5 of those months. It is what I love to do. With that said. I agree that vocalizing coyotes rarely respond. As I have said in other threads, I really don't care if they talk to me, I want them to come to me. That happens much more frequently with no response on their part. The exception to that being a coyote that is challenging within 1/2 mile or so. More often than not that will lead to success for me. I think most callers tend to do the same thing most people do in the human world. They do too much talking and not enough listening. Meaning they howl to much and kill the stand. Except where it pertains to aggressive coyotes, with vocals, there is a time to talk and a time to shut up because curiosity really does kill the cat.

I also fully agree with you that scent blocking clothing is a joke when it come to coyotes. Coyotes are generally agreed to have the best "nose" of any animal on the North American continent. You will not fool it. To those who argue it can't hurt. I say it will hurt your checking account with no benefit to your success.

Since I am writing a novel, I will quote you, because I love this saying, "something that gets my dander up" Every time I see this in a thread I want to cringe. "If you didn't see a coyote you didn't educate a coyote" To this I say B**ls**t. You do not need to see a coyote to educate it. In fact a coyote doesn't have to see you to become educated. They are an animal that survives based on their conditioning and they have more keen senses than we do with which to learn those lessons.

I would agree with you that coyote calling is not chess. The place and the way you set up is 70% of the game. The calling is simply a matter of having a turned on coyote that can hear you.

In closing I would like to say. This is not meant to be an argument to you or anyone else. I don't know that I have as many years of experience behind me but I have been predator hunting for 25 years. I do pretty good and these are the things I have noticed. But they are the things I have noticed in one small portion of this land. If I gave advise to a new predator hunter it would be to learn about the animal you are hunting. It will let you figure out where to start looking (scouting). Work on land access. The more coyotes you have access to the more likely you will have success. Then learn where and how to set up. Those three things are the majority of your battle.
 
All good posts. The biggest problem we all face is we fall into the trap of thinking we can use our human brains to understand coyote thinking. I have a bs in wildlife biology and I was taught a Latin phase I can remember now but it meant that we can't see through the animals eyes so don't think you understand how they perceive the world based on your human perception.

I spent years trying to do just that, and it did not work. In human terms a coyote should never come to the call after the hunter has shot, yet coyotes do just that. Why would a coyote respond to a distress sound of an animal they have never heard? Even more perplexing to me is how do they learn to dig up traps?

I only have my human perception and I am trying to learn game but they have their own rules.

I don't think coyotes are amazingly smart or learn at high levels, but I do think they are incredibly in-tune with their environment.

There are simply too many variables to make a model that will allow us to achieve total mastery of them and that is exactly why it is fun.
 
Thanks everybody.

radio-you pretty much summed up the entire post in a lot less space.

d0gs1ay3r-I personally believe that most of a coyote's responding to a rabbit screaming is, to a great extent, a conditioned response, based on an experience I had a couple of years ago.. If this is true, then certainly a conditioned response can undergo extinction. However, they can also undergo spontaneous recovery. Since we hunters are out there during a miniscule portion of a coyote's life, a coyote that ignores an obvious indication of a food source generally does so to his detriment. Even in heavily hunted areas, the odds are a screaming rabbit is just that, a screaming rabbit.

Someone once said (again, don't remember who, but it may have been Aldo Leopold) that the main determinant of a hunter's success is his access to land to hunt. I would add a couple of caveats to that. #1 is that the land be suitable habitat for the animal in question, with a good population of that animal, and #2 is time to hunt that land. Having a million acres does one little good if one can only find time to hunt it once a weekend. As far as Tony and others of that exalted status, well, Tony has access to about a million acres of prime coyote habitat, and he is out there all the time because this is what he does for a living. I will tell you this, and I believe Tony would agree wholeheartedly: you could take cousin Eddie from Christmas Vacation, give him all Tony's land, a FoxPro and a rifle with basic hunting instruction, and he will kill way more coyotes in a year than Tony would if all Tony had to hunt was one 250 acre farm. Even Tony can't kill what's not there.

I understand what you are saying about gun shy bird dogs, but I think that model is flawed as it relates to coyotes. Some dogs, and horses for that matter, are just naturally gun shy, so I see no reason that some coyotes couldn't be the same. However, teaching a bird dog to be steady after a shot is an artificial situation that is entirely different than what occurs when a coyote responds to a rabbit call and gets shot at. The coyote's motivation for investigating a potential food source is his very survival. They aren't like deer. Deer know where their food is going to be, because it doesn't move around, doesn't hide from them, and doesn't try to get away from them. Deer move in all kinds of weather. In all my years of nocturnal hunting, I have never, not once, killed a wet coyote at night. This extends even to the point of heavy dew in the rye pastures where I hunt. When the dew forms at night down here, you'd better go hunt over dirt, or you're not going to see a coyote. I think this is because, in the coyote's "programming", they "know" that the calories expended to keep warm while being wet at night are not worth the chance of not finding food, so they lay up until morning.

I don't know about out west, but I don't believe the unseen coyote gets educated around here. Everywhere I hunt, there are people all the time. Human scent is, I'm sure, everywhere. I don't believe it possible for a coyote to associate human scent with a sound for that reason.

SalemDawger-I agree with you 100%.

 
Originally Posted By: KizmoI don't know about out west, but I don't believe the unseen coyote gets educated around here. Everywhere I hunt, there are people all the time. Human scent is, I'm sure, everywhere. I don't believe it possible for a coyote to associate human scent with a sound for that reason.



It's very different in the areas I hunt. Very.

Human scent is not that common in the big majority of areas I hunt. Human activity, period, is unusual. Coyotes in general tend towards nuevo phobia, with some individuals displaying it to an extreme degree. Others much less, of course. But my experience leads me to believe that the coyotes around here do very much become educated to calling. Very much. I think it's probably as much to do with associating man smell and activity with the calling as anything. That's all they really need to learn, or be conditioned to - is that man smell and activity. Which, most coyotes around here instinctively fear. I don't know a single successful, experienced coyote hunter in my area that doesn't agree - coyotes DO get wise, around here.

But, of course, coyotes are highly variable, adaptable and individual. There simply are not any hard laws, no always, no never and everything has to be taken in very specific context. Even here, some don't wise up - but, those ones are almost all dead, by this time of year.

Another variable, a dynamic, that's different around here, that the above starts to touch on. Public land. It's a two edged sword. The bad side is that everyone can and does hunt the same ground you do.

You talk about only 10% coyote density in GA vs. the west. How about talking about 1000% coyote HUNTER density in the West vs. GA. It's not an exaggeration, though to the tyro I know it sounds wildly so, but, it's true, to say that "most" coyotes on public land in the West that are within reasonable striking distance of a population center, have been called to multiple times by Jan. And as a result, have become educated and difficult to call. Most of the virgin ears are dead by now and the ones that remain mostly are educated.

Again, that must sound nearly unimaginable that millions of acres could all be called multiple times in a season, but, it's true. Keeping in mind, most of the habitat is marginal and most of the coyote are concentrated in the better habitat, a million acres can be parsed down to a much smaller area of good coyote density - those are the good areas and everyone knows them and everyone hunts them. And by "everyone", I mean a LOT of predator hunters.

Just because it's not like this in GA, don't vastly over generalize and over simplify and extrapolate those circumstances to other areas with vastly different variables in play. I honestly don't think you can appreciate just how much pressure these public land coyotes get around here. I work in an office of white collar, generally not very outdoors oriented people and about 1/4 of the men coyote hunt with a call at least once or twice a year. There are many thousands of coyote hunters that live in the same city I do - Salt Lake, and we all hunt the same public ground. You can bet your Bippy that a lot of our coyotes associate prey distress with danger by January of every year!

Some of your other points, again, simply do not apply and would be considered "bad advice", for the areas I hunt. Like the part about howling in response to jackrabbit sound - my experience (over three decades of calling), is pretty consistently very, very different from what you describe. Howling to rabbit is common as dirt around here, for one thing - it happens on literally MOST morning stands, all season long. It's expected, not unusual. And the expectation created by it is not at all what you describe either. I don't doubt your description and observations are accurate for your area and your experiences, but, again, you can not apply them very widely, because they are pretty much exactly wrong, for my areas and what I have seen over 35 years of calling coyotes here.

I could go on and on. But it's a waste of my time. Most of this stuff, a guy just has to get out and figure out for himself. Because, as really the only point I'm trying to make here, is that coyotes are next to impossible to pigeon hole. You have to deal with the unique variables and circumstances in which you find them. And chances are, at least half of what you read on the internet, is going to be dead wrong, for those particular circumstances.

- DAA
 
Thank you for the post, it's very informative and should be thumb tacked for the new hunters to read..
The challenge with a post of new hunters is that you can't delve to far into the topics or tactics since it's new and won't make sense.

Those that have adapted/ modified something to work in their region will argue with you about the best way that works.. But the short of it is that until you get out there and put the basics to work, and find that groove that works in your area and your situation, This original post does a great job of explaining the basics of what we are talking about and should help those people that are just trying to get started.

I agree that you can't kill what isn't there. If you only have 250 acres to hunt, hunt it hard, and check back often for new or fresh sign. If there was a coyote there, unless something changed a new coyote will move in, assuming that it still has food, water, and shelter to meet it's needs.

Most of us drive, and drive a lot.. I don't have lots of land that hasn't been called and in that case you have to travel and get out there, meet some ranchers, and farmers. Find some places that work and strive to learn what you can about Coyotes to be a better hunter. Educated doesn't mean that you can't get them.. It just means that billy bob and his 5 minute stand of Jack distress out the truck window won't work. Elevate your game, and you will be rewarded..

Doubles are great.. But for my money, there is nothing more rewarding than calling in a coyote on a stand that i know someone has already called that morning. I know what sounds to not use.
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Good luck to all.
 
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DAA-There is no question that there are differences between eastern and western coyotes or east vs. west habitat. Eastern coyotes tend to be larger and have admixed Canis lupus DNA in their gene pool. This includes domestic dog, gray wolf in the northeast and red wolf in the southeast (as a matter of fact, genetic dilution by interbreeding with coyotes is one reason for the demise of the red wolf). Eastern coyotes tend to be much more pack oriented than their western cousins and disperse pups later and to a lesser extent. Theories for this behavior range from their genetic lineage (Canis lupus is more pack oriented than Canis latrans) to the fact that eastern coyotes tend to prey more on larger animals (ie deer), and it is to their advantage to have a pack structure to do so. In any event, this stronger pack behavior coupled with our lower population density makes hunting eastern coyotes extremely difficult. A pack of 5 or 6 30+ pound coyotes is not going to come running from half a mile away to get to one single rabbit. There's not enough calories in that rabbit to justify the effort.

Georgia, like most eastern states, has relatively little public land compared to out west. I've coyote hunted 8 states, but not Utah. Some of that was public land, most was private. Outside of Georgia, Alabama, and Florida, most of it was as remote as what you describe. I would argue that coyotes on private land where the ranchers are constantly shooting at them are just as "educated" to general human activity as your public land.

If there is any conditioned component to a coyote's investigating a rabbit call, then some coyotes are going to be more conditioned to respond than others. As such, you are entirely correct that coyotes are highly variable and individual. I have no doubt that coyotes can be de-conditioned to respond to a call. It is estimated that the average domestic dog has the intelligence of a 3 year old child, and I think that can be fairly extrapolated to a coyote. Sure, a coyote lives in a much tougher world than a domestic dog, but coyotes don't have the benefit of having thousands of years of selective breeding, much of which is to bring about desired behavioral traits that arise, at least in great part, from intelligence(Irish Setters being a notable exception). Thus, my German Shepherd Dog is very likely to possess significantly more intelligence than the average coyote, and, almost certainly, not less.

If you have ever trained a dog, you realize that it is a daily process that requires hours and hours of training. In fact, I think you never stop training a dog. The minute you stop reinforcing a point (like not eating cat crap out of the litter box), the dog begins reverting to its natural behavior. If we even go out of town and kennel the dog for a week, it takes days to get her back to the point where we had her before. If this super-intelligent dog, with untold hours of professional training, can lapse back into her natural state after just a week, I have no doubt that even an "educated" coyote can revert back to "uneducated" status just as fast.

While I certainly cannot dispute your observations, I can offer an alternative explanation for them. As you said, coyotes are individuals, and, as I said, they probably exhibit different levels of interest in the sound of a rabbit call. Rather than your coyotes becoming "educated", what I believe is happening is this: the individual coyotes with the most strongly conditioned responses to a call are simply being killed off at a greater rate than the ones with lesser conditioning. Some would say that you're killing off the "stupid" ones. Actually the opposite is true. The ones that are being killed are the ones that have learned most strongly that a screaming rabbit means food. If you wanted to kill off all the professors in the country, you would be better served by luring them with television ads for an opera than you would by television ads for a tattoo parlor. What we are doing when we use a rabbit call is reversing a natural order. When a coyote learns to investigate a dying rabbit sound, he should find lifegiving food in the form of a dying rabbit, thus enabling his survival. When we play an artifical dying rabbit sound, not only is there no food there, but also the high likelihood of getting shot, thus militating heavily against the survival of coyotes who have learned that a rabbit call means food.

The bottom line is that, I believe, most "educated" coyotes are, in fact, "uneducated" coyotes, at least in terms of a conditioned response to a rabbit call, and, if you kill a lot of coyotes on any piece of property, there are simply not going to be as many coyotes as there were to respond to a call.
 
Originally Posted By: DAAOriginally Posted By: KizmoI don't know about out west, but I don't believe the unseen coyote gets educated around here. Everywhere I hunt, there are people all the time. Human scent is, I'm sure, everywhere. I don't believe it possible for a coyote to associate human scent with a sound for that reason.



It's very different in the areas I hunt. Very.

Human scent is not that common in the big majority of areas I hunt. Human activity, period, is unusual. Coyotes in general tend towards nuevo phobia, with some individuals displaying it to an extreme degree. Others much less, of course. But my experience leads me to believe that the coyotes around here do very much become educated to calling. Very much. I think it's probably as much to do with associating man smell and activity with the calling as anything. That's all they really need to learn, or be conditioned to - is that man smell and activity. Which, most coyotes around here instinctively fear. I don't know a single successful, experienced coyote hunter in my area that doesn't agree - coyotes DO get wise, around here.

But, of course, coyotes are highly variable, adaptable and individual. There simply are not any hard laws, no always, no never and everything has to be taken in very specific context. Even here, some don't wise up - but, those ones are almost all dead, by this time of year.

Another variable, a dynamic, that's different around here, that the above starts to touch on. Public land. It's a two edged sword. The bad side is that everyone can and does hunt the same ground you do.

You talk about only 10% coyote density in GA vs. the west. How about talking about 1000% coyote HUNTER density in the West vs. GA. It's not an exaggeration, though to the tyro I know it sounds wildly so, but, it's true, to say that "most" coyotes on public land in the West that are within reasonable striking distance of a population center, have been called to multiple times by Jan. And as a result, have become educated and difficult to call. Most of the virgin ears are dead by now and the ones that remain mostly are educated.

Again, that must sound nearly unimaginable that millions of acres could all be called multiple times in a season, but, it's true. Keeping in mind, most of the habitat is marginal and most of the coyote are concentrated in the better habitat, a million acres can be parsed down to a much smaller area of good coyote density - those are the good areas and everyone knows them and everyone hunts them. And by "everyone", I mean a LOT of predator hunters.

Just because it's not like this in GA, don't vastly over generalize and over simplify and extrapolate those circumstances to other areas with vastly different variables in play. I honestly don't think you can appreciate just how much pressure these public land coyotes get around here. I work in an office of white collar, generally not very outdoors oriented people and about 1/4 of the men coyote hunt with a call at least once or twice a year. There are many thousands of coyote hunters that live in the same city I do - Salt Lake, and we all hunt the same public ground. You can bet your Bippy that a lot of our coyotes associate prey distress with danger by January of every year!

Some of your other points, again, simply do not apply and would be considered "bad advice", for the areas I hunt. Like the part about howling in response to jackrabbit sound - my experience (over three decades of calling), is pretty consistently very, very different from what you describe. Howling to rabbit is common as dirt around here, for one thing - it happens on literally MOST morning stands, all season long. It's expected, not unusual. And the expectation created by it is not at all what you describe either. I don't doubt your description and observations are accurate for your area and your experiences, but, again, you can not apply them very widely, because they are pretty much exactly wrong, for my areas and what I have seen over 35 years of calling coyotes here.

I could go on and on. But it's a waste of my time. Most of this stuff, a guy just has to get out and figure out for himself. Because, as really the only point I'm trying to make here, is that coyotes are next to impossible to pigeon hole. You have to deal with the unique variables and circumstances in which you find them. And chances are, at least half of what you read on the internet, is going to be dead wrong, for those particular circumstances.

- DAA

its comments like that, that keep me coming back to this website. The thing about dave is he has been calling coyotes for as long as alot of guys have been alive. He got to see what it was like calling when 99.9% of people didn't even know you could call coyotes. oh my I could only imagine what the calling must have been like 20 years ago, in the BFE areas I hunt now days.

The reason so much public land gets called is because if you really look at the land, yes there are quite a few roads through it, but is there really that many?? and on those roads how many spots would make a decent spot to make a stand. What I have seen happen in the last really 5 years is that the locals in these remote areas are now coyote hunting too. I remember walking into a store in baggs wyoming a few years back and people saw I was camoed up and asked me what I was hunting. I said oh just a few coyotes. I would get a look like "what coyotes"?? why would you wanna do that. now if you go back into that same store I bet a dollar to a donut the same person would say, oh my uncle, or brother does that. This keeps us from being able to escape the crowds because if a local is out there and lives out there, they are going to be tearing up the joint. I have been walking into stands where we were actually very quiet on our approach but the place just erupted in threat/warning howls. No question these coyotes have been monkeyed with. They associated noises like this to human and danger. as I mentioned in another post if there are transient coyotes in the area that might come in normally. you have been cock blocked by the educated ones.
 
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Kizmo, thanks for that grand explanation, everytime I go out I hear them laughing at me too!

A leaf fell in the woods.

The eagle saw it.
The bear smelled it.
The deer heard it.

But only the coyote did all three........
 
Originally Posted By: steve garrett
oh my I could only imagine what the calling must have been like 20 years ago, in the BFE areas I hunt now days.

I don't know about the areas you hunt, but I actually kill more coyotes now than I did 20 years ago. When I was a teenager in south Georgia in the mid 70's, we were "blessed" with one of the few pockets of coyotes in the state, thanks to a fox club that imported them into the county back in the 50's. Calls weren't nearly as good then. I started out with a PS Olt "Cottontail Rabbit" closed reed call. There were no custom calls (at least any I was aware of) and electronic calls consisted of a close and play phonograph with a flimsy Johnny Stewart record. When I got my first Johnny Stewart cassette tape caller, I thought I'd hit the big time. Looking back, the sounds that came out of it were downright primitive compared to the 24 bit sound of my FoxPro Shockwave, and it sure didn't fool as many coyotes then, despite the fact that nobody, and I mean Nobody, was hunting them.

Originally Posted By: steve garrett I have been walking into stands where we were actually very quiet on our approach but the place just erupted in threat/warning howls. No question these coyotes have been monkeyed with.

Why do you assume they have been messed with? It has been said that a coyote can hear a mouse under several inches of snow 100 yards away. If they can do that, they can surely hear even the most stealthy human walking. Warning howls have probably been around ever since coyotes came into being. It's not something that they have made up recently to warn coyotes of other hunters. As a matter of fact, their most predominant "warning" sound is a rapid series of barks, not howls. Most "warning howls" are better described as "challenge howls", in which one or more coyotes is warning another coyote to stay out of his/their territory. It could very well be in the instance you described that you were, in fact, SO quiet that the coyotes mistook you for an intruding coyote.

We humans are inherently analytical. It is in our nature to always postulate a reason for events, and, if one is not apparent, frequently ascribe something we do (or didn't do) as that reason. This is a form of confirmation bias (also called myside bias), and is a systematic error of inductive reasoning.
 
Originally Posted By: Kizmo
steve garrett said:
We humans are inherently analytical. It is in our nature to always postulate a reason for events, and, if one is not apparent, frequently ascribe something we do (or didn't do) as that reason. This is a form of confirmation bias (also called myside bias), and is a systematic error of inductive reasoning.

I'll disagree with this. Some humans are and some aren't.
 
Originally Posted By: RJM AcresOriginally Posted By: Kizmo
steve garrett said:
We humans are inherently analytical. It is in our nature to always postulate a reason for events, and, if one is not apparent, frequently ascribe something we do (or didn't do) as that reason. This is a form of confirmation bias (also called myside bias), and is a systematic error of inductive reasoning.

I'll disagree with this. Some humans are and some aren't.

Ya got me there, Randy. I'll bet a passle of the "aren't" ones live up in your neck of the woods.
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Originally Posted By: KizmoOriginally Posted By: steve garrett
oh my I could only imagine what the calling must have been like 20 years ago, in the BFE areas I hunt now days.

I don't know about the areas you hunt, but I actually kill more coyotes now than I did 20 years ago. When I was a teenager in south Georgia in the mid 70's, we were "blessed" with one of the few pockets of coyotes in the state, thanks to a fox club that imported them into the county back in the 50's. Calls weren't nearly as good then. I started out with a PS Olt "Cottontail Rabbit" closed reed call. There were no custom calls (at least any I was aware of) and electronic calls consisted of a close and play phonograph with a flimsy Johnny Stewart record. When I got my first Johnny Stewart cassette tape caller, I thought I'd hit the big time. Looking back, the sounds that came out of it were downright primitive compared to the 24 bit sound of my FoxPro Shockwave, and it sure didn't fool as many coyotes then, despite the fact that nobody, and I mean Nobody, was hunting them.

Originally Posted By: steve garrett I have been walking into stands where we were actually very quiet on our approach but the place just erupted in threat/warning howls. No question these coyotes have been monkeyed with.

Why do you assume they have been messed with? It has been said that a coyote can hear a mouse under several inches of snow 100 yards away. If they can do that, they can surely hear even the most stealthy human walking. Warning howls have probably been around ever since coyotes came into being. It's not something that they have made up recently to warn coyotes of other hunters. As a matter of fact, their most predominant "warning" sound is a rapid series of barks, not howls. Most "warning howls" are better described as "challenge howls", in which one or more coyotes is warning another coyote to stay out of his/their territory. It could very well be in the instance you described that you were, in fact, SO quiet that the coyotes mistook you for an intruding coyote.

We humans are inherently analytical. It is in our nature to always postulate a reason for events, and, if one is not apparent, frequently ascribe something we do (or didn't do) as that reason. This is a form of confirmation bias (also called myside bias), and is a systematic error of inductive reasoning.

your over thinking this, I very rarely hunt private land. almost everything is public land. after doing this for awhile I kinda know and can guess what I think the calling pressure is like in a given area. One way I am pretty sure of this is certain areas I have hunted for years used to see alot less pressure. now days often I am getting the busted/threat warning howls, poor calling results, one can also look around and see if there are coyotes in the area by various ways. when coyotes are in the area, they are doing alot of yapping and not coming in. this always means pressure. The south is totally different than here. I grew up in texas. Honestly I think there are way less people that hunt down there. I think we have tons more hunters here.
 
Originally Posted By: steve garrett
your over thinking this, I very rarely hunt private land. almost everything is public land. after doing this for awhile I kinda know and can guess what I think the calling pressure is like in a given area. One way I am pretty sure of this is certain areas I have hunted for years used to see alot less pressure. now days often I am getting the busted/threat warning howls, poor calling results, one can also look around and see if there are coyotes in the area by various ways. when coyotes are in the area, they are doing alot of yapping and not coming in. this always means pressure. The south is totally different than here. I grew up in texas. Honestly I think there are way less people that hunt down there. I think we have tons more hunters here.

Not trying to be argumentative, but just being persistent, and trying to get a better handle on what you're talking about.
1. How do you know there is increased pressure? Are you hearing a bunch of e-callers while you're hunting, or do you run into a lot of vehicles in your favorite spots when your are out?
2. How do you know that all these warning vocalizations are due to increased hunting pressure vs. coyotes just warning other coyotes away from their territory because, well, they're territorial?
3. How do you know there are fewer hunters down south now? Sure you grew up in Texas, but how long ago was that? I would think the more hospitable winters would tend towards more hunters hunting. I used to think that there were fewer eastern than western hunters because coyotes are relatively recent invaders here. I no longer believe even that is true.
 
Great post Kizmo. Loved it. It is very well thought out and very rational and logical.

I am glad to see that most of the respondents are able to appreciate it from that stand point.
 
Originally Posted By: KizmoOriginally Posted By: RJM AcresOriginally Posted By: Kizmo
steve garrett said:
We humans are inherently analytical. It is in our nature to always postulate a reason for events, and, if one is not apparent, frequently ascribe something we do (or didn't do) as that reason. This is a form of confirmation bias (also called myside bias), and is a systematic error of inductive reasoning.

I'll disagree with this. Some humans are and some aren't.

Ya got me there, Randy. I'll bet a passle of the "aren't" ones live up in your neck of the woods.
lol.gif


Those would be my relatives.
 
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