Setup and Calling

Finding the right spot to call from is critical to success. The direction of the wind, amount of cover, sun position, field of view are among the conditions you must be aware of and use to your advantage. Coyote's have a highly developed sense of smell and use this, is some cases, more than sight to understand their surroundings. When setting up, make sure you position yourself with the wind directly in your face or at your right or left side (crosswind).

Coyotes will try to circle downwind to gain scent advantage given enough time, so try and position yourself in a spot with sufficient open area downwind to see any circling coyotes. A second or third hunter setup on your flanks can help with coyotes trying to circle. If you have a remote controlled electronic caller you can place the speaker upwind of your position give the coyote a different point of focus and then if he/they try to circle you will have a better chance of seeing them.

It is important to have the sun at your back so that the sun will be in the eyes of the coyote and not yours. But if the sun and wind are not aligned to put the sun at your back and wind in your face, it’s more important to be down wind of the area you are calling….remember, the coyote relies heavily on his nose. Having the sun at your back also gives you a better chance to position yourself in the shade. By being in the shade, this will help conceal your position and make it more difficult for the coyote to see you.

Now, putting all these items together would certainly be the perfect scenario, but in reality this is almost never the case. Sometimes you have to sacrifice the position of the sun or your ability to sit in the shade in order to call a prime location, but as I mentioned, you never want to sacrifice wind direction in order to call an area. If the wind isn't right, it’s better to wait for a better day. If you call an area and they detect you before you see them, it’s likely you have just educated these coyote for future hunts and hunters, it will be difficult to get these coyotes to come to a call for quite some time, they seem to have good memories.

Blending with your surroundings is also important to a successful coyote calling effort. Your camouflage/cloths should somewhat match the environment you hunt in. I am not impressed with all the fancy new and improved camouflage products out there…they look real neat to us, but coyote are canines and they see things very different than we do. I believe if you stick with light browns or green earth tones which have a pattern of darker colors to break up you silhouette is good enough. Obviously, don’t wear clothing with a shiny or reflective surface.  It is also critical to cover exposed skin, including your face. Skin can be highly reflective and coyotes will pick up on this from a long distance. A good pair of camo shooting gloves and a net style, loose facemask will do the trick.

Coyotes also have very, very good eyesight and their brains are wired to detect any movement, so if you must move during a call sequence, do so slowly and deliberately, keeping your hands close to your body if possible.

Last but not least is using the calls.  Calling with mouth calls is an art that will take a long time to master but once you start getting close to making the sounds you want to, get out in the field and test them in the real world. Making the right sounds is important, but unless you get all of the above steps right your chance of success are greatly reduced. Just making noise with a mouth blown distress call is pretty simple, but actually playing them like a musical instrument takes a great deal of practice. I would start out with a closed reed style mouth call, these are the easiest to make the right sounds with. Open reed calls require a great deal more skill and are for advanced callers, but they are the most versatile and have the broadest range of tones and sounds.

If you unsure of what a rabbit in distress sounds like, I suggest buying a CD or downloading a track of a real live rabbit in distress and practice along with it. You don’t need to sound exactly like the rabbit but the sounds need to be natural noises and not mechanical, and do your best to sound like you are frightened and in pain. As long as you sound like an animal in distress, you're likely to get the attention of a coyote. The advantage with mouth calls is that no two people sound exactly alike even when using the same call, so you have a better chance of calling in coyotes that have been educated by other hunter’s calls. Under the right circumstances coyotes will come to investigate just about any sounds that have that distress cadence as long as they don’t sound unnatural.

Electronic or digital callers are self explanatory and I won’t get into how to use them in this article other than to say you don’t want to play your entire library of sounds at each stand. Stick with one type of call sound, throwing in a rodent squeaker to get them in closer.   

The other big question is how long do you need to call at each stand before giving up and moving on to the next. The answer is, it depends on a number of factors, but generally I give each location at least 20 minutes, and maybe a little longer when calling open areas. If you are calling areas of heavy or thick cover, you may stop after a shorter time because your calls don’t travel as far. Call in short bursts of less than a minute or so, and then wait for 2-5 minutes before repeating. During the time between calls be very still but keep your eyes moving. I have noticed that coyotes will sometimes stop and listen when you are calling but start moving again when the noise stops. If there are bobcats in the area and you have a tag, you may want to stay on stand for 30 minutes or more. Cats are very patient and take their own sweet time to come to calls. Also, a more continuous soft call sequence is more effective on cats.  

Using some type of decoy can also be very effective in diverting attention from the caller but I will cover this in another article.

Well, those are the very basics of choosing a location and calling. If you are brand new to the sport, just keep in mind that it may be awhile before you actually call in your first coyote so don’t get discouraged and stick with it. When that first one does come in you will be hooked for life.

Go to Chapter V