Before you read on, a few words.... Some people find hunting or some types of offensive. If you are not open-minded, you may not like my writing. Some of these stories are rather graphic. Years ago, coyote's competed with wolves. Wolves kept the population of coyotes in check by killing them. Wolves kept their own population in check by not permitting any but the alpha pair to mate. Wolves ate things that people valued, like livestock, or people. So people killed wolves.They tried to kill coyote's but weren't successful with poisons and traps, Coyotes' population has exploded in the last few decades. Today, it is perfectly biologically acceptable to kill a few coyotes. Hunters will never kill them off. For species such as Pronghorn antelope, overpopulated coyotes are a serious biological threat.
Hunting 'yotes is a blast, you dress up in camo, go sit under a tree in the desert (isn't that a contradiction of terms) and blow on a call that sounds like the screams of a rabbit struggling to escape while a coyote or some similar predator rips its hind legs off and eats them.
Coyotes hear this and often recognize that familiar metallic sound of a vibrating reed in a plastic tube, associate it with the slamming car doors, crunching footsteps, loud human voices they just heard a few minutes earlier and that awful stench of human, and they run the other way, never to be seen.
Occasionally, however, one of them thinks that sound is a real live honest to goodness 4 (well by now 3) legged breakfast entré. So the 'yote comes running in straight to the sound at full speed to share the meal... BANG, my brother Jeff just shot the dirt on the ground just behind where the coyote used to be...and the 'yote is running off into the brush as fast as it can, never to be seen again, and a whole lot smarter.
And its a lotta fun. I shot my first 'yote west of Wickenburg in April and another one up north east of Winslow in August. Both of these were called in by my brother. The first I shot with an AR-15, .223 Semi-auto, with iron sights, using handloaded 60 gr. softpoints. The 'yote was trotting right in towards Jeff and I shot it broadside at 26 yards.
Actually, I shouldn't criticize my brother, The guy is turning into a seriously prolific coyotero...If he calls them, they will come Check out his page.
I got a third coyote, winter 98, down near
Oracle, details to follow.