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Improve Your Turkey Hunting Odds By Spring Coyote Hunting

Improve Your Turkey Hunting Odds By Spring Coyote Hunting

When two gobbling toms rumbled the early morning spring woods, my late friend and I decided we would have the best chance if we split the difference between the roosted birds. After quietly making our way down a wooded fence row, we made it within one hundred yards of each tom, then proceeded to get into position to begin calling.

 

As the sun lit up the spring woods, I knew it wouldn’t be long until we heard the beat of wings as the two toms flew off the roost. I amped up my calling by cutting and imitating a fly-down cackle on an H.S. Strut diaphragm call to entice them into coming closer. After a short time, we heard the anticipated sound of a turkey flying down and landing in the leaves. A few seconds later, I spotted one of the toms strutting his way down the hill toward the sound of my calls. Meanwhile, on the opposite side of the approaching longbeard, my friend stayed motionless as the other tom was still roosting a mere sixty yards in his direction. Trying to stay still, I was baffled when the gobbler heading in my direction suddenly went out of strut, then quickly went the opposite way, eventually out of sight. While trying to figure out what had gone wrong so quickly, I suddenly caught movement a few yards to my front. My instincts took over when I saw a coyote approaching where my tom once stood. After folding the coyote in his tracks, my twelve-gauge shotgun echoed through the bottom ridge. Unfortunately, the echoing of my gun resulted in the tom in front of my friend going silent until it eventually flew off the roost in the opposite direction.

If one has vast turkey hunting experience, it is easy to relate to the heartbreak and the aggravation my friend and I felt after a coyote ruined our morning of tagging a gobbler. Many turkey hunters have had coyotes attack their decoys or, as with our hunt, charge between the hunter who has been calling and the gobbling tom who is not too far ahead. Even though coyotes can be highly frustrating when turkey hunting, it is mother nature’s way for them to find an easy meal during the spring of the year.

Improve Your Turkey Hunting Odds By Spring Coyote Hunting

A coyote’s breeding season typically occurs from late January through mid-March. Once a female has been successfully bred, she has a gestation period of around sixty days before having her pups. With the peak of the breeding season occurring in mid-February, that would make their young scheduled to arrive mid-April to early May. Days before a female gives birth, and through the first several days of the young coyote pups being born, the mother’s requirement for more food increases drastically. During this period, it is typical for the male coyote to be a bit more aggressive as he is hunting for food for the mother and her pups. This is the reason for the increased coyote activity while hunters try to harvest a spring turkey. To help boost the odds for a spring gobbler and prevent coyotes from ruining a turkey hunt, it is vital to spend the month before the season hunting and calling coyotes. When coyotes are in search of extra food to prepare the female coyote for birth and later feed the young themselves, response rates to calls can be highly effective.

 

When hunting coyotes in March, it is imperative to focus on the territorial sounds they make, which symbolize the protectiveness of the area around their den sites, and the sounds of an easy meal. Using coyote vocals such as challenge and territorial howls signal to other coyotes that the area is theirs. If resident coyotes have settled themselves, they often will respond to see who has invaded their area. As for food source sounds, many animals also have their young in early spring. For that reason, using sounds such as baby cottontail, baby birds, and fawn distress all work excellently because they are the natural sounds heard in the wild at that particular time.

 

Due to the increased aggravation that male coyotes often have before their mate has pups, finding areas near a den can be ideal for hunting. As a good scouting tool, I have often placed one or two Muddy Outdoors Manifest 2.0 Cellular Cameras near areas where I plan to turkey hunt or where I suspect a den is located. When coyotes begin showing up on my cameras, I move in as quickly as possible and try to make a harvest. While finishing up the last portion of the coyote hunting season, focus on den areas and coyotes near a turkey hunting spot. By doing so, I have found that I have less pressure from predators when spring turkey season arrives in mid-April; less pressure from nearby coyotes means calling a gobbler into close range becomes less complicated. Improve Your Turkey Hunting Odds By Spring Coyote Hunting

 

Eliminating Coyotes To Improve Your Deer Herd

Eliminating Coyotes To Improve Your Deer Herd

By: Heath Wood

While sitting in a treestand during the fall deer season, I’m the first to admit that if a coyote comes by within shooting range, the deer hunt quickly turns into a coyote hunt.

Many hunters confess that they will shoot a coyote when deer hunting to help aid in the fight against the loss of their deer herd.

As mentioned earlier, I seldom pass up the opportunity to shoot a coyote, no matter what I am hunting. However, the truth is, shooting one or two coyotes each fall has little to no effect on improving fawn survival and the overall deer herd on a property. In my twenty-five years of hunting coyotes, I have learned that it takes an extensive predator management program to impact how many coyotes there are on a specific piece of land. Harvesting a mere two or three coyotes throughout the fall deer season does not constitute the fight to thin out the coyote population. Sadly, the truth is that new coyotes will take their place within a week to a month, resulting in no real impact. Yet, there is still hope for those who want to eliminate predators to improve their deer population.

Extensive Removal of Coyotes

 There are two types of coyote populations when zoning in on a specific hunting area. Some coyotes live every day of their lives on or near said land. These coyotes are the ones who breed, den, raise their young, and survive daily in a five to eight-mile radius. Others, however, need a home range or territory, thus making them spend much of their time roaming and searching for an area to mark as their own. The roaming type of coyote is the one that makes managing the population difficult. Coyotes are one of the most territorial animals on the planet, so there is only room for the roaming coyotes to settle after removing one or two coyotes

Eliminating Coyotes To Improve Your Deer Herd

Because new coyotes are always waiting to mark an area as their own, creating a significant impact on the growth of a deer herd requires extensive coyote removal. To successfully remove numerous coyotes, the hunter must spend extensive time hunting coyotes and trapping simultaneously. Many studies that have been completed on fawn mortality state that up to eighty percent of the coyotes in an area must be removed to make an impact.

In most areas across the United States, trapping season typically occurs during December, January, and February, which is also the most sought-after time for coyote hunters to try calling predators into shooting range. Hunters and trappers eliminate as many predators as possible in the months before fawns are born in the spring, increasing the deer herd’s survival rate and population.

Eliminating Coyotes To Improve Your Deer Herd

Spring and Summer Coyote Hunting

If hunting and trapping a vast number of coyotes during the winter does not sound worthwhile, try hunting during the spring and summer when coyotes make the most noticeable impact on baby fawns.

For the past ten years, I have spent significant time calling and hunting coyotes during April, May, and June. In my home state of Missouri, even though it is legal to shoot a coyote when turkey hunting, it is not legal to hunt or call coyotes until the day after spring turkey season, which is the first week of May. Once the spring turkey season has concluded, I focus the next two months on trying to call coyotes into shooting range. It is still possible to increase fawn survival rates by consistently eliminating coyotes while fawns are dropping.

When calling coyotes during the late spring and early summer, hunters can use distress sounds, including a distressed baby fawn, on their electronic callers to bring in coyotes searching for a meal to feed their young. Coyotes have their pups near the same time that deer have their fawns. Female coyotes must increase their food intake to help prepare to nourish pups. Over the next couple of months, mother coyotes need extra food to feed the pups until the young pups are ready to hunt on their own. The months of higher food requirements make fawns a leading target to fill the void. Eliminating coyotes during these higher-risk months and into the summer decreases fawn mortality because fawns are older and less vulnerable, giving them a higher survival rate when new coyotes move into the area.

Eliminating Coyotes To Improve Your Deer Herd

Should hunters still elect to harvest a coyote when given the opportunity while deer hunting? The answer is yes! A pack of coyotes can take down a full-grown whitetail deer at any moment. Eradicating a coyote could very well save a deer’s life. However, to successfully decrease fawn mortality and improve the numbers in a deer herd, it is imperative to hunt and trap extensively during the winter or hunt them when fawns are most targeted.

Having The Right Amount Of Trail Cameras

Running trail cameras can no doubt be one of the most exciting things to do as a whitetail hunter. The feeling of inserting an SD card into a computer and anxiously waiting for the card to load so you can start flipping through photos is almost as good as the feeling of seeing a big buck headed your way while in a treestand. It’s often described as better than Christmas. Partially because of this, it can be easy to run a lot of trail cameras. Trail cams have their place when it comes to deer hunting and can be very beneficial to you in terms of helping you be a successful hunter.

The question that always seems to arise when discussing the aspect of using trail cameras is how many should you be using? Some hunters don’t like to use trail cameras at all, and some run them religiously. When it comes to how many you should be running, it’s not a black and white answer, but more doesn’t always equal better. It’s very dependent on how much hunting property you own or have access on, and what you can handle. That may be five trail cameras, it might be twenty spread across multiple states, or it could be seventy on a large farm.

Below are a few points outlined that can be a product of running too many trail cameras. If you find yourself in any of these predicaments, odds are you’ve bitten off more than you can chew when it comes to trail cameras. So, take a look at these points and ask yourself if you’ve found yourself in any of these scenarios.

There Isn’t Time For Other Projects

If you get to a point where you find yourself not being able to complete other whitetail projects because you spend too much time heading afield to swap SD cards, it may be time to consider how many you are running. There’s a lot that needs to get done in the whitetail woods throughout the entire year and if you start putting things on the backburner or find yourself not completing what you want to get done during a day or a weekend of whitetail work because of having too many trail cameras to check, that can signify you simply have too many. If you get to this point, take a look at how many you are running, and what you’d be able to get done if you cut the number of trail cams you have in the field.

You Can’t Stay Organized

When you start running a lot of trail cameras, things can start to get hectic when it comes to staying organized. There’s a lot of other stuff that goes into it that one may not worry about when only running a few cams. But when you start to run a big number of cameras, there’s a lot of batteries, SD cards and trail camera maintenance that you have to worry about. When you run a couple, it may not seem like a big deal, but when all of a sudden you have thirty cameras, it can be very challenging to keep all of this organized. It can be a good idea to label SD cards for specific cameras, create spreadsheets on where your cameras are and to number each trail camera. This can help, but when you get to a point where you’ve simply got too many and can’t stay organized, or forget about cameras, you’ve got too many.

You’re Always “Behind”

This is a big indicator of running too many trail cameras. When you run a large number of cameras, a lot of times you end up relying on the information they provide during the season by default. When you have a large fleet of trail cameras out and find yourself not hunting areas during the season unless you check a camera that has a shooter on it, this can put you into dangerous waters and often times lead you to chasing your tail. A scenario would be you check five cameras in a day in the middle of October, and on one of them over a bean field, you have a shooter that showed up five days ago. Because that’s the only camera you had a shooter show up, you hunt there and don’t see him. Well, that buck could have easily shifted food sources in those five days, and you should be scouting for the hot food source, not just checking trail cameras. If you find yourself doing this too much, it might be time to reduce how many cameras you’re running.

So How Many is Too Many?

Well, that is dependent on you and you only. What it comes down to is are you able to stay organized, can you still get everything else done that you need to and are you not chasing your tail because of trail cameras? For some people, they might be able to run thirty trail cameras on a large farm and be able to still hunt effectively while keeping all of their trail camera data organized. If you hunt multiple states, this might mean you can only keep track of a couple in the out of state areas.

At the end of the day, trail cameras are meant to be a tool to help you succeed at deer hunting. When you use them properly, they can most definitely provide you with information to make you a better hunter. But when trail cameras become relied upon, or when hunters get ahead of themselves and run too many, it can detract from other things that you need to do in order to be a successful hunter. If you get to a point where trail cameras take away from these other things or create stress because you can’t keep up with them all or stay organized, then it’s time to consider reducing the number of trail cameras you have in the field.