2nd Annual Buckhunters Coyote Hunt

What an awesome experience! What a great day to spend in the snow filled woods of northestern Wisconsin.

I found someone to go with me at the last minute. I want to thank my cousin Wayne for coming up. I pretty sure he enjoyed the day as well. His started a little earlier than mine. He had to travel over an hour to get here around 6:00 am Saturday . I hope he packed his gear the night before. I know I had to even though I got home late the night before because of a basketball game with my daughter.

I apologize for not having any pictures, but you'll have to trust me the day, was cold in the morning around zero, and the wind very light, if any. The sun came up and it was awesome being on stand when the woods came alive at around 7 am.

We decided to go to my father-in-laws 10 acres south of town, since I have heard many coyotes there while hunting for whitetails. After getting dressed up and guns loaded, we entered the short road to get to a blind stand and a tree stand. We decided to use them, since there were several sets of coyote tracks passing on the road quite early. We thought we may as well use the deer stands.

I placed the electronic, remote call between us just off the ground and faced it in the direction of a swamp nearby. Since I had never used a call before, I started with a short cottontail call, and gradually increased the length of the call, for a total of around 5 minutes of calling before I shut it off. We didn't get any response that we could tell. So, I repeated this another time. Don't know for sure how many times you should do this before moving on to another location. But, we spent less than an hour at this location. No coyotes responded, but I did jump a deer on the way in.

After getting stuck once and finding many more hunters on public land, we decided to go to another plot of private land that we got permission to hunt. I loaded the ATV and off we went. The snow was deep and we couldn't get back to the one swamp I wanted to try. We stopped and tried calling twice from a ridge that was several hundred yards from where I wanted to go. Nothing.

We went down the road further to a food plot and an elevated box deer stand. But, we got stuck again with the ATV. It took a while to winch ourselves out, and we made plenty of noise, so we really didn't know if we should even try. "Stranger things have happened" I believe the comment was. So, we climbed up into this huge blind to more-or-less rest. Like a dufus I left the call right under the stand. Yup, started calling and here came a small coyote heading around down wind and it stopped. I couldn't get my gun high enough over the side of the blind to get it in the scope. I noticed the coyote looked back, and sure enough a huge one was right behind. Wayne could get a shot at that one so told him to take it. MISFIRE@#@#@# Some much for reloads. The big one took off and I decided to blast at the smaller one while standing. I got a tree.

What a mess. Everything happened so fast. How did we mess that up? Rookies!

Oh well, we thanked GOD for the experience and tried the rest of the day to call more, but to know avail.

We got a lot of exercise, a lot of sun, a lot of laughs, and probably got hooked on doing this more often. So, we sure would take any advice. I do have a lot of questions about hunting these dogs.

Until next time. Hunt safe.