Calling for some Coyotes (Jan. 22, 2011)

This was my first experience calling Coyotes using the "FoxPro" electronic coyote caller. It seemed to work like a charm on 3 out of 5 setups this past Saturday. Charlie and his buddy, Matt Gaines, from Kansas City had made plans to go coyote calling and I decided to tag a long and try to get some good video of coyotes coming to the call. Matt is a veteran coyote caller and prior to coming to western Kansas has shot 14 coyotes this year and one bobcat. So needless to say he knows what he is doing when it comes to calling predators. Well, our first setup was successful as Charlie and I sat next to a cedar tree and Matt sat about 20 yards to the North of us after placing his "Foxpro" down the canyon on which we were setup on. After about 10 minutes of calling, a coyote suprised us and came from the North and we were expecting them to come from the West. Charlie nudged my shoulder and said "coyote" and so I turned on my video camera and tryed to focus on the coyote but the damn cedar tree branch kept interfering with the focus on the camera. All of a sudden the coyote knew something was up started "buggin out" when Charlie decided to take a crack at him with his SKS rifle. The first shot I did not get on film as Charlie missed. Then he tried 2 more shots at him and missed again. Our second setup we called and nothing responded. Our third setup was pretty fast paced as we only called for about 5 minutes when all of a sudden we heard a "wuff" and I looked at Charlie and asked, "what the hell was that?" So I turned my video camera on and got ready and then we heard "wuff" "wuff" "BOOM!" as Matt was sitting about 20 yars to the left us in a cedar tree and dropped a coyote dead in his tracks out of sight of Charlie and I. We could see pretty well all around us and so could Matt but nobody had any clue where this coyote came from...he just appeared out of nowhere! Matt made an awesome shot thru some trees to make a 100 yard shot and kill this coyote. Setup number 4 was unsuccessful after calling for 20 minutes. Setup number 5 was my favorite hunt of the day as we sat up against this big limestone rock outcrop on the North side of the canyon we were calling from. Again, Matt put his "Foxpro" down the hill from us a ways and started of calling with a "rabbit in distress" call and then after about 5 minutes he switched to a "coyote yelp" call and that is when I saw Matt start looking down the draw in his rifle scope and noticed a coyote heading our way. The coyote was very hesitant to come in as he would come a ways and then stop and look around and then come again. I had my videocamera on this coyote as he came in and was actually waiting for Matt to take a shot at him. Matt kept letting him get closer and closer as the coyote was right below us and we all lost vision of where he was at. Five to ten minutes went by and we thought we blew our chance at this coyote because we could not see where he was or if he busted us and left. So thinking the hunt was over I turned off my videocamera and looked over at Matt and he kind of gave us the "where the hell did he go" look and I shook my head. Then I saw Matt looking back at the direction we last saw the coyote and quickly bring his rifle to his shoulder and "BOOM!" This coyote was sneaking up the side of the canyon and came to about 10 yards when Matt said all he could see was a big furball coming his way and shot the coyote right between the eyes at 10 yards!!! Charlie and I were not able to see the coyote because again, we were about 15 yards away from Matt. It was a pretty exciting coyote calling day and I was able to get some video of coyotes coming in to the call and got the recovery of the coyotes we harvested for the day. The only problem was when I watched the video on the TV I noticed everything was washed out and really bright. I looked for a bit on my video camera to see what the deal was and noticed that the whole time I was filming I musted have accidentely pushed the button that changes the video setting and changed it from "automatic" to "bright" mode for cloudy or darker lighting situations. Anyways, we had fun and had coyotes respond on 3 out of 5 setups and killed 2 coyotes for the day.