Hi... my name is JoshT... and I've been a coyote-aholic for over 20 years now. If I had to give up every animal I hunt, except for one... coyotes would win, hands down. I now have a boy that's 1 1/2... and twins on the way... so, needless to say I haven't had near the time recently to devote to coyote hunting. I live on the west side, so this past weekend was probably my only full trip of the year, I hope to make it over again... but I doubt it will happen.
Over the past 6 years or so I've been hunting east side coyotes pretty hard... I have 8-10 "honey holes" that have produced year after year. But, I've seen a lot of dead coyotes shot by east siders this year... and the explosion of coyote hunting in general... has had me really concerned about "my" spots. I've heard the names of my most productive areas thrown around quite a bit on this website... and I've even seen several pictures of dead dogs taken from some of these spots. So, I was expecting tough times when we headed out Friday night for a weekend trip.
The first area we went is my absolute best location... we've seriously killed at least 30 dogs over the last 6 years in this spot. I was nervous... because it's public... and easily accessible. I jumped out of the truck while my buddy was getting ready and blew on the howler a couple of times. Well... I'm no longer concerned for "my" coyotes!! After about 3 minutes, we counted at least 6 pairs going absolute ape-schitt. I grabbed the rifle... my buddy grabbed the light... and we headed into the wind to see if we could wrangle-up a dog or two. Killed one... but the rest were staying put. All of my other areas also showed no signs of slowing dow...good to know that my prime areas are still prime.
All in all we saw at least 50 coyotes over two days of hunting... killed 8... only missed one. It was pretty obvious that the coyote population is getting hunted pretty hard though... pretty much every dog we saw was on high alert, especially the ones spotted from the road during the day. I guess it is pert-near impossible to hunt coyotes out. So, I grant you East Side guys permission to continue hunting coyotes for the remainder of the season... shoot all you want... they'll make more.
