Congrats! How many hours of calling before you got a cat? I've yet to get one but have called many coyotes. I need to step up my cat game.
Honestly I have no idea. hundreds, thousands. Who knows. The first cat took six years. We might only get one or two days of good huntable snow every year, so that is the limiting factor. If I had goos snow here every season I would probably kill one almost every year. The day I killed my first cat just happened to be absolutely perfect weather. It was a heavy snow starting the evening before. The snow and wind stopped around 4 or 5am. Those are perfect conditions. Most of the time it's too windy, or the snow gets too deep to hunt the high country, but the low roads don't have enough snow. It's hard to be at the perfect elevation here. It was 5 years since I killed that first cat. We had one good day last year, but didn't cut any tracks until it was late in the day. We still tracked them and did a couple of sets but we were just too far away. This incident proves I can probably get one every year with the right conditions. I knew he was there and was able to set up fast.
Also, the female showed up at 5am monday morning in the same area. At 6:45 there were some deer looking very nervous and snort wheezing. If only I could get a second tag. I have buddies I can take, but it's hard to have another guy geared up and ready in a hurry.