Article:Hunting With Erooster May 2008

“Hey WRat, can you and ERooster come out and take care of a ‘yote problem I have?”

Those were the words that got us out the door and into a cattle pasture waiting for the coyotes to come on into the fields. Out here cattle ranchers have some problems with coyotes and what they could/would do to the calves

This time out, we had our .223’s. I had my Savage and my brother had his Howa.

We set up the wounded rabbit decoy and made the call to see if any coyotes were listening.

Unfortunately, the local cattle population found the call kind of interesting. Yeah, California cows aren’t the brightest animals, despite what the propaganda commercials show on television. They really blew our cover, so we had to pick up and move.

The next best spot to hide happened to be on the back side of the dairy poop pond. Ah the smell of dairy effluence on the wind, smells like, well crap. Although our buddy says it smells like money.

We set up the decoy in the middle of the field and waited for the ‘yotes again. I set up on the left, my brother on the right. From there, we had a pretty good field of view. To my left was an empty corn field, followed by a hedge to the right of that, further to the right was the field with the decoy. My brother had the decoy field, followed by a fence to the right, and another pasture to the right. The only problem lay in the background, if we shot too high and there would be trouble. But, we had a good 700 yards to play with before that trouble.

Before long, I saw a young coyote coming across the corn field to my right and whispered ‘yote! to WRat.

We watched the coyote coming in and I set up for the shot. However, when he got to the hedge, I could only see him from the neck up. He looked at the decoy then he looked at us. I aimed for a kill shot above his right eye and squeezed the trigger.

We waited around to see if any of his buddies would venture into the kill zone, but no more came before dusk.

We tracked over the coyote and snapped a few pictures. If you notice, his left eye is out of the socket. This is due to the concussive blast of the bullet entering the skull. He was pretty mangy, not really a good time to skin and keep the pelt. I suppose that his buddies came in and cleaned him up.