Most likely I'm a lot like Forest , I've worn a lot of different shoes and hats in my life and may be a little slower then most . One year I was working a shut down at the power plant , my job was on the turbine doing repair work on it , the journal bearings , the control valves , reduction gears ect. . As I'm standing waiting for the elevator a group of contractors gathered waiting also , one of them had a hunch back and two bags of refractory on his shoulder weighing over 125 lbs . total . He also had a welding glove in his mouth . Every one just called him glove because of this habit he had . After work hours you would often see him carrying a railroad tie around . After awhile I started to visit him he had an interesting life story . He had at one time been a mathematics professor at a leading college in Wyoming . One day a drunken driver ran a stop sign and tee boned him as he was going home from work . He had spent weeks in the hospital , had a broken back thus the hunch back , severe head injury and resulting brain trauma and could no longer do his job as a mathematics professor . He carried the glove in his mouth because of seizures and would bite his tongue . That is one book that you could have never figured out by looking at it's cover .
Ramblings and Such From Hunting Coyote
- Thread starter DSheetz
- Start date
Help Support Long Range Hunting Forum
Butter Bean , I found the book you and Ron Spomer spoke of P.O.Ackley's book , Handbook for Shooters and Reloaders on Amazon Kindle books for right at 10.00 . It should be some interesting reading . I like the saying that you have , Remember .... Don't argue with stupid people they will drag you down to their level and then win by experience . I find that stubborn people are much the same .
Last edited:
More years ago then I would like to admit I was trapping coyote and bobcats up on the mountain above 8000 feet . In late November there isn't any green grass to be found up that high just browns and the grays of the grass and granite rocks as well as the pine and bare aspen with some snow blowing in the cold breeze . I had a couple of good well protected sets made by an old road that lead to an abandoned cabin . As I was driving to them I saw what appeared to be a large rock by one of my sets and wondered who would have done that to my trap . As I got closer the rock jumped up and started fighting it's restraint it was a large tom bobcat and had been curled up sleeping protected from the wind . I dispatched it loaded it in my truck and finished my route . When I got home I took it to my garage where I did my fur work . I had a bathroom scale set up there as well , I would hold an animal and weigh us then me without them and find out what they weighed that way . This bobcat weighed 48 pounds . When it was stretched and dried it measured 48 inch's from the tip of it's nose to the base of it's tail with it's hips stretched to 7 inch's wide . It had a nice blue gray back with a very white belly and sharp black spots and well used teeth . When I worked with the USDA guys the biologist ask me if I would save some of my bigger bobcat heads for him . He would clean them and make measurements then record them for a study being done . One of the cat heads that I gave him was an old tom cat but was still in good shape that weighed a little more then 47 pounds and measured 49 inch's tip of nose to base of tail . He told me it was the largest skull that had been recorded so far and the age of the cat it came from was estimated at 12-13 years old . Mike and I worked together often and he taught me a lot about different things that we got to do that weren't what I had done in the past . He had access to a lot of studies done that most of us wouldn't even think of .
Those are monster bobcats, very interesting. Today I saw my 1 st coyote mousing in a stubble field 3/4 of a mile away. Most crop is cut off here and in the next 30 days those young pups will be out there the rest of the winter mousing…..just like Dave said 
I heard that saying years ago with this little bit added to the end, "and from a distance no one can tell the difference".
justin61 and ButterBean , that just makes sense to me . Reemty J , out of 500 or 600 cats those two were the biggest ones I've had some big old cats and some that were not doing very well on their own in there first few years of life . I once found a nice young cat dead in a rock pile that had a face and mouth full of quills . Not a good way to go but then nature isn't very kind a lot of the time . We humans tend to live in a sterile world when we can .
Around 30 years ago I was out with a couple of guys hunting coyote . As we approached the top of a raise a coyote was out in the valley hunting . It got shot before we even set up to call . We went ahead and set up I let out a few howls and way off to our left a single coyote howled at us . It was in some deep draws and well over a mile from us . From our right a coyote didn't talk but came running in out a draw . It too got shot and showed that it was feeding pups as she was still wet . Later that day I located the den around a 1/2 mile from where we had gotten the male and female that morning . The next day I went in from another direction and howled from up on the side of a hill nearer to where the lone coyote had talked the day before . A coyote came on the run no talking this day it just ran in then stopped below me looking for the intruder . It got shot , as I looked it over I noticed that it's tail had the fur and hair worn off nearly to the skin . That told me he had been baby setting pups and they had been chewing and playing with his tail . Knowing where it had came from I went over there and started looking and tracking . In the grass I located a slight trail with the grass pushed down that led to some rocks and short brush . Well hidden in under the brush and rocks was the den . Wanting the female as well I set snares in the fence around that pasture between the sheep and the den . The next morning I had a wet female in a fence snare . Those two days were well spent . Had I not known how the coyote in my area behaved I may have let one of the dens full of pups go till the fall or late summer and several lambs would have paid the price for my carelessness , or lack of knowledge .
I really enjoy the reminiscing and education you are providing all of us Dave
Last edited:
Thank you Reemty J. I enjoy doing it and if I can help someone out with my doing so it's a bonus to me . If I don't share what I have done with others not many people would ever know about it having ever happened . A lot of what I did I was by myself doing it . I enjoyed doing it and I enjoy it again as I share it with others .
I understand completely as I get older I hunt alone most of the time, feel I am more effective and alert. And with some age comes patience and prey understanding, giving one the ability to close the deal more often than I would have in my 20's and 30's. I have learned a lot from this ol Why-Dam-O-Ming potlicker!!!!!!!!!! 
Ka-Pow
Ka-PowI did coyote control work for over 36 years , but I studied , hunted , trapped , snared and called them longer then that . I probably have never not been interested in and fascinated by them . I've read about them as far back as Lewis and Clark mentioning them . I even paid to go study under a guy in Montana to be better at controlling them in the early 80's . During this time I made observations of my own also and I kept notes as well as comparing notes with others that also were into coyote control . We didn't always come to the same conclusions but for the most part we would have good discussions on our reasons for what we had figured out . Now and then someone would bow up their back and be a little defensive about their point of view instead of just discussing their way of thinking on the subject . There are so many small things that as a control worker you will come across that the average pleasure coyote hunter just won't get exposed to , because they just aren't exposed to as much of an opportunity to see them just by the shear amount of time spent in the field as well as the time of the year that they are normally in the field . Being so , lets say consumed by hunting coyote , there just weren't that many people that wanted to hunt them that much so I did a lot of it by myself . But I also enjoy being by myself , I don't often talk a lot , don't want to listen to the radio and such when I'm in the field and like to just think about what I'm seeing , hearing , smelling ect. . It's the way I'm wired and for me it's good to be the way I am each to their own ways . I like to hear about other peoples experiences and their observations as well I just might see where my line of thought is flawed and have to rethink some of my conclusions , I hope that I'm still learning from each and every one that I come across . There are times that I ask people questions and they don't realize that I'm trying to learn or have someone else learn from them . That gets frustrating for me but I will do ok with it as that is the way those people are wired and I figure they can't help them selves . All in all I enjoy telling of things that I have done and learned while hunting coyote and other problem animals and I hope that others enjoy me telling about these times in my life and that they just might gain a little knowledge and entertainment from them as well .
I visited with my friend Gene and his dog Jack today . Jack is 16 years old now and still out there hunting coyote . Jack is a short haired Jack Russell Terrier . Yesterday Gene shot a pup of the year and it went in a hole Jack found where it was and they got him out of the hole . Gene told me that this year there aren't any rabbits and very few mice so what coyote there are have been hitting the lambs hard . In a normal year you can get the dens and old coyote taken care of and you will have a slack time till about this time of the year before they move in around the sheep again . But this year they didn't even slow down . He said you could take the coyote and pups and within a week or two there would be new coyote with pups moved into the area . The good part is that they had small litters this year mostly due to the fact that there was limited food for them and they weren't in good enough health to support carrying large numbers of pups full term or have that many eggs to be fertilized . It's a hard time to be hunting and doing control work if you don't want to keep busy . Gene put nearly 200,000 miles on his truck in 6 years he told me today , I normally put on close to 35000 miles a year on my truck doing control work and I couldn't even start to figure out how many on my feet and loved every minute of it . I went in for a physical one time and the nurse ask me what the ih87 do you do to your legs there isn't any loose skin or mussels on them they are like rocks . Walk a lot up and down hills was the reply I gave her . I guess they may have looked like tooth picks stuck in a potato or something .
I don't like fleas at all . The best flea treatment that I have found is made by Adams it smells good and kills fleas on dogs as well as humans . I used a large black lawn garbage bag in the field to put my critters in and sprayed them once in the bag with raid tick and flea spray . That takes care of fleas , ticks and mites of all kinds . When I needed to get critters back to my truck from a distance I made a drag from a 4" piece of 1/2 "sch 40 PVC pipe . I drilled an 1/8 hole in one side put a 36" boot lace through the hole shoved it out the end of the pipe tied a knot in it and pulled it back into the pipe . I used a double ferrule for 3/32nd snare cable to make an adjustable loop in the other end that I hooked the upper jaws canine teeth in and drug them behind me head first , just a slip knot works well also . Animals always drag easier with the fur or hair then against it and you end up with less fur damage .You can wrap the cord around the pipe and carry it in a pocket as it takes up little room . Adams is water based so if left in the truck it will freeze . I had a fur buyer once tell me I like buying your fur they smell like flea spray so I know that I won't get infested by yours . When I put my fur up I always washed them after I skinned them to get the dirt , blood ect. out of the fur took the burs and other tangles out of them and combed them well . On bobcats the fur buyers look at the bellies for stains . Washing them with woolite takes any of the milk stains out of the fur . But when the buyer runs his hand down the belly he's feeling for nipples on them , and you get docket if he feels them as they will be called milk bellies . A good fur buyer taught me how to avoid this . Once your cat is stretched and dried you lay it down on it's back run your hand down the belly , when feel a nipple stop then blow on the fur it will expose the nipple . You then use a pair of toe nail clippers and clip just the nipple off close to the skin . If you need to you can wet the fur just a little to keep it laying down away from where you are going to clip the nipple off . More trivia that I learned over the years . When the price of fur is low you need to know how and what to do to get the best price you can from them just to pay for gas as you play .
