A few weeks ago, my friend sent me a text message stating that he had a place to go hunt coyotes. Knowing of my interest in wanting to hunt coyotes, he offered to take me out for a hunting trip. My friend knows a family who has some farmland in Oakdale. In addition to orchard crops, they raise a few sheep on the farm too. Recently, their prized "show lamb" was killed by a coyote, so they contacted my friend to take care of the problem.
Our first trip to the farm took place on a Thursday evening after we got off work. On the way to the site, my friend told me that he went to the property the previous Tuesday and scouted it out. He said he located some fresh coyote tracks and heard coyote sounds in an area of the property. However, he never did see any coyotes while he was there. When we got to the farm and spoke with the owners, they advised us that they think the coyotes are sleeping in a den located under some trees at the base of a small cliff.
We got in the truck and drove around the property trying to get a feel for the area. My friend showed me the area where he heard the coyote sounds earlier that week. This apparently is the same area where the owners were suggesting that the coyotes had a den as well. We got out and walked the property. Soon we came across coyote tracks. They were located in a freshly planted orchard. My friend found a set of tracks that were leading from the river (which boarders the property) to the area of the trees that the coyotes might be bedding down in. Later on, I found a set of coyote tracks that were heading to the river from the area where they might be bedding down. These tracks were in a different row of the orchard than the first set of tracks found by my friend. Based upon our discovery, it appears the coyotes are accessing the river area by walking down one trail through the orchard and returning to the trees down a different trail through the orchard.
The pathway to and from the river is blocked by a short chain-link fence that serves as a grazing pen for some cows. We found an area of the fence where we think the coyotes have dug underneath it. We found some coyote scat nearby the hole under the fence too.
After scouting out the property, we decided to try to walk along the cliff and try to locate the den site. We got halfway to where we thought the coyotes were bedding down. Unfortunately, our progress was stopped by thick brush like blackberry bushes and the cliff suddenly dropped off as well, so we could not advance any further.
For the last forty-five minutes or so of the trip, we set up at the base of two large oak trees that were growing in the fenced grazing pen. We sat with our backs against the trunks and had a clear line of site of the path we believed the coyotes were taking to get from the tree area where they might be bedding down and the river they were accessing for water. Unfortunately, we ran out of daylight and the hunt ended.
Though we did not see any coyotes on our first time out, we believed we had gained some valuable information on what to do on our next hunt.
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