Desert Hunter

Shotgun Tactics for the Desert Southwest or anywhere else you can't see 40 yards

A few years ago I read an extremely interesting piece of information published in a coyote hunting club's newsletter, its author claiming to have killed almost a hundred coyotes in a single season with a shotgun. That astounded me. After all, I had been hunting coyotes for quite a while, exclusively with a rifle, usually as part of a team, and often at night with a spotlight. Trying to visualize that kind of daylight shotgun hunt was almost impossible. No one I knew called them that close, shotgun ranges, and there was no one I knew to ask for advice. I didn't know it at the time, but the piece I had read in that newsletter was total bullshit. I didn't find out until a couple of years later the the guy had lied. He didn't kill squat with his shotgun. It turned out he'd been trading tails for ammo with local farmer and throwing them down at the check-in. But by then it was too late. I'd already taken a misguided leap of faith and set out to prove I could do it with a shotgun too.

Hunting coyotes with a shotgun still gets very little text in books and very little play in hunting videos. Back then it was worse. There was no one to ask. I realize now that it isn't uncommon to see a magazine writer run with a story line, shoot two, and sell an article. That isn't much different from the amateur video producer who shoots 15 and starts selling videos. More recently, most of us have seen Les Johnson take the point with his shotgun on a wide open prairie-style rifle stand and hammer one when it came all the way in. The average guy just getting into hunting coyotes can get a lot of good information from reading magazines and watching videos, but without a real hunting context, he's at a real loss out in the field. Back then, just imagining the conditions where the shotgun was the primary weapon was difficult.

Now after a lot of false starts, I think I've come up with something. It isn't revolutionary nor is it totally original. It's just back to basic hunting, common sense, and the implimentation of a few original assumptions that needed to be proven, in a way very few had tried before. It eventually required me to throw out half of what I thought I knew about coyotes and all of what I knew about setting up a rifle stand.

Here are the bullet points from several successful seasons shotgun hunting in thick cover. It comes from more than a 2-kill article or a 15-dog video. Now pictures on the internet aren't absolute proof and after the original lies I had naively swallowed when I started my own quest for coyotes, I don't expect you to swallow them either. The pics below represent a lot of time and effort, with a score of witnesses in tow, many of whom are moderately well known in predator hunting circles.

Pictures from the 2006-2007 season.

A few more from the 2007-2008 season.

I'll add a few more from last year in time.

I hope that conveys the idea that maybe these few pages have a bit more basis than those magazine articles and videos I have given so little credit. I realize though that no story, especially this one, can be a real hunting experience. There is no way a few pages of text are ever going to make any reader feel what it's really like to set up correctly in heavy cover, call for a few minutes, and have a pack of hungry coyotes charge in at full speed, sometimes only a few feet away and then charge out scant seconds later in full technicolor. If the hunter is both prepared and lucky, in those few seconds, though the feeling of absolute surprise is inevitable, he'll be ready and take game. The sights, sounds, and smells of the hunt, the adrenaline rush, in those few short moments in time, can't be captured here. You'll have to feel them yourself.