Is it Hunting or is it Memorex?

[Mike P]

Davey Crockett and Daniel Boone must be doing cartwheels in their graves. Teddy Roosevelt would have me deported if he were still around. And I am absolutely certain Fred Bear would want to take away my bow. Why using these tactics to take your quarry would be sacrilegious by their standards. But I do it anyway. My hunts have evolved into electronic warfare.

This is the season after deer season and before turkey season. For me there is always some season. I am a renaissance hunter, a hunter for all seasons. And the season between deer season and turkey season has always been yote season for me. I have always hunted yotes. I hunted them as a boy in Texas as much for the necessity as for the sport. They were unwanted “critters” and prone to all kinds of dastardly deeds. I hunted them in the wheat fields of Kansas. I even hunted them on the fringes of Chicago’s northwest suburbs. And this past week I hunted them in the hills and hollows of southwestern Ohio as I have done for the last eighteen years.

As a boy in Texas I would place a reed of grass or wheat between my thumbs and blow so hard my ears would pop. That’s how I called them. Didn’t have any fancy “store bought” call to use. I couldn’t afford one. And besides, you sure didn’t need any fancy call to mimic a dying jackrabbit.

I bought my first “store bought” predator call when I lived in Kansas. It was just a cheap old wooden one, turned walnut and a plastic reed. But it made some really nice high pitched squeals and saved me from having a coronary out in some wheat field blowing on a sliver of grass. I used that old four dollar call year after year. I finally lost it in McHenry County Illinois in 1989 while hunting yotes. I never replaced it.

When I moved to southern Ohio in 1990 I went high tech. I bought a Lohman battery powered caller. It used cassette tapes and had a separate loud speaker. Why wonder of wonders, it even had a rechargeable battery. You could get tapes of every animal that was ever of interest to any yote, and that also included tapes of yotes themselves. We could launch a space shuttle and I no longer had to do anything to call yotes save push a button. I was truly living in an age of discovery.

And that was just the beginning. The technology just kept getting better and better. No longer did you need a pack mule to carry your “calling machine” into the woods. They kept getting smaller and lighter. I watched the age of the cassette pass by in less then a decade. You now could get all the calls you could ever dream of on one compact disc. And then in less time than it takes for the air to clear after you fire your smoke pole during the primitive weapons season, the compact discs were obsolete. Now all those calls were magically contained in something called a chip.

But it doesn’t stop there. Not by a long shot. My electronic warfare tactics were just beginning. No longer would I ever trudge over hill and dale calling my yote to his death. Why that was not time effective. I would now drive in my Tundra four wheel drive pickup truck all over the county roads near where I live to locate my yotes. Of course I would have my Tom Tom GPS in the truck at all times. I also have a small loud speaker attached behind the front grill of the Tundra. The speaker is connected to my CD player in the truck and has a separate on off switch under the dash. I pull off the road near a likely looking spot, turn on the CD player, flip the speaker switch and never get out of the front seat as my coyote locater call blasts out from behind the front grill. Should I hear a return howl to my greeting, I take the Tom Tom and mark where I am in my “destination” folder. I then drive on and do the same exercise at the next “yotey looking” location. And when it is dark and I have no idea where and what old county road I have wondered down, I hit “return home” on the Tom Tom and listen to some very sexy sounding British lady direct me back to my house.

It even gets worse. I take the Tom Tom into the house and fire up the computer. Then with my high speed access connection to the internet, I call up the county auditor’s site. I then plug the “destination points” from the Tom Tom where a coyote returned my call on the county map. I zoom in on the sites one by one. I click another button and I see an aerial photo of the spot. I can even change the elevations that I choose to view the photo and I am able to zoom in as close as five hundred feet. Another click of the button tells me who owns the land and how much the tax bills are for the year. Why, it even tells me if the land owner is delinquent on his bill! Another few clicks at yahoo white pages and I have the property owner’s phone number in front of me.

“Hi, I’m Mike P and I noticed you have coyotes on your property, are they causing any problems?” is usually the way the introduction goes on the phone. I have a success rate of over 80% accessing property to hunt via this method. I hit the spots the following day with my very small digital caller. It may be small but it belts out everything a yote wants to hear. I raise my rifle with the variable power scope. And as if in tribute to Davey, Daniel, Teddy and Fred, I manually pull the trigger.

I will be hitting the big 60 at the end of this month. I told my wife I want a night vision scope for my birthday.

[DropTine]

Great read as usual! I think we can all relate to that!

[Kenton]

think about how good those old outdoorsmen would be with our technology.

[GREY OWL]

I can one up you Mike. I've got all the same technology you have and more.
I just purchased a super sonic spaceship, that can get me from Saskaton to Texas in a nano second. On board is a heat seeking infra-red spy camera. I just touch a button and it tells me the age, sex, and weight of the yote. The laser beam then zooms in and instantly stuns them, bringing them back to the mother ship for futher processing. I can usually bag between 500-750 yotes in one day.

You can buy one of these, in the basement level at your local Walmart. Ask for the 2012 model, "yippp"...... that's right, there made 4 years in advance, that way your ship is not out dated.

So if anyone has a better technology for hunting coyotes, I'd like to know.

Grey Owl

[dick195252]

Great story Mike! very very true

[saxman]

Great read mike.
I got flack from someone a while back about modern equipment and how the old timers did it and my response was,yes it is modern and at the time so was the old timers equipment.
One day we wont even have to manualy pull the trigger.
Thanks Mike,Alwas entertaining.

[Dimteni]

Thanks for the story!

[bbbwb]

As a discussion topic when the topic of the modern technologies and how easy it is to be a successful hunter is introdused, I like to throw out a thought. Saxman has posted along my line. Early settlers had it easier to hunt successfully as the game was not used to man and the firepower used. It therefore was less fearful.Adding to this the game harvested was the less wary. Therefore the game over the years has been selectively harvested leaving the wiliest to reproduce. Present day offers game that is a product of generations of selection. On the other side, man has also improved with the firepower and other gadgets to utilize. However, the individual hunter lives only the "3 score and 10" years. Lost is the many years of experience and specific knowledge. The new hunter starts to build his own wealth of successful tactics that make success. All this time the selective harvest of the more vulnerable game is on going making for new challenges for the new hunter.
In conclusion, it is much more difficult to be a ssuccessful hunter as time passes even with the advancement in technology.
This on going challenge is what makes hunting an activity to stumulate the mind at all times. Consequently, I feel that the individual -successful hunter is a specialist and is in the same category of learning as the individual who chooses to continue academically at a university to a masters degree in a special field.
I trust that the foregoing will provide a smile and offer some healthy conversation in each of your individual friendship circles.
bbbwb

[xbowkidd]

a great read