The Genesee Valley hunting country is blessed with both red fox and coyote which have coexisted for thirty-five years. So to say that I would draw specifically for coyote on any given day would be impossible. However, there are areas in which coyote are more likely to be in my country. If am drawing one of those areas, I am very mindful of the wind.
With a coyote it is much more important to draw upwind. He will get up and go much sooner than a fox will. To have the best chance of being close behind him, it is better to draw upwind so he does not wind us and bolt. I would enter the covert quietly, encouraging hounds to concentrate and draw fairly widely.
However, hounds must draw as meticulously as for a fox, as a coyote that hasn’t winded hounds earlier will sometimes lay just as tightly as a fox. Also, by drawing a little tighter you will help ensure that when you do find, your pack will be able to get away all together.
Coyotes sometimes lie two or three together, so the whips need to be sharp to make sure hounds get away together all on one coyote. So to summarize, if the coyote winds you earlier in the game, he’ll likely get up and go. But if you can sneak up on him, the coyote may lay way tighter than a fox, making it easy to walk right by. But when he does get up, he does not hang around. He may circle once or he may just go right away.
The biggest difference between drawing for fox and drawing for coyote is the amount of time it takes to find a coyote. It is pure math. A foraging coyote may cover fifteen miles a day, having a much larger territory than a fox. The coyote is much more likely to be hidden in long grass or brush than the fox. In country with both fox and coyote, I am probably five or ten times as likely to run across a fox line as there are simply more foxes per square foot in any given covert. The coyote is either there or not there. And if not, he is not coming back for a couple of days.
If a coyote has been around, there are likely to be no foxes at all even in normally well-foxed covers. I have found that on a very good scenting day, it would be unlikely that we would run a coyote as we would cross a fox line, trail it up, and go. On a very poor scenting day, you would maybe draw for two or three hours, feeling that it is hopeless, and then bang, you hit a coyote and go. Coyote scent seems stronger, and hounds’ cry much more of a scream, no boo-hooing hardly ever. Even if they are trailing it there is an urgency and excitement to their cry.
Do certain hounds prefer a coyote over a fox or visa versa? I would say yes, that some are specialists. There are hounds that simply do not hunt coyote but rarely the reverse. Maybe they were snapped at by a bayed coyote and lost their taste for it? I don’t know. But certain voices that I hear at a find often tell me what we are on.
Is it a day where game is sitting tight? Or are they on the move in which case you want to hustle your drawing a bit and hope to cross a line. Of course you don’t really know this until you get out there, and conditions can change even during the day. Is it summer with super thick covert or the winter where game is more concentrated in sparse cover? You don’t want to miss anything when drawing, but if it’s a moving kind of day you want to recognize that fact because the coyotes will be long gone and know you are coming if you dilly dally.
If my country had only coyotes I am not sure I would change very much in the way I draw. I would probably change my pack slightly. I would be more likely to keep hounds that always cast forward on a loss, and are more forward even when trailing a faint line while drawing. I suppose this depends on the size of your country to some extent, as by placing this kind of pressure on your quarry, you are going to eat up your country.
I do think that the style and concentration exhibited by your pack are super important. They can have the best noses in the world but they have to use their brains. The pack needs to be confident in each other, not seduced by trash and ancient lines, and to handle perfectly. This is of course true no matter what the quarry. Every time you have to correct the pack you are risking missing a find as your hounds will take some time to get back to work. Wasted time on either quarry is not helpful, but with coyotes it is even more important. There is a certain amount of luck I suppose in any find, but I feel that if your work is done well in the summer, your pack will have a minimum of mistakes while drawing, will settle into the job more quickly, and therefore find more readily.
Posted January 21, 2018
Marion Thorne is MFH and huntsman of the Genesee Valley Hunt (NY) and a member of Foxhunting Life’s Panel of Experts.