Alan Liere: Shooting coyotes a personal choice
There was a time right after a coyote killed my domestic ducks that I shot at every coyote I could. Watching a pack of them separate a fawn whitetail from its mother and methodically tear it apart hadn’t endeared them to me either.
When I moved to this 20-acre piece of ground, one of the first things I did was shoot a big male from my front porch. Later that summer, though, I watched a silvery female hunting pocket gophers by the creek, and I enjoyed her athletic antics so much I forgot about shooting. I was enthralled by the way she waited tensely, then rose up on her hind legs before pouncing with both front feet hitting the ground simultaneously and close together. In half hour, she had eaten six of the destructive rodents.
There is no right or wrong in the coyote world – just the inevitability of NOW. They were here before I was. They have being killing fawns and raising their young and howling at the moon from the beginning. I hunt deer because I want the meat. Is it okay to be killing coyotes just to be killing them?
I think the incident that really turned me from a coyote hunter to a coyote observer was a goose hunt in Alberta, Canada. I had arranged an elaborate spread of decoys for an evening shoot. As the shadows lengthened, and before the flight began, I was tucked into my layout blind when I spotted a young coyote sulking along a fence row 200 yards away. When he left the fence row, he bellied down in the barley stubble, literally crawling 60 of the hundred yards separating him from the decoys. There, he stopped, pressed his body even harder into the ground and waited, remaining motionless for several minutes.
Suddenly, he charged into action – lean, muscular, low to the ground. At 15 yards, I could see him falter. At five yards, he screeched to a stop in a cloud of dust and chaff. What were these weird birds that didn’t try to escape? The coyote looked back over his shoulder as I tried to keep from laughing. “I sure hope the boys didn’t see me do that,” he seemed to be thinking.
Then, inexplicably, he jumped high and came down in the center of a group of decoys. He then pounced from decoy to decoy in a crazy, hilarious dance. It was as if he knew he had screwed up and he thought that by exaggerating rather than denying his actions he could pretend he had known these were imposters all along. “Just practicing,” he was saying.
Competent, strong and independent, the coyote is what most men aspire to be. It’s okay with me if others choose to shoot the song dog, but I might as well sell my 22-250 – or perhaps swap it for another side-by-side shotgun. I’ve had my eye on a little .28 gauge for quite some time. I’ve got no problem whatsoever shooting wild quail.