Calling and Shooting Critters Year-Round
Richard Mann 03.13.17
Most hunters live for two seasons, spring and fall. They’ll go near insane in the spring chasing gobblers that are too stupid or stubborn to come to their calls. Then, in the fall, they sit high in oak trees blowing on a grunt call hoping a whitetail gets curious enough to come see what all the racket is about.
What many don’t realize is that you can hunt in the winter and the spring, and with the right call you can entice critters that are just dying – pardon the pun – to pay you a visit.
In many places, there is not a crow season, so you can call and shoot them during winter, spring, summer and fall. Sometimes they will come in one and two at a time, and sometime they will come it by the dozens. They thing with crows is you gotta be able to shoot. Shotgunners need to brush up on their skills because crows responding to a call can fly in just about any direction and sometimes it seems, two directions at once. If you are using a rifle, you’ll obviously need to wait until they land in your decoys, but the target is small and one shot is all you will get.
Coyotes are harder to call than crows, but in most places, they’re much easier to call than deer or turkeys. When coyote hunting, you might also call up a fox or bobcat, so it’s more like a safari than a hunt. You can use either a shotgun, handgun or rifle for coyotes, but with the first two you’ll need to get them in close. With a rifle you can stretch your distance. I’ve seen a coyote killed with a rifle beyond 800 yards. (No, I was not the one doing the shooting.)
The trick with calling critters such as coyotes and crows is having the right call. I hunted coyotes with two professionals not too long ago. One used a mouth call, the other a FoxPro electronic call. The group with the FoxPro – www.gofoxpro.com – took five coyotes in 2 days; the group using the mouth call took two. Now, there are a lot of other variables at play here, but you simply cannot match the versatility of the FoxPro with a mouth call, and you can run the FoxPro with little to no movement.
Remember, your hunting doesn’t have to be limited to only spring and fall. With a FoxPro, you can hunt year-round, and for critters that will actually come when you scream at them.
