FLOAT HUNTS FOR FOX AND COYOTE Stephen D. Carpenteri


Sometimes it’s best to call from the water and wait for predators to appear on the river bank.


Like most other predator hunters, I’ve spent count- less hours cruising back roads, farm lanes and crop


fields en route to calling sites where, I hoped, a hungry fox, coyote or other furbearing varmint might respond. After decades of the same-old drive-stop-and-call routine I began to notice a pattern that changed the way I hunt these animals. In many areas the largest farms border large streams and rivers, and in most cases these water courses form the farthest boundary of the property. The soil is great for tilling but not so hot for driving, and the permanent byways are often hundreds of yards from the crumbly wetland borders of the primary waterways. So, it’s natural that hunters will drive the roads, pull off near the highway and begin calling facing the river or stream in the far distance. It’s also natural that the predators spend their days in the dense brush cover along the river, and we hope that our wails and squalls will be enough to lure a hungry canine out of the brush and bring him close enough for a shot.


Over time I began to see a trend: I’d pull over, hike in to a good spot, call toward the river, and try to lure a fox or coyote out of the protective cover of the often impenetrable wetlands along the water. The technique worked often enough to get me out of bed at 3:00 a.m. on cold winter mornings, but I also noticed that more often than not the animals would come only as far as the edge of cover, hang there and then drift back into the brush, forcing me to take extra-long shots or simply pass on targets I knew I could not hit at that range.


Other hunters I met along the way had the same com- plaint, but all agreed that there wasn’t much you could do


When calling from the water it is important to keep the shotgun tethered to the craft using a rope tied to the trigger guard.


because the river and lack of bordering roads made it impos- sible to get behind the animals. Or did it?


I finally made the connection one day when I was float fishing a section of river that bordered one of my favorite calling sites and happened to spot a coyote trotting along the bank above me. Hmmmm . . . I started to wonder how often predators used the river as a travel corridor and I decided to beach the canoe and have a look.


I was surprised to find a clear, well-traveled game trail


that wound in and out of the brush along the river for several hundred yards. The trail was nearly always in sight of the river but often diverted into the brush where tributaries, deep ravines or washouts created obstacles that were too deep or wet for traveling canines to use.


On my next trip I left the fishing gear at home and


spent a full day scouting the river bank for trails and open- ings, marking the most promising spots on my GPS so that I would be able to find them in low light or on days when rain or snow made it tough to identify certain landmarks. I had develped a plan that seemed simple enough: Instead of driving along the distant roads and trying to call predators from hundreds of yards away, I’d sneak up on them in my canoe and call them from behind. My guess was that there were plenty of foxes and coyotes in the wetland brush that I would never even see when calling from the road, and I suspected that some of those predators would be less suspicious of a dying rabbit squeal coming from the river’s edge. I also knew from the amount of sign I found on the bank trail that there were canines to be called, – I just


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