Jun 4, 2021 4 min read

My daughter likes to tell the story of the time she came home from work went downstairs to her big upright freezer to get a pack of something for dinner. She opened the fridge and there was a large garbage bag in there. Now this bag was pretty big, and she didn’t remember putting it there, so she opened it up and got a big surprise.

Earlier that day, I had gone out coyote hunting with some friends. Inside the bag was a whole now frozen coyote. The hunt had been successful, and the coyote was a dandy, so I had thought I might take it to my friend, the taxidermist Jimmy Roberts. Here was my small mistake I forgot to tell Kathy that I drove over to her house and put the coyote in her freezer.

To hear her tell it, she thought I had lost my mind. I guess finding a whole dead frozen coyote in one’s freezer isn’t a normal thing in most households.

Coyotes are everywhere in the state. They are more prevalent in the less populated north part of the state, but you may find them in your backyard. Last week, we talked about groundhogs, and I ended by saying that the groundhog’s No. 1 enemy is the coyote. Coyotes feed on about anything they can catch but commonly eat rodents, rabbits, carrion, fawns, livestock, chickens and people’s pets.

They say if your neighborhood cats disappear, it is probably from a coyote. They will eat seeds and berries. Mortality in coyotes from hunting is 60 percent in young coyotes but only 15 percent in adults. That is because they are very intelligent and learn very fast.

The eastern coyote came from interbreeding between coyotes and grey wolves. They are middle sized compared to wolves and its smaller cousin, the western coyote. It is also a fact that the coyote has been around one million years. Some records of early wolf kills may have been early ancestors of today’s coyote. The first recorded coyote kill was in Tioga County in the 1940s.

Coyotes are monogamous forming bonded pairs, who hunt in territories they establish. Pups are born in the spring. They will pack at times and hunt alone in others. Usually, they hunt at night but are seen in the morning too. They yip, bark and howl with a distinctive sound.

The time of year was September and it was hot and sticky in the field. It was hard to believe that soon winter would be here, and snow would blanket this same field. I was looking at a woodchuck through the scope as he was sitting in the middle of the field. I sat and watched as the dirt flew. Five or ten minutes later, he was gone completely underground. The dirt was like concrete but in no time, he was done. Soon, he was dragging corn stocks over to his house and started taking them down below. I am sure this was for the long winter to come.

Suddenly, he stopped and became still and alert. Then just like that, he was gone, down the hole. And there was the coyote. I never saw him step out, but he loped right out to that hole and started sniffing around. I could see every hair on his body. I sighted back onto the new target as he set out to dig the chuck out of his hole.

The shot was true, and I had gone out to bag groundhogs but instead shot a coyote who was after a groundhog.

Another time, I remember calling coyotes with an electronic call in Ohio at my aunt’s farm. They had told me all about the number of coyotes in the area, but I wasn’t completely sold on the number of coyotes they were talking about. It was full dark and down there it gets really dark. We set the call down on the ground and waited as the coyotes answered all around us.

After a short time, we were surrounded, and it was an eerie feeling when my cousin shone the light around and eyes lit up as coyotes fled the scene. In all my years of hunting woodchucks, deer and other critters, I have not seen that many coyotes without looking for them exclusively. They are hard to run into as they see you first.

George Block writes a weekly outdoors column for the Observer-Reporter.