Don's Practical Outdoors gear for the budget minded! - Coyote Guns!

         Hello again, and glad you all found my first real article. I would like to talk about coyote guns. Seems simple, but is it really?
         Let's consider the needs of a coyote gun, we need it to kill a coyote, yeah, we want more, but the bottom line is that it needs to be able to take down a tough, wily coyote. If you are new to coyote hunting, your best bet might be to use what you have. That deer rifle that you just put away after deer season will be more than sufficient, that turkey gun in the safe will do the job also. You are going to have to make a few changes to make them more efficient at this new game. Mostly nowadays when we talk about coyote hunting we are talking about calling them into range and trying to get a quick clean kill. Let's look at that a little before we get to far into the firepower aspect.
       Calling coyotes, is going to generally be you, or you and a partner, going into the field, setting up a quick simple stand and then trying to coax a wily coyote into gun range using calls designed to attract them by imitating the coyotes natural food, or other instincts that cause the coyote to want to investigate the sounds you are making on a closer level. We won't get into the calls on this post, they are many. What concerns us right now is what type of firearm we want to carry, to me the most important things that will affect this choice are, What type of environment are we calling in the majority of the time? A precision long range rifle is next to worthless in heavy brush country, By the same token a firearm that doesn't shoot well over 100 yards is not going to help you harvest as many coyotes in the wide open plains.
     Many professional coyote hunters carry both a shotgun and a rifle, or each partner will chose to carry the opposite of the other when hunting as a team. Here's the thing to me, the AR-15 platform is most likely the current most popular coyote gun, chambered in one of several different cartridge sizes it can and will do the job, but coyotes rarely respond as a pack, 90% of the time it is a single coyote that shows up to the call, with an occasional double responding, for that we don't (or shouldn't) need 20+ rounds. If you already have one use it! But don't run out and buy one just because that is what everyone else is using, you can do just as well or perhaps even better with a much lower cost firearm.
      Okay back to the deer rifle and shotgun sitting in your gun safe, we already determined that these will work, now how do we make them better at killing coyotes? Let's start with the shotgun, most of todays shotguns are fitted with screw in choke tubes making them extremely versatile. A quick change to a extra full choke and a box full of #4 buck or "dead coyote" brand rounds will turn your shotgun into a 80 to 100 yard range coyote slayer, in brush country you would be real hard pressed to beat that. As for the deer rifle all you might have to do is change over to some ammo with lighter bullets, re-sight it in before hunting if you do, point of impact will usually change. Another modification you could add to your deer rifle is a slightly higher power scope, it will let you get a better picture at further ranges.
     There are many, many makes, models and types of firearms out there to choose from that will get the job done, no way we can talk about them all, so I am going to hit on a few favorites that will function beautifully in the right environment, to help you choose what you need, after all everyones budget and level of dedication are different.