I set a personal goal of 500 coyotes for this hunting season. I start hunting a little bit in August. My hunting ramps up through the rest of Fall and Winter. I typically stop hunting around the end of February. My goal was to shoot 500 coyotes solo this season. Please keep watching episodes to see if I make it. This video marked coyote #100, so I reached Milestone #1.

Great video, and some very good shooting.

500

Might fine shooting and thanks for sharing.

If memory serves me correctly, in 2021 & 2022 you called the same honey hole spot on Valentines Day night that had a coyote infestation and piled them up.  If you are trying that same spot tonight, good luck.

I haven't reached 500 this year, but there is still time lololololololololol. Fine shooting Korey.

I know I have a spot where I shot 7 on one stand on the same night in back-to-back years, but it wasn't on Valentine's Day. I didn't go out on Valentine's Day. I have been gone a lot this season. It was nice to have a nice meal with my family and get some quality time with my Valentine who has been my wife for over 30 years.

Hell yeah!  Another great video.

My bad...I had the right story but wrong date.  Those special times with family make great memories too.

Nobody's Bad at all. I couldn't remember myself, so I looked back at some old footage, and I still could be missing something that I posted in the past.

I have a pretty good memory, but some of it starts to merge together over the months/years of what happened when. Moving to a weekly video release has many positive things, but it also means that I am releasing content at times 6+ months after it happens since I only hunt for part of the year. It is sometimes hard to remember all the details of that hunt.

Thanks to all of you for watching and for so graciously providing comments.

For those of you who follow me or Night Goggles on Facebook, Night Goggles (Tom Austin) shared a post about the 500 goal. I don't think it will ruin the surprise too much, but I did indeed exceed my goal with about 1 month left in our night season. Although there is still a lot of time to blow past that number significantly, I am starting to slow down my hunting. My family has supported me along the way, and we are going on a nice long, and well-deserved vacation. Videos will continue to post through the entire year, and please follow the journey of what turned out to be the best coyote season I have ever had. At the end, I will post final number, stats for how many stands, average per day or night hunting, etc.

Thanks for riding along with me, and please subscribe, like, and continue to follow my journey and keep commenting on AR15.com. God Bless.

Thanks for sharing. Great videos

Congratulations, that's amazing. I'm currently at 73 for the season and can't imagine how much time, energy and work it would take to get to 500.

Thank you.

73 is a lot of coyotes. Each person has to face challenges. For some, it is early mornings, so they can't hunt all night. For some, it may be access to land and/or a low coyote population, and the list goes on. For me the challenges are I live about 1.5 -2 hours away from what I would consider good coyote country. This means that I can't just go out and hunt a few stands when it works out. When I hunt, I try to hunt all day or all night depending on the time of year I am hunting. Also, I am working two part-time jobs this year. Luckily, the hours are flexible on both, so that helps me hunt all night and still get a few hours of sleep in before I start work the next day.

It was a grind, but my average this Fall/Winter hovered between 11-12 coyotes per hunt, so that helped. I believe it was a combination of a higher-than-normal coyote population, an El Nino winter allowing me to get around to places I normally can't due to snow, and some additional hunting equipment.

coyotes are not a problem around here.  Do you think when you get to or near 500 it makes an appreciable positive difference for the nearby farmers, residents, and wildlife?  Or do the remaining coyotes adapt and just reproduce like bunnies to make up for the difference?

There are a lot of factors to provide an answer.

First off, there is nothing magical about 500 besides the fact it is was a personal goal I set for myself. Based on the length of the hunting season, and how many times I knew approximately I could probably go hunting, 500 seemed like the best foreseeable number to set a goal to keep pressing, so I would not lose focus. I hoped to average 10 coyotes a night and try to get out 50 times. My average ended up being higher than this, and I have been out a total of 46 days/nights so far this season. I don't believe I am going to get to 50 hunts, but my estimate was pretty close.

Does it relieve some pressure from local ranchers? Yes, I believe it does! How long does this impact last is the question. Their main concern is immediate, and that is to lessen pressure when they are calving. By hunting Fall through early Spring, I am helping with the immediate threat. Yes, research shows if there are less coyotes in an area, the remaining coyotes eat better and apparently this can result in more pups being born than usual. This doesn't happen multiple times a year as it happens once a year. So, by next Spring, there could be a replacement for some of those coyotes that I removed. The population will take some time to get back to where it was. If I stop hunting, yes I do believe the population will get back to where it was or be even higher eventually. On top of this, I know for a fact that other coyotes move in when there is an absence in a coyote population. I am a firm believer all that howling we hear is a way for coyotes to help determine where and how many other coyotes are in an area. When there is a lack of response, transient coyotes will start to move into areas that were previously occupied. There was a reason coyotes were there in the first place. It has the factors coyotes look for including food, water, cover, etc. A population has to be controlled for many years to make a more permanent impact. This is a good thing for coyote hunters but an unfortunate thing for ranchers.

I had an area that has produced for me for years. Last spring, the Game and Fish came in with planes when the snow was several feet deep and absolutely obliterated the coyote population in that area. The snow was too deep that the coyotes could not get away or hide from the planes. I went there this Fall, and I could not get any coyotes to howl and saw literally nothing. I am confident in a few years there will be a huntable population there again because it is virtually impossible to get every one of them and if they do, other coyotes will move in. In this area, there  was a significant drop in the coyote population beyond what typical hunting would provide. Humans have tried so many different tactics to get rid of coyotes and yet they remain. The saying goes if everything on earth is gone, "Coyotes and Cockroaches will be left". More often than not, when a population gets too high, nature takes care of it through disease and other factors. With the impact that I make, I am hopeful that I am keeping the population at a level where ranchers aren't having issues in the areas I hunt. The benefit to me is I get to spend a lot of time in the beautiful land that God created.

Informative. Thank you.

Heck yes!  One of the most informative, thorough answers to anything, ever!  Very much appreciated.