-
Essential Coyote Hunting Gear: Learn about how the correct rifles, suppressors, and predator calls can make your coyote hunting trips successful and efficient.
-
Effective Camouflage Tips: Discover how to blend into your environment with practical clothing and gear recommendations to stay hidden from the sharp-eyed coyotes.
-
Recommended Extras for Hunting: Explore additional tools like laser rangefinders, decoys, and spotlights that can enhance your hunting experience, especially in challenging conditions.
-
Beginner-Friendly Guide: Understand the basics of coyote hunting, including low-cost equipment options and key strategies to help you get started with minimal investment.
-
Maximizing Success with Suppressors: Find out how using a silencer can improve your situational awareness and make your hunting experience more pleasant and tactical.
Table of Contents
Coyotes can be very problematic, they often hunt deer fawns, cattle calves, and other small game animals, so limiting their numbers can be very beneficial. Coyotes also reproduce quickly, so they’re numerous in many parts of the country. Getting rid of a few coyotes can help your local deer population thrive, and the ranchers in the area might thank you as well.
It doesn’t take much investment to hunt coyotes proficiently! With a low barrier to entry and lots of opportunity, coyote hunting is very accessible, making coyotes one of the better animals to cut your hunting teeth on.
We’ll break down what gear you need to start hunting into just a few categories: guns, gear, clothes, and recommended extras.
Coyote Hunting Gun
Any accurate gun will do. What’s most important is that you have a reliable, accurate gun and that you know how your ammo behaves over distances between 50 and 200+ yards. You’ll want solid D.O.P.E. (data on previous engagements) to know what your elevation and windage holds are for varying distances and wind conditions.
An ideal coyote gun is one that shoots a fast bullet with a high ballistic coefficient. Since a typical coyote hunt involves firing at a moving target at highly variable ranges – often out to a few hundred yards – a really flat-shooting, high-velocity bullet provides a meaningful advantage. Coyotes are small and thin-skinned, so a lightweight varmint bullet is perfectly sufficient.
AR-15s chambered in 223/5.56 are likely the most popular, and are certainly a great choice for coyotes. We do prefer hunting coyotes with semi-automatic rifles, as the wild dogs often travel in small packs and require shots while they’re on the move. Though 223 Remington is the most common, other great cavaliers for hunting coyotes (in no particular order) include 6.5 Grendel, 6mm ARC, 22 Nosler, 224 Valkyrie, 204 Ruger, 22-250 Remington, 6mm Creedmoor, and many more. If you’re simply out to eradicate pests and aren’t seeking a clean hide or trophy, there’s certainly nothing wrong with hunting coyotes with larger cartridges such as anything in the 308 Winchester parent case family and beyond. The smaller, faster cartridges are simply preferable because they shoot flatter, get there faster, and have lower recoil for quicker follow-up shots.
Coyote Hunting Gear
Suppressors for Coyote Hunting:
We highly recommend using a silencer for any type of hunting. As usual, hunting suppressed delivers multiple benefits. For the hunters, shooting suppressed means making your gun wear the hearing protection for you, which in turn allows quiet conversation between hunters and improves your situational awareness. For the hunted, suppressed gunshots are harder to pinpoint and a coyote may not know in which direction to flee once the shooting begins. The dramatic reduction in muzzle flash and dust signature can also be of benefit, as coyotes have excellent eyesight. Hunting suppressed provides you with multiple tactical advantages, not to mention a more pleasant shooting experience with a near-complete elimination of blast and concussion and a solid reduction of recoil as well.
Predator Calls:
Coyotes have excellent hearing and can be reliably called to your location with a coyote call. Electronic calls have become the most popular, playing sounds that coyotes find hard to resist – squealing rabbits and the sounds of other wounded prey animals, “excited” female coyotes, and more – at high volumes. There are also various types of manual calls similar to those you may use for hunting turkeys and other animals. While opportunistic coyote hunting is exciting and can present itself relatively frequently, if you’re hunting coyotes intentionally then you’ll need a call.
Coyote Hunting Clothes
Coyotes have stellar eyesight and are extremely skittish. They'll pick out the shape of a person or even just the glare off your face or your scope and turn tail. If you’re hunting in daylight, hide in a shadow. Done well, the need for predator camo clothing can be reduced or eliminated. However, effective camo for your area is highly recommended for coyote hunting.
It doesn’t have to be fancy or expensive, and it doesn’t have to perfectly match your surroundings. Any camo that breaks up your shape so you aren’t identifiable as a human and vaguely looks like it more or less belongs in the general environment will do. A face covering or face paint can also be useful for blending into your environment.
Be mindful of where the sun is in order to prevent glare from your scope, binoculars, glasses, watch, etc. from being visible downrange. A glint will send a coyote in the opposite direction. You can use an ARD (anti reflective device) on your scope and binoculars to reduce the glare, but these are not required by any means.
Coyote Hunting Recommended Extras
Laser Rangefinder:
Coyotes often come in fast and can appear where you aren’t necessarily expecting them. Given the extended ranges at which coyotes are often shot, a laser range finder is an incredibly helpful piece of predator hunting gear. As soon as you get set up, range landmarks (notable rocks, trees, ridges, etc.) and remember those distances so you can immediately estimate range on target when a coyote appears. Coyotes tend to cover ground quickly enough that ranging the coyote itself prior to taking a shot isn’t always practical. A second hunter / spotter can help by operating a rangefinder and calling out the range and/or the holdover to the target in real time, and shooting suppressed makes this kind of quiet communication far easier.
Decoy:
A coyote decoy consists of a few pieces of fabric that are wiggled around vigorously by an electric motor. This is designed to simulate an injured prey animal like a squirrel or rabbit, luring in dogs on the hunt. Some electronic coyote calls have an integrated decoy. Coyotes are skittish and careful, and will approach your call with a measure of caution as they scope out the scene before getting too close. A decoy can overcome much of this, confirming for the Coyote visually what it has been hearing audibly from your call, and causing the coyote to run to your location with far less caution, if not reckless abandon.
Miscellaneous Coyote Hunting Gear:
You may well find yourself plunking down at the base of a tree, on the ground hiding in some brush, or behind a pop-up blind. You’ll want to hold still, as coyotes’ great eyesight is particularly attuned to catching motion. We’d highly recommend having at least a pad to sit on, if not a low-height folding chair or a full-on camping chair, etc., depending on your situation. Water, shade, warm clothes, a blanket, hand warmers, and any other accessories of this sort to stay comfortable in whatever weather you may encounter.
Spotlight with red lens:
If you’re night hunting and don’t have a night vision / thermal optic or can’t use one in your jurisdiction, you’ll want a big spotlight. Use a red filter and the coyotes won’t be able to see it – they literally cannot tell the difference between a red spotlight being on or not existing at all, just like we cannot see infrared. A red flashlight is also handy for night hunting in case you need to see stuff close to you, like your snacks, drinks, magazines, etc. Red light is less harsh on our eyes and will not disrupt your natural night vision as much as white light does.
Coyote Hunting Gear FAQs
What to wear when coyote hunting?
Coyotes have very good eyesight and it’s recommended that you wear some form of camouflage to disguise your human form from your surroundings. A face covering is also recommended, especially if you’re well-lit by the sun. You can get away without camouflage – we’d still suggest wearing natural colors – if it’s sunny out and you’re positioned in a good shadow. Naturally, you also need to wear appropriate clothes for the weather you not only anticipate, but the weather you might potentially encounter.
What all do I need for coyote hunting?
Requirements for successful coyote hunting are an accurate rifle that you know how to shoot out to 200+ yards, and a coyote call that you know how to operate. Everything else is a “nice to have”, coyote hunting can be done very affordable and without much specialized gear.
Conclusion
Coyote hunting provides an important service to ranchers and others by helping to control the population of these prolific predators. They’re an accessible species to hunt, with few special requirements to getting started and little specialized gear required. Low barriers to entry and lots of opportunity combined with dynamic hunting at highly variable distances on what are often moving targets makes coyote hunting fun, challenging, and easy to get started on!
