By John E. Phillips

I’m not willing to wait until deer season starts to begin hunting with my CVA muzzleloader. I don’t want to wait until just before deer season to try to find new lands to hunt. I’m starting today to locate new places to hunt, and I’m going coyote hunting. I’ve got my CVA muzzleloader packed and plenty of PowerBelt bullets and powder with me.

Remember that when you’re asking permission to hunt on someone’s property, that landowner has no reason to allow you to hunt his or her lands for no charge. However, if you can solve a landowner’s problem, you not only will be a welcome hunter, you’ll also be a new friend.

Stockmen and truck farmers in just about every state have problems with coyotes. Coyotes eat sweet corn, watermelons and most other vegetables, although these animals primarily eat meat. If you can eradicate a number of coyotes for a landowner, you may become his new best friend as well as start to solve his predator problem.

What You Need to Know about Coyotes and Hunting Them

Never forget though that the coyote is a highly-intelligent, extremely-keen-nosed critter. If he smells you, the game’s over. One of the most-critical ingredients to successfully hunting and taking coyotes is to make sure that you have the wind in your face, or that you hunt across the wind, and that there’s some type of barrier that will prevent the coyote from moving downwind of you.

For instance, if you start calling coyotes along a creekbank or a riverbank to force the coyote to have to swim to move downwind of you, your chances of taking him are much better. A coyote will come to the edge of the water, if you call it in, and then the animal will sneak down the riverbank to come to you. If there’s a highway or a road at your back, the coyote will be unwilling to cross the road to get downwind of you. But never use a mountain, a rock bluff or any type of physical feature that rises behind you when hunting coyotes with your CVA muzzleloader. If you’re hunting with the wind in your face, the wind will blow your human odor right into that mountain or rock. Then when the wind containing your odor curls back, it will carry your odor to the incoming coyote. So, make sure when you’re hunting coyotes that you have an open-type barrier behind you that keeps the coyote from crossing the barrier but won’t stop the wind.

With today’s modern electronic predator callers with remote controls and coyote decoys, predator hunting is easier than ever previously. Also with the large number of coyote-hunting videos on the market today, you quickly and easily can learn to predator hunt while sitting in your favorite easy chair. However, to become a good predator hunter with your¬† muzzleloader, you’ll have to take your calls and hit the woods.

Don’t just sit around and mope because blackpowder deer season is months away. Instead, take your CVA muzzleloader out today, sight it in, get a predator caller and some decoys, and go coyote hunting now. If you don’t know where to hunt, call your conservation officer, who may know a list of landowners who are having coyote problems you can solve. Muzzleloading hunting with your CVA rifle is fun and exciting, and you can start today enjoying your gun by hunting coyotes.