Our intrepid writer and his dubious wingman turn an early morning coyote excursion into a discovery of new hunting fun and the latest gear for pursuing rascally raccoons
by Ward Archer
The other day, my buddy Chet texted to see if I wanted to go coyote hunting the next morning. The plan he explained was simple and efficient: slip out early, hunt with thermals, and be back home in time for a big scrapple and eggs breakfast. [If you don’t know what scrapple is, well, I pity you.]
Going against my longstanding rule that it’s easier to ask for forgiveness than for permission, I checked with The Queen to see if she would mind me slipping away for a little o’dark thirty hunt with Chet. She said, “Sure,” but qualified that with something along the lines of not expecting her to fix breakfast again if I’m late.
Duly noted.
The next morning started with black coffee and two lumps of optimism. Chet and I had a farm lined up that we had yet to hunt. He had set up a couple cameras where he had seen tracks, and it seemed the dogs were frequent flyers on the north end of the main pasture. So, with a full moon overhead and a favorable wind, we reckoned our odds were fair enough.
But hunting has a way of laying waste to good plans. Despite the sign and what we felt was a right smart setup, the coyotes never showed. Twenty minutes later, we picked up our gear, ploughed through about a hundred yards of briers, and crossed another pasture for a second set.
Zip.
I was already having visions of a hot pile of perfectly crisped slabs of scrapple and eggs — sunny side up, of course — when Chet said, “I got an idy.”
Chet never says “idea.” It’s always “idy.” I told him several times he would do well to hone his vocabulary just a tad. His response is always the same…squinch up those bushy caterpillars stuck above his eyes, give me a hard look, and squirt a stream of Mail Pouch out the side of his mouth. It’s a trick he learned in high school.
Some folks you just can’t trot out amongst decent company.
What did Mr. Debonair have in mind?
Try for coons.
Well, “What the heck?” I thought. We had this much time and boot leather invested in this little pre-dawn adventure of ours. Might as well go for it.
We’d both watched videos on the YouTube of fellows squalling raccoons out of hollow trees, brush piles, and rotting barns and farmhouses. Looked like a pile of fun, but it was something Chet and I had never bothered to try.
I’m an “if you kill it, you eat it” kind of guy (except when it comes to coyotes), so hunting coons for the pot never entered my mind. It still hasn’t. I did, though, have an uncle who swore by coon pot roast. He also liked boiled deer brains, served cold with a light salt-and-pepper seasoning, so go figure…
But coons are predators — effective predators at that — and they absolutely put a hurt on turkey nests in the spring. Turkeys I eat. Slice up those breasts, debone the thighs to make a thick gravy, and you’ve got some serious vittles. So, I reckoned that knocking off a few coons would help satisfy my gastronomical leanings for wild turkey.
That settled, Chet and I made another mile-long trek to the opposite side of the pasture where we had first set up. By this time, the sky was already light enough for us to see without our headlamps.
We parked ourselves in an area where there were several old locust trees and a smattering of beeches, sycamores, and oaks with decent holes in them. Adding to the possibilities, a small creek bordered the nearby wood line. Coons like water for the crawdads they find amongst the rocks and gravel.
We’d seen plenty of videos of coons responding, sometimes aggressively, to calls imitating coons fighting or distressed coon pups and such. Chet dialed up some sort of coon sound on his caller remote and hit it.
What happened next was worth missing breakfast.
In no time, we heard the splashing of leaves and claws scrabbling on bark. Scanning the gloom with our thermal scopes, we saw white dots on the move — in the trees and along the ground. Not one or two coons but nearly a dozen. Coons seemed to roll out of nowhere like Shriners in clown cars.
I’m not sure what they were celebrating. Maybe they wanted to see a rumble. Maybe they wanted to get in on a rumble. Given the questionable pedigree of Chet’s caller (he’s not known in these parts as a “spend good money for quality stuff” kind of guy) maybe they were scared witless and were trying either to get to safety or to mount a coordinated attack. Whatever the case, we had us a good ol’ fashioned coon shoot on our hands.
The downside was that we were equipped for shooting coyotes in a field and not coons out of trees. I had my 224 Valkyrie AR (yes, an AR…wanna fight about it?) while Chet rolled with his pawn shop 223 Remington bolt action. Chet’s a bit slow, you see. Anyway, those chamberings meant we couldn’t safely shoot into the trees to knock any coons out of their arboreal perches, so we were limited to plugging coons on the ground. I busted two of them. Chet took out one, but not before it skittered down a broken off red oak stump to die.
If that ever happens to you — whether it is a coon, a squirrel, groundhog, or some other hairy varmint — you can twizzle them out with a switch. Just cut a suitable length of live tree branch, and if you can find a piece of greenbrier or multiflora rose, wrap it around the switch. You can then take that thorny switch and run it into whatever crevice the critter got itself into and twizzle it around. You’ll eventually snag enough hair or a leg or a tail or something so you can pull that sucker out. My grandpa taught me how to pull groundhogs out of their holes like that. It was either that or suffer through another of grandma’s beans and taters dinner.
Let’s get back to coon busters.
The truth is, it doesn’t take anything fancy. Our dads and grandpaps piled the coon fur high with little more than 22 LRs and shotguns — the former if you intended to sell fur, the latter if you were just having fun with your dogs. Well, I’m not one to thumb my nose at tradition.
Similarly, I’m open to new ideas and technology when it suits my needs or expands opportunities, and you should be as well.
Take air guns, for example. There are some excellent PCP models out there chambered in .22- and .25-caliber that will put a coon’s lights out in a hurry. These guns hit hard enough to do the job and do it with a much softer “footprint,” as the in crowd might say. They are quiet, so they won’t blow your ears out if you need to shoot inside a barn or some dilapidated farmhouse. Their limited range also makes them safer if you’re going after coons in a more suburban environment.
As far as effective range goes, figure 20 to 30 yards as your average. Anything farther than that and you’ll probably not be able to needle that pellet through the tree limbs. Plus, those pellets lose lethal energy fairly quickly.
Much as I enjoy air rifles for pests and small game — particularly the multi-shot types like the Gamo Swarm models — I have a hard time letting go of the always reliable 22LR. But even here, there are new things to spike your coffee.
I recently got a suppressor for my Ruger 10/22. A suppressor on its own is a slick piece of equipment for hammering varmints. Couple that with the new suppressor-optimized 22LR loadings like Federal’s American Eagle Rimfire Suppressor or CCI’s 22 Suppressor and you’ve got something.
Just a week ago, before our squirrel season closed, that combo proved the point. I came across three squirrels chasing each other up and down a small maple tree. It was their mating season, so those rascals were doing their rut thing, I guess you could say. Anyway, one of them stopped long enough for me to get a good bead on him. All I heard when I pulled the trigger was the bolt snicking in the receiver and the wet smack of the bullet hitting that squirrel in the noggin’. The buck squirrel dropped, and the rest had no clue what had happened. So, I kept on keeping on until the other two joined the first one in the leaf litter.
Squirrel gravy.
But I digress. Back to the coons.
These are nocturnal critters for the most part. That’s when they come out of the dens to raid chicken coops, pillage turkey and songbird nests, prowl through garbage cans, and eat any dog food you may have left on the back porch. Furthermore, tradition says coon hunting is a nighttime affair, even though you can have tremendous action squalling them out of their hidey holes during the day.
All this means that you need light to shoot by, to locate coons in the trees or on the ground, and to navigate through the brush. Chet and I already use thermal scopes on our coyote rigs, and the same can be used on rimfire rifles to hunt coons. It gives you a good excuse to spend more money you don’t have on another thermal scope. But if The Queen holds a flaming sword over the bank account, you’ve got to think creatively (or is it deviously?).
One solution I’ve started using for coyote hunting and now coon pursuits is a thermal monocular. I was testing one this past weekend by Topdon called the TS004 Pro. What I like about thermal monoculars is that they make it sooo much easier to scan for incoming targets compared to swiveling your gun back and forth on a bipod or a tripod. As far as coon shooting goes, just use the monocular to spot them in a tree or on the ground, then switch to an LED spotlight — preferably mounted on your gun — to take the shot. Very simple, very convenient, and a much less expensive a solution than dropping $3-4K on another thermal scope.
You don’t need to spend a ton on coon gear. You just need to spend smartly.
I had to whip up my own scrapple and eggs brunch by the time I got home from Chet’s and my little adventure. A small price to pay, I reasoned, for opening a new lane of hunting fun. You should give it a try.
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