More Land Means More Predators
What does every predator hunter want more than anything else in the world? Land, land and more land! Land is of the utmost importance when it comes to making sure that you can keep consistent numbers in the back of your truck and enough rotation between your stands to keep landowners happy. In this writeup, I am going to give you a brief rundown of how you can add more landowners to your portfolio, which will let you add more predators to the truck bed at the end of the nights that you go out and hunt using night vision!
Fresh ears and unpressured ground seem to be harder and harder to come by anymore, which is causing a lot of frustration for people that may want to get into hunting predators at night but aren't finding a lot of success in what they are doing. This can be caused by several things, but one of the main reasons is usually hunting ground that is overcalled and overhunted. This can lead to many stands on the same piece of ground that produce dry stands where you call in nothing and see nothing. The only thing that you can do to mitigate this is to go out and find fresh ground and fresh ears to call to. So that you can put time in between when you revisit the same stand, but how do you do that?
Well, to start with, you must spend a lot of time in your vehicle driving around and finding property that holds coyotes that no one else is hunting and finding out who owns that piece of ground. Personally, I use OnX Hunt, which is an app that has a monthly or yearly rate, that gives you the name and address of the landowners. This is step 1, which is finding out who owns it and where you might be able to find the person to talk to. The next thing that you need to do is contact the owner and basically try to present yourself as professionally as you can. No landowner wants to let some cowboy slinging lead all over their property in the middle of the night that could shoot their cattle or their grain bins. Make sure that when you make contact and you are explaining yourself in asking permission, that respecting their land and the landowner is of the utmost importance. More importantly, if you do gain permission, make sure you follow through with that 110%. Don't just talk the talk, make sure that you walk the walk!
Spend a weekend or two a month and focus on this. You'll never hear a successful predator hunter say, "I have too much land to hunt!" Even your most successful predator hunters will tell you, they are constantly looking to get new, fresh ground to hunt on and they are always wanting one more piece of new property. Never be satisfied with mediocrity, make sure you are constantly networking and your reputation will do the rest for you. If you don't think that farmers sit around and talk about that guy or gal who came by and really did a great job on the coyote problem or hog problem that they had, how he/she shut every gate on their way in and out or how that person came over and while they were hunting predators last night, seen a piece of the fence that was broke and when he showed up today, you were putting that one strand of fence back up that they never seen...That is how you get phone calls to come hunt other people's properties. That is how you build a good reputation for yourself as a respectable hunter and human being. You would be amazed at how much further that will get you in not just night hunting predators, but in life!
