Searching for coyotes in the wide-open desert country of the west can be a daunting task. There’s a lot of country. In some places the vegetation is so scarce and the land is so flat that you could put your head on the ground and see a horse turd sticking up 10 miles away. I have made many “blind” stands over the years in hopes a coyote would respond to my call. Somewhere in the midst of this country there are usually coyotes, but finding out where they are is normally the biggest problem when calling. Using a coyote siren is a great tool to help locate coyotes to find out how many coyotes are in an area. Coyotes normally can’t resist howling at the siren because the high frequencies hurt their ears.
A great coyote siren is the Mini Siren Coyote Locator put out by E.L.K., Inc. This siren isn’t as loud as others and only has a range of one to two miles. The benefit of this is you can hear the coyotes when they howl back at you.
Questions
Here are the questions I had when I first started to use a siren.
What is a good sequence when using a siren for locating coyotes?
How long do you turn it on and how long do you wait before you try another spot?
What time of day or night can you use the siren?
Do you use a howler with the siren or just the siren?
The answers to these questions
I normally let the siren go through four cycles, one cycle in each direction. Then look and listen.
If you don’t see or hear anything in 3-4 minutes, try it again.
You can use the siren anytime of the day. The best times are early morning and late evening.
Sometimes if I don’t get a response on the second try, I will do a howl.
7 Siren Techniques
- Pick a good place to siren from like the head of a canyon or big open basin.
- Hide your truck so a Coyote that comes to a ridge won’t spot the truck.
- Get on a high point or on the truck to allow you to hear better.
- If you are with someone else, have one guy run the coyote siren while the other gets away so he can hear while the siren is running. A coyote might answer and you won’t hear it.
- After you hear Coyotes don’t siren again. Coyotes will only answer once. They might howl for awhile, but they won’t answer again. If there are more coyotes in an area they will start howling and talking back and forth to each other.
- Coyotes are normally twice as far away as you think. It takes hearing a lot of coyotes to help judge their distance.
- Don’t go out and use a coyote siren in the wind. You can’t hear and the coyotes can’t hear you. You will have very little success.
You can use a coyote siren all year long, day or night. The siren won’t scare coyotes, but if used to much coyotes will get wise to it and will quit answering, especially during the day. Pick up a Mini Siren Coyote Locator and it will give you an advantage when calling coyotes.
