1. Choose your stand wisely. (This aspect will be covered in detail in Where To Hunt.)
2. When taking a stand, give it a cooling off period. Eg; sit down, set out your cover scent, put on your face mask and gloves, adjust your rifle and/or camera to a comfortable position which you'll be able to maintain for up to 30 minutes and, take time to familiarize yourself with the area before you. Do this all quietly! There may be a predator nearby. The time taken here allows things to settle down in case you made more noise than you should have walking into your stand site..
3. Begin the call, quietly. Sometimes I may use a squeaker, or a coaxer, or merely use my wounded rabbit call as softly as I can with a short "session" of calls just in case there is something nearby. Many times I'm surprised to have a coyote appear only seconds after I've done this. I'm always more surprised that some of these early comers have appeared after I've cussed myself for making what seemed like an over-abundant amount of noise getting in to the stand.
And let me explain my use of the word "session" here. I'll use it to refer to the times that I'm actually making noise with the call. Maybe chorus, or iteration, or something would be a better word, but just so you'll know...
4. Keep strongly in mind that you are imitating a relatively small animal in distress. I am just as guilty (in my early years of calling) of making very long bursts on the call at volume levels that would wake the dead. Your lungs are 10s of times larger than even a jackrabbit. While the volume can increase to a very, very loud level during the calling session, in order to really "reach out," the length of each calls voice -or wail- should be short to imitate the amount of air the distressed animal would be disbursing, realistically to make the same noises. Instead of a wwwwaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa, make it a wwaaaa. Don't fall into the old catch of a distressed rabbit call sounding like a baby's cry. It doesn't.
My hunting partner, Gary, still can't seem to get this right by my opinion. To me his calling resembles more of a long-winded, wailing pig. But he still manages to call in varmints. I like to think that this is one of the reasons why I get the honors of doing most of the calling though. In that my called-in ratio is much higher than his. I kid him about this too, in that I usually manage to get coyotes to come screaming in while most of the dogs that Dave call in come very late in the call, usually slow and cautiously. For example, one day this past February, one dog came down a ridge top at about 400 yards, walked nonchalantly towards the sound another 100 yards or so, and layed down to take a nap! Which brings me to...
5. Get the coyote excited! Long long ago, I had bought a calling cassette tape put out by Lohman Manufacturing, where a coyote calling champion was being interviewed about calling (I don't remember the Lohman rep nor the champions names now). The tape was more of a marketing tool for Lohman's various models of calls and the prowess of that rep to sell his videos and services with, than it was an instructional tape. But on the second side the champ was allowed some time to actually blow on a call for demonstration purposes. And interspersed with his demo calling technique, he stressed exciting the animal with what he called --and I do now too-- the "scramble call."
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