The Bounty Of Big Baits

It had been a dry fall, and clouds of dust billowed behind the truck as I approached the head of a deep arroyo that snaked out into the prairie.

- Mike Powell

The scattered clumps of four-wing salt bush that followed the arroyo ended abruptly in that sea of grass. My eyes strained ahead, trying to detect any telltale movement that might indicate a catch. There! A coyote jumped up and made its own dust cloud as it tried to pull out of the Jake trap.

But it wouldn’t be going anywhere— except home with me to the fur shed.

Twenty-five yards farther out, on the rim of the arroyo, I saw another coyote standing. Fifty feet beyond that, another. Three coyotes out of six sets was an exceptional stop. But I wouldn’t call it a surprise. I hadn’t merely hoped to catch coyotes at that location. I expected to pick up as many as four. And I had several more similar setups to check that day.

I’ve heard Southern beaver trappers say, “It’s not how many beaver can you catch in a day but how many can you skin.” I never thought that same sentiment could apply to coyote trapping. But I’m happy to say I’ve had days on the coyote line (and what felt like longer nights in the fur shed) when I knew exactly what those beaver men were talking about.

I credit big bait attractors in carefully chosen locations, and it began a few years back when I was asked to remove coyotes from the prairie portion of a vast Colorado ranch. I was already trapping other parts of the ranch, but I hadn’t set there because the area was too open and too big, encompassing about 30,000 acres.

I couldn’t find any of the funneling features or attractors I look for when deciding where to set coyote traps, no saddles, dikes or blow-outs. All I had was the arroyos, and looking at them brought back conversations with Dan Gates, a friend who catches a lot of coyote in snares on big baits in the willow bottoms. Crippled livestock provide the fodder for his bait piles. If I was a lame horse in Dan’s country, I’d make sure no one saw me limp.