PRIME WINTER PURSUIT

Every big-game hunter across North America, wherever he or she pursues white-tailed deer, black-tailed deer, mule deer, elk or antelope, cherishes that very special time when fall turns to winter and the snow flies. Suddenly fields, both riparian and tilled, river valleys, hills, mountains and even deserts are covered in a blanket of dazzling, white snow. This not only changes the land, but changes all animals in it in ways that cannot be matched at any other single season of the calendar year.

These landscape changes give rifle, shotgun and pistol hunters a decided advantage. And so it is for major predator species who are out hunting game, both large and small, to survive through the long, icy winter. For coyotes, foxes and bobcats, “winter kill” is the season of endless hunting, and that simple fact makes this the most productive time of the entire year for us to be out as predator hunters, too. This magical time begins with the Hunter’s Moon of late October, running five full months until March.

HABITAT CHANGES

Even those new to predator hunting quickly come to realize that for most of the year, success at calling in animals proves best from dawn