Bear Grease - Ep. 338: This Country Life - The Kansas Coyote Project

Episode Date: June 27, 2025

On this episode. we're going behind the scenes of Brent's first ever solo hunt film. He's out in Kansas with his good friend, Jeff Writer, along with Jeff's decoy dogs, hunting coyotes. Brent shares the inside scoop on the challenges that arise in filmed hunts, and how this particular one went. He also learned that what he thought he knew about coyotes may have been quite the opposite. He's talking about coyotes, decoy dogs, and predator control on this week's episode of MeatEater's This Country Life podcast. Subscribe to the MeatEater Podcast Network on YouTube Connect with Brent and MeatEater MeatEater on Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, Youtube, and Youtube Clips MeatEater Podcast Network on YouTube Shop This Country Life Merch Shop Bear Grease MerchSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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Welcome to this country life. I'm your host, Brent Reeves. From coon hunting to trot lining and just general country living, I want you to stay a while as I share my experiences and life lessons. This country life is presented by Case Nives on Meat Eaters Podcast Network, bringing you the best outdoor podcasts that Airways have to offer. All right, friends, grab a chair or drop that tailgate. I've got some stories to share. The Kansas Coyote Project.

Now here's a little insight on how my first solo video project went that we just finished filming. Now it'll head to the editors who'll take the pile of footage we assembled over three days and try to tell the story visually that we set out to tell during the planning of the project. Months from now, after a whole bunch of work from the folks you never see or hear about, We'll post it for all to see and hopefully learn a little something and enjoy it. Only time will tell. I got a lot to say, so let's get to it. My first solo video project for Meat Eaters took place a little less than a month ago.

That project immediately followed the South Louisiana fishing trip and a hog hunting Texas I talked about a few episodes ago. I've been a busy boy over the last few weeks, and now after a couple nights at home from the Texas trip, I was making tracks toward Kansas to leak up with my friend Jeff Ryder. Jeff's a fellow Arkansas and a longtime friend, and I talked about him in episode 229 dedicated to hunting with decoy dogs back in July of 2024. If you're not familiar with what a decoy dog is,

I highly encourage you to give that one a listen. But I'll go over briefly here for those that are new or for you folks with bad memories, or the select few who are too lazy to move your finger about three times and listen to it for yourself. But decoy dogs have been an effective tool in predator control for a long time. As a matter of fact, there are still folks who've historically been called government trappers and hunters that are still working on predator numbers. Folks who are state or federal employees or contractors tasked with reducing the number of predators on the landscape with coyotes being one of their main targets.

Now, you're probably going to hear me say coyote and coyote interchangeably, and it's just the way I was raised, but that's what I'm talking about. Forever, I thought the role of coyote number production was to benefit cattle ranchers and deer populations. So with that info, simmering in my back pocket, I set out many moons ago to fill my friend Jeff doing the work of the people and saving Kansas burgers and booners, one coyote at a time. Now, in a way, we were. But just not to the extent I was led to believe by word of mouth

in my very unscientific research and observations. All that info would come out with a meeting schedule for the final day of shooting with a wildlife biologist from Kansas State University. Now, more on that enlightening meeting and conversation a little later on. Right now, here's how decoyed dogs work. We set up in a territory that offers cover and terrain suitable for coyotes to operate in, which is just about anywhere, and start blaring coyote sounds over a predator call.

The cow hears the sounds, comes to investigate, and while approaching, the dog sees the coyote and gives chase. Now, if the coyote is aggressive enough, it will engage the dog by chasing it, and the dog will come back to where we're sitting, and someone will take the shot, reducing the predator population by one. It is quite the spectacle, and to those who are interested in seeing how two canines and one domesticated and one not interact with one another, it's pretty amazing. But before we get into that, we've got to get to Kansas and link up with the production team

and our host, the ever-clean-shaven, Jeff Ryder. I've known Jeff for quite a while, and he's as good a fella as they make. His disdain for anything related to onions, and a poor choice in music leaves a whole lot of room for improvement, but we can't all be perfect. I saw him contemplate a felony once in a cafe where a waitress brought him a cheeseburger with onions. He didn't say anything to her. He's a gentleman above all else, but the rest of us heard his sad tale of woe endlessly over that whole trip. onions nearly started civil unrest on the plains of the sunflower state. I also remember driving home with him late one night after nearly a week of little sleep

and lots and lots of driving over the vast Kansas prairie chasing old Wiley Coyote. I was sound asleep in the passenger seat when all of a sudden the Beastie Boys were blaring no sleep till Brooklyn at full volume within the confines of the cab of that truck. A song and genre of music that would have me choosing a dentist appointment over listening to a complete track. I bolted upright in the seat and glared at him in his big, dumb smiling face and told him, won't you ever play that again? And I tried to go back to sleep. For those that are wondering, he did not listen.

But a couple weeks ago, when I pulled into the place where we were all staying, Isaac Neal and Dave Gardner, two veteran cameramen who I've worked on. several projects with during my time at Meat Eater, we're already there putting equipment and cameras together that we'd be using for the next three days. Isaac had made the drive over from his home in Missouri, and David flown down from Montana, rented a car, brought the majority of the equipment that we'd be using. The amount of stuff needed for a professional production may have gotten smaller in size

as far as cameras and sound gear goes over the years, but the number of hard cases and redundancy has more or less remained the same. It's a lot of stuff. Some don't realize the depth of planning a production crew goes to in preparation for a film and a hunt like this. I know because I was one of them that didn't. Back when I was doing it, I bought the best camera and tripod I could afford, coupled with the best shotgun mic, I could attach to the camera. We headed to the woods and whatever happened happened. And whatever happened, I was hopefully, paying enough attention to have the camera pointing in the right direction to document the event. Now, that's still basically what we do, except everything is planned ahead of time,

for what we're going to try to film to fit a story agreed upon that hopefully the cameras will capture and support our narrative. Several online meetings of me pitching the idea to the office last year had this project ending up being about a hunter's relationship with his dog. A lot of my content is about hunting with dogs, and that relationship is a solid narrative throughout them all. Different environments being the stage on which the same story is told again and again. The nuances of the relationship being described on how the human dog interaction plays out in the hunt is what I find entertaining in education. I never grow tired of seeing a working dog work in conjunction with a set goal, whether it's fighting a squirrel or a coon in a tree,

and the dog is telling you, I promise, he's right up there, just keep looking. Or a shepherd moving cows from one place to another at the direction of a handler. I dig it. And I love witnessing the correlation between the man and the dog as much as the interaction of the dog and whatever game is being pursued. In this case, it's Coyotes, and I just gave you a brief on how it works with a more detailed version of that to be depicted in the footage we were fixing to try and capture. I couldn't think of a better hunter to be with than Jeff and his dogs to showcase in this project.

Countless hunts from him years ago still played vividly in my brain as I drove toward where we'd all meet. And I couldn't think of a better place to do it than Kansas, even though Arkansas, Oklahoma, and Missouri have been great locations as well from back in the day. There's just something about the Kansas Prairie that speaks to me on a level like no other when it comes to this kind of hunting. Now, maybe it's because it was the first place that I witnessed the decoy dog worked with jail. If I had to bet, though, I'd say it's because of the sunsets. In Kansas, they're as good as they get anywhere. And when I think about them, I always see the horizon and in the frame of windmills missing a couple of blades. And it sits motionless as the sky fades from blue to orange, and you can seemingly see forever.

I was in the right place with the right people. There was only one problem. It was raining like a cow peeing on a flat rock. It had been raining off and on all spring. Deluges of rain and storms that seemed to be on a tighter schedule than we were. Almost a year of planning had come down to go time and it was raining buckets. Day one was an absolute wash, literally in 15. figuratively. We'd be in Kansas for five days. Day one and day five would be travel days,

getting there and then getting back home. That left us the middle three days for hunting and for getting the required shots outside of the hunting location, like sunsets and sunrises, birds and creeks, landscapes, drone shots, interviews, and the multitude of other film and photographs required to complete such a project. It's a lot of stuff, but we We were ready. We were well prepared. We all knew what our individual roles were, and the shooting schedule was our playbook.

Everything that we could control was accounted for. The only two things we had no control over was the weather and the coyotes on this trip. They were going to be hard to work with. Last spring, Clay Newcomb and I collaborated with Jason Phelps at Phelps game calls in building each of our own favorite turkey diaphragms, called prime cuts. Now I'm going to tell you, I love mine because it's easy to use.

I'm not going to go, I'm not going to win a turkey calling contest. It's just not going to happen. But when I run this call, I get the sounds that goblers are looking for. I have a great turkey hunting track record. If you go listen to real turkeys out in the woods, they're not going to win calling contests, right? That's who I listen to. I can make those sounds on my cut. I also hunt with Phelps's cut, and I hunt with Clay's cut because they're

They're all three great cuts. Check out prime cuts at Phelpsgamecalls.com. I think you'll be glad you did. And you'll find out that the Steve Ronella cut is an easy-to-use cut for beginning callers who just want to start making good turkey noises and getting action. Three hours before dark, the rain tapered off, and we hit the ground running. Guns, cameras, and dogs. My old high school agriot teacher always said, boys,

You got to make hay while the sun shines. It sounded cool, and I was probably a lot older when I figured out what he meant by that. You have to take advantage of an opportunity when it presents itself. Well, the break in the weather was our first opportunity, and we were chomping at the bit to get started. Coyotes like tickets to den in and hang out during the day. During this time of year, mating pair will have a litter of pups in a den.

Naturally, they'll be more protective and aggressive and other times because of that fact alone. Before we go any farther and I get accused to separate mommies and daddies from babies, that's not how nature works. They ain't people. Their will to survive is what makes them protective as any parent should be.

That same will is also what makes them slip into your farm and snatch a calf, a lamb, a goat, a piglet, or your pet out of the backyard. The ones that do that, I would come to find out two days later are the very ones we normally encounter on such a hunt. I'm not purposely bearing the hook to keep it from you. I just want you to learn about it like I did from a more trusted source than me. So back to that first setup.

We walked north through an old barn lot and stopped at the edge of uncut pasture that was more prairie grass than, hey, I can't imagine it looking much different from when the first European settlers started and making wagon tracks in that part of the country. Jeff walked out about 30 yards and set that predator call out. There was a fence line to our left also about 30 yards that ran north the direction we were facing. Straight up that fence on the west side of it was a thicket. But you could see on an annex that was pretty substantial,

about five acres worth of Bodark trees and briars and tick fever that looked like a coyote had designed it himself. We sat there facing north. There was a gap in the fence at about 10 o'clock on our left about 50 yards away. The wind was blowing from the front right to the back left. According to Jeff, the coyotes were more than likely come from the north out in front of us or from the left, which was west, and entered that gap where they could see the prairie and see what was making all the racket. The call Jeff at echoing across Kansas was a coyote howl on a challenge to the local inhabitants,

and then a simulated fight between two adult coyotes and rounded it out with the artificial sounds that mimicked coyote puppies in distress. All of which would make the hair stand up on the back of your neck and give you the creeps, but were a hundred times more pleasing to my ears than anything the Beastie Boys ever released. Normally we'd sit in a spot no more than 15 or 20 minutes,

trying various calls with Jeff working a pattern of gradual intensity, hoping to ramp up to predatory and territorial instincts of the coyotes to draw them out of the open, building layers of curiosity and anger upon layer until they finally broke out in the open. I'd watched him do it a million times, and I'd safely bet that more times than not, it worked. This was the first time in over a decade

that I would be sitting side by side with my friend Jeff on the plains of Kansas, waiting on a coyote to show up, and this time would be no different. I was getting itchy to leave to make another stand before dark when Jeff said, I think I saw something across from the prairie over into that thicket by 250 yards up the fence. I didn't see nothing. I kept a watchful eye up that fence rope for what seemed like forever. Then I remembered what he said about the gap.

And as I shifted my gaze to the left, Jeff said, there he is, three o'clock. That joker had done just what Jeff said he was going to do. He crossed in front of us where he saw him, then he followed that fence line south and walked into our setup exactly where he figured he would. He was right on top of us, and had we been there just to whack and stack coyotes, that hunt would have ended right there. I swung to the left and had him in my sights. Dave and Isaac started rolling their cameras and Jeff sink the dogs to engage the coyote who was staring at us from an easy flycast away. But the dogs didn't see him immediately. They were looking straight forward.

He was on the left. And the coyote faded further to our south, trying to figure out which one of us was making the sounds that had brought him out in the first place. Now, this is all happening at the same time, a mere matter of seconds. And he got downwind enough, just enough, to catch a bit of human sin. And when he got a snout full of that, he lit a shook and bamused back into that thicket with Jeff. with Jeff's dog right behind him. Finally, he saw it.

Now, you'd think that that would be the end of it with the coyote beating feet out of the country, but like most things in nature, it's not always what it appears to be. Spooked deer don't run near as far as you think. And neither the coyotes. Less than 100 yards away, we heard some fisticuffs break out

between Jeff's dog and the coyote. Nothing vicious, mind you or that lasted very long, more of a meaningful exchange of ideas from two folks who are never going to get along. Sometimes this will lead the coyote back into the game, but it's only a remote chance if they get a whiff of human scent before they engage with the dog. And right along with what the law of averages would say, he didn't come back out. But we had done what we had set out to do. We'd made a stand.

We'd called in a coyote that we could have taken at any point. We just didn't get the dog action. looking for for our project. It wasn't a coyote shooting show. It was supposed to be a coyote decoy dog show. And we were just getting started. We deal with rain off and on for the next three days, so our hunting time got limited by the weather. In that time, we made about half of the stands that we would normally have done. By hunting from daylight until around noon before it gets too hot, you can feasibly make three stands an hour, which comes to about 15. Another five hours in the evening will put you at 30 stands a day.

Not that hard to do when you're not having to drive very far, and we didn't because Jeff had easily a half a million acres of private land that he had permission to hunt on. Access gained over 30 years of helping farmers and ranchers with their coyote issues. I'm not going to reveal how the filming ended because I want you to watch it when it comes out next year. I will tell you this, that we had some crazy cool hunts, and I missed some shots I shouldn't have,

and I made the shot of my life on the final hunt for the final day. But I also want to share with you the name of a new friend Jeff and I made on this reunion hunt of ours, Dr. Drew Ricketts, a professor at Kansas State University. Drew's specialty is wildlife biology, and he is the Extension Specialist for Wildlife Management, and predator control, which means if you have problems with predators on your land, Drew is the guy you called who can teach you how to deal with issues like that.

And I like that. I like the idea of passing the knowledge down for someone else to do it instead of doing it for them. It's like that old shampoo commercial of how the good word gets out. You tell two friends and they'll tell two friends. And after a few of those, everybody knows how to deal with the problem. and before you know it, it ain't a problem no more. Well, in theory, that's how it works. Anyway, Drew was invited to be a part of the production

to bring some learned knowledge into the mix. The best part about the whole thing is Drew is a decoyed dog hunter himself. Drew added a lot of great information to the project and we're already planning a more in-depth interview podcast about what I'm fixing to lightly touch on here. I found it fascinating. and I hope you do too. Give me a show of hands out there as to how many of you have seen the meme on social media

that shows a coyote on top of a pyramid of deer fons that says during dinner season, studies show the female coyotes average killing 19 fons each to feed their offspring. And then it ends with keep doing the work, fellas, which is an encouragement to keep the coyotes in check. Now, that's an activity I fully support. But not for those reasons now, because those aren't facts, and not even close. And I always thought they were. Dr. Ricketts, Jeff and I talked at length about how he came to the conclusion that that meme was bogus.

Guess what? He showed his math. He showed the work he did how he got there. and I'm going to sneak peek at here for the folks that are curious and make the non-believers mad with facts. It's one of my favorite things to do. Simply put, there aren't enough deer in Kansas to make that math work. The actual figure of farm loss to coyotes isn't 19 fawns per year. It's 0.65 fawn deaths per coyote.

that's like a half a deer a ratio if anyone out there is old enough to remember the andy Griffith show now is when you say poor horatio anyway zero point six five is a long way from 19 as a matter of fact which is what I like to deal in when I can

it's 18.35 deer away from facts the deal is that coyotes do cause a problem and the cows that respond to calls during dinner season are the ones most likely to cause their problems on farms, ranches, backyards, and deer leases. I'm going to weigh neck deep into that subject and a lot of others pertaining to these interesting creatures and how they affect the landscape when Dr. Ricketts and I sat down and discuss it in detail very soon. I think you'll be surprised at how the numbers

really shake out on these curious animals. I know I was. They are very interesting, and I learned a lot. I think you will too. But that's a wrap for this one. I appreciate y'all so much for listening to all of us on the Bear Grees channel. Until next week, this is Brent Reeves. Signing off.

Y'all be careful. Last spring, Clay Newcomb and I collaborated with Jason Phelps at Phelps game calls in building each of our own favorite turkey diaphragms called Prime Cuts. Now I'm going to tell you, I love mine because it's easy to use. I'm not going to win a turkey calling contest. It's just not going to happen. But when I run this call, I get the sounds that gobblers are looking for. I have a great turkey hunting track record.

If you go listen to real turkeys out in the woods, they're not going to win calling contests, right? That's who I listen to. I can make those sounds on my cut. I also hunt with Phelps's cut, and I hunt with Clay's cut because they're all three great cuts. Check out Prime Cuts at Phelps gamecalls.com. I think you'll be glad you did. And you'll find out that the Steve Rinella cut is an easy-to-use cut for beginning callers who just want to start making good turkey noises and getting action.