Calling All Callers: 12th Annual Winnett/Grass Range Coyote Derby Set for Dec. 11–13

When the first hard freeze settles over the prairie, and the pickups are all wearing their winter dust, callers across central Montana start warming up the hand calls and checking the e-caller batteries. The 12th Annual Winnett/Grass Range Coyote Derby returns December 11–13, headquartered once again at the Wrangler Bar in Grass Range, and after eleven years it’s less a contest than a homecoming…the weekend the whole county catches up on. Whether you’ve been talking to coyotes since before e-callers had remotes or you bought your first call this fall, there’s a division and a pot with your name on it!

• Registration runs Friday, Dec. 11, from 5 to 7:30 p.m. at the Wrangler Bar, with the rules meeting to follow and the Calcutta auction right behind that — teams stay put until their division is sold to the highest bidder, so don’t slip out early.
• The Advanced Division ($300 per team) can hunt 24 hours a day, while the Intermediate Division ($200 per team) is daytime only; both are teams of 1–3 hunters chasing $500 in added money with the top three places paid.
• Side pots — the Big Dog, the Little Dog and the Lucky Dog — run $40 apiece in Advanced and $20 in Intermediate, so there’s money on the line no matter how the stand goes.

Half the reason people come back every December has nothing to do with the payout, though…it’s the thermos coffee at daylight, the stories and motivation at check-in, and a raffle table that empties wallets happily. The rules keep the field honest, and the hospitality keeps the whole town in on it:

• Calling only in both divisions — no trapping, airplanes, snowmobiles, shotguns or decoy dogs, no hunting off bait piles, and ATVs and side-by-sides are for transportation only.
• Every coyote gets temperature-checked at the Sunday, Dec. 13, 2 p.m. check-in, and with the hunt open statewide, your ground is wherever the dogs are answering.
• Off the clock, there’s over $2,000 in door prizes plus a raffle of at least 8 guns valued at $1,000 each — $20 a ticket, only 52 sold per gun, no limit on tickets or winnings, and each gun gets its own deck of cards ($20 a card) that closes the gun once it’s gone. Questions? Call Cody Martinez at 406.694.2212.

And if anybody at the bar asks why a crowd of hunters spends a December weekend out-calling the wiliest predator on the prairie, the honest answer is that it’s good for the ground. Coyotes are the number-one predator of cattle in USDA’s national death-loss survey, and predation overall accounts for 11.1 percent of calf losses nationwide (USDA-APHIS) — losses that hit hardest during spring calving on open range. A USDA-APHIS wildlife biologist’s review found that where coyotes are limiting, well-timed management can cut calf losses below 1 percent, drop lamb losses (which can exceed 29 percent unmanaged) dramatically, and even double fawn production for deer herds below objective (Bodenchuk, Texas A&M/USDA-APHIS). There’s a balance to respect, too — research out of the Chicago-area coyote project shows coyotes also do real ecological work, from thinning rodents to suppressing fox and feral-cat numbers, which actually boosted songbird nesting in some studies (Urban Coyote Research). A derby like this one simply puts a regulated, calling-only, temperature-checked harvest where sound management and small-town community meet — and sends everyone home with a story, whether or not the Lucky Dog comes through. Mark your calendars!