Al Morris on Winning the 2007 Coyote Calling Contest
How We Won the World Coyote Calling Contest
 Editor’s Note: Forty-one-year-old Al Morris, from Springfield , Utah , a Hunter's Specialties’ predator pros, has hunted coyotes since he was 12. He’s also helped in the production of the “Operation Predator Videos 2, 3, 4 and 5.” Al Morris and his partner, Garvin Young, for won the 2007 World Coyote Calling Contest in November, 2007. Al and Garvin were the first team to win the World Coyote Calling Contest twice and the only team to consistently finish in the top-10 places in the championship for the past 11 years. This week Al will tell us how he and Garvin won the World.
In 1997, Garvin and I won our first World Coyote Calling Contest. Then we needed 11 years to get back in the winner’s circle. Only one other man in modern times, Bill Countis from Colorado , had won the World twice, but he did it with different partners each time. Countis is on Hunter’s Specialties’ “Operation Predator 4” video. Garvin and I are the only team who ever has won it twice and the only team that has stayed in the top 10 every year since we won the World the first time. Garvin is from California and appears on “Operation Predator 3, 4, and 5.” In 2007, the World Contest was held in Williams, Arizona , and also will be held there in 2008. A traveling event, the
World will be held in Cortez , Colorado , for 2 years, and then in Nevada for 2 years.
We checked in on November 29, 2009, a Thursday, but we’d been scouting the week before. When we checked in, the weather wasn’t too bad. But on Friday morning, the first day of the hunt, we had a heck of a rain and windstorm through Arizona and New Mexico . Some sections of Arizona received so much rain that some of the hunters sitting on their stands poured water out of their sh otguns and rifles before they could attempt to take a coyote. Garvin and I found a heck of a lot of coyotes, and we also had a great location to hide the truck to keep the coyotes from seeing it. We hunted rolling hills mainly. This year the coyotes seemed to be tied to the juniper trees because they were feeding on juniper berries. We also located a privately-owned railroad track, about 300 – 400 yards fromthe juniper trees, which went through the sagebrush that also held numbers of rabbits, too. If the coyotes were out hunting rabbits in the brush, they could hear our calling, and if they were out in the juniper trees, they could still hear our calling.
By hunting hard, we finished the event with 17 coyotes in a day and a half. We actually took  16 on the first day, and were only able to take 1 on Saturday because the wind was blowing 40-50 miles per hour. Since the second-place team only had 11 coyotes, we won by six coyotes. The second-place team, Everett and Chandler Miller, a grandfather and grandson, was hunting in a region we’d actually scouted with one of their team members. We told them we wouldn’t hunt that area and that they could have it.
Both Garvin and I carried a rifle and a shotgun to the stand after parking the truck behind a hill close to the railroad track. Next I took my new PM-4 Wireless Preymaster made by Hunter’s Specialties about 50-yards away from where we were setting up the stand. I always liked to put the caller upwind of our stand site. Then if the coyotes tried to circle downwind, they’d come out right in front of us. If I was operating the caller, Garvin would usually sit 50- to 100-yards downwind from me and off to the side. We only used two calls, and 90 percent of the time we called our coyotes in with the Grown Cottontail call. The other call that we used was Vittle’s A’La Jackrabbit. Six or seven of the coyotes we took came right to the caller, and we shotgunned them.
Tomorrow: Setting Up for the World Hunt
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