What causes big bait stations for coyotes to get hammered one night, then left alone for almost a month? I will share more details this evening.

With wolf jackpots,If you have a bunch and rotate them each year or couple years,they seem to produce better.I find if you keep setting the same ones every year they will be ignored by some wolves.
Not sure on why a coyote jackpot would go dead for a while in the same season.Maybe similar to wolf only on a shorter scale.

My thoughts....... the yotes and fox rotate through areas, especially in the thick spruce areas. I normally nail them hard the first month of the season and then you go for weeks not seeing a track and then boom they are there again. About all you can do is keep them fresh, keep the birds active, and wait.

Any commercial fishing near you.... with all the course fish on the ice easy picking.
25 miles is nothing for them to travel to get on the ice.
It's Christmas time and a lot of late night ditch lice are out (snow machines) upsetting their evening travels, settles down after New Years.

Bait station nailed for a couple nights by around 8 to 12 yotes. Nice trails made. Set 18 snares between 100 and 400 yards away from bait as usual. Nearly a month, one yote caught, very few tracks. Ravens and magpies quit the bait too. Why? Bait is deer. Carcass of doe, opened up, guts and scraps from two other deer. Bait in excellent historic location. A ten coyote catch place, minimum.

Feels like such a waste of snares to be sitting there so long.

I know what will happen eventually. The yotes will suddenly show up, eat the bait in one night, and make me 😜 But why such a long wait. No pressure from others snaring or hunting, no skidooing, I do not pee on the bait 😀, I just drive past it. I check snares from a good distance. I used skunkfire to add intrigue. I have been doing this long enough, that for me, this is strange. I have had baits go cold, but not for so long.

So where are the yotes?

Your guess is a good as mine.I would quit that one for a while.Or if you can move it a quarter mile or so and see if they hit the bait in a different location.Sometimes it don't take much location wise to change their behaviour.

Out here in my area we have very few skunks and on the advice of others I tried baiting with a skunk I caught a couple of different times and my bait stations went dead like you experienced. So maybe your skunkfire lure is the problem????

My thought is on a bait station why would a person need to use lure?.? You have the scent of the scraps and carcass there. I am sure that can be smelled for miles. Is there a chance that they might have killed something themselves a ways away and they are spending time on that before they return?

The whole bait station thing is a puzzle for sure, I have a few select pastures and shelter belts where they hit the bait year after year as I’m sure all of you do. It has always been my belief that the more isolated the area the better luck you will have. Not true, the past 3 seasons I’ve been baiting road ditches on sign and this is a quick efficient way to pick up some quick ones. Problem is our road ditches fill up with snow often early and are useless because of mother nature, now I’m wasting carcasses. With Beavs advice which I have modified this year I started using a long call lure with small amounts of bait. I don’t pre bait these new locations because in most cases they will come and check it out ONE time. I set my snares when I bait get my 1-2. Coyotes and move on. I will stop and check these used locations once in a while and if they are still coming I will use a lot of bait and set up heavy for them. Of course my method does not always work but with time i learn which spots will produce year after year . Cattails, samethng. Obvious trails in and out, move on. This works well for filling in the gap‘s between your main bait stations on your line that we are driving by anyway. Not an answer to the question, but I do not think we will ever learn why they go dead or why coyotes just stop coming.

Could bright moonlight on snow be a factor?

Been cloudy most of the time so not much moon influence. I use skunkfire, because my belief is frozen bait does not throw much odor. And the time the bait was hit, was the night after I put skunkfire out.

I placed a new bait about a mile away to see what happens. Beef guts and trim and hides and heads. Ravens are all over that one within hours. What gets me is that the bait that went dead, has no raven activity. That is really what makes me marvel. They were attacking it ruthlessly originally. So it went dead. Not just coyotes. Everything quit coming to it. That is what i find so strange.

Yesterday I went and flipped the deer up out of the snow and added more guts. Maybe even that will trigger something?

Good thread - I have been observing similar with my wolf bait stations. I think Boco is on to something with moving the bait just far enough to break the routine. I've noticed the wolves change their patterns significantly after a catch and won't cross my tracks in snow once I get a trail established to dump bait or tend traps. Makes it hard in the snow so I rotate trap locations at the bait site over the course of the season since my bait site access is limited. I try to get in just before a snow so my tracks are covered.

Let us know how your new bait goes.

Try a howler at the site and just move on.... get them asking...Who's at my pile now !

If the birds are not hitting it that is a problem. I try to dump at least a carcass/ big chunk of bait, once a week on the ones I run. The area I trap there are alot of winter moose hunts and my observation has been that within the first three days of a kill there is a explosion of activity by both birds and k9's, then things go quite and you might see a random track go through the area. IMO bird activity = catches.

We have the same problem at a couple baits Saskayote , but I blame it on the warm weather and lack of snow . My baits never get cleaned out , not now or in the past but dogs seem to investigate at least . We've still been catching a few on the perimeter but not like last year .. Could some one have tampered with your bait site { I know nothing shuts down a bear bait like a little diesel fuel } or been calling near enough to it to scare the dogs off ? All I can suggest is to keep adding some fresh stuff and see what happens .

Man i sure appreciate the input. Some things I thought of, some not. The bait can not have been tampered with. The approach to it is through a narrow gate on my own land, and in the middle of nowhere with no other access. I guess I am leaning towards weather, it has been somewhat milder with less snow than typical so far. Until this morning. Minus 33!

Maybe a moose death in the vicinity? I just do not understand why the ravens are not there. That is just so odd. The bait a mile away is covered in ravens and magpies. This bait was covered in ravens and magpies initially.

Having the same trouble here. 7 baits out,4 of them dead as can be. I did have one good week that I picked up 15, then went dead again. I put on around 50 miles yesterday glassing proven coyote country , never seen one, only seen 2 tracks. I think we are short of coyotes here.

3 days of cold weather will make them return to their know Mcdonalds country hang-out is.

how much k-9 distemper did your region have last summer? no young ones around

I got a few pups but not the % I normally get. Didn’t notice any distemper but doesn’t mean it didn’t go through here.

The people that see distemper are the hay cutters in June- July were there are just dried bodies in the hay swaths.

Look at the harvest last year in Saskatchewan was it not 6 times the amount than when they had the 25$ foot bounty ? What is left ?