Coon Hunting Thread

I know we got some people on here that hunt coons. I recently got a new redbone pup and so am excited for the fall to get her in the woods learning to do her thing. So just wondering if anyone wanted to chat about coon hunting, or really any hunting with hounds. Got pics of your dogs? Y'all just hunt for pleasure/fur or any of you into comp hunting? Anyone got any favorite tales of an interesting hunt? Here's my puppy. She's a little bigger now though, this was several weeks ago.

Nice! Always liked redbones, but I hunted blueticks. Good luck with her

My Dad had Walkers every cornstalk was a urine post

i think you already heard all my best coon huntin stories

Hunted coon with hounds my entire life. My dad traded and sold dogs his entire life it was not uncommon to have 20-30 hounds in the yard at any given time. We also hunted hogs with dogs for almost 20 years and had squirrel dogs as well. After losing my dad I quit hunting for a while but I do have a pair of 1 Year old registered blueticks that I hope to put in the woods this fall. I just can't leave behind the experience of standing in the dark listening to the hounds run.

I had a redbone born on Valentine’s Day called her Val. We road hunted her a lot and she also rigged out of the truck. Raised her with a fast bluetick gip named Sue, was a deadly pair on coons. Those two dogs would do everything together except stay together when I lost them. I would leave my jacket by the road the last place I saw them. Ole Val would be lying on my jacket the next morning and Sue would be miles down the road trying to trail my truck back home. Lots of memories.

You name her yet?

Been hunting walkers for a while. Never competition hunt. Just keeping myself in shape chasing up and down hills.

That's it. I was houndless for 15 or so years. I hope to never be again. There's just something about that bawl ringing across the hollows on a crisp fall/winter night.



The dog in my profile pic was my last hound. She left the house one night to go hunting and never came home. I'd never worried too much about them getting stolen/killed/shot until that happened.



Well, Pete tried to name her Heathen, but I just can't seem to call her that even though she is one, lol. It just doesn't roll off my tongue right. So he calls her that, and I call her Dixie.

Ang, do ya still have that cur dog? Hunting squirrels too?

That's Pete's dog, and yes...she's heck on squirrels and will tree coon too.

Nice!! Are you gonna run your pup with the cur any? That's a good looking cur and pup!

The pup is gonna run loose until she trees her first coon, so I reckon they will run together. As far as the long run I dunno. The cur will run deer. My hound's not gonna. I guess it depends on the pup. If she can see a deer and turn away despite the other dog running it like my last hound did then fine. If the cur running deer makes it so I can't break the pup off it, they'll need to be separated.

When Val and Sue were just big ole pups and I was training them they were running a hot track across a fresh clear cut and bayed the “coon” in a clay root that had been uprooted by the logging. I was bound and determined to help them get that coon. After about 30 minutes of digging out came a skunk. We had skunk dogs for awhile after that. All the encouraging and digging I was doing made them think I really wanted them to chase skunks. It amazed me how long and fast a skunk would run. Many skunk races were better than a lot of coon races. It took awhile but I finally broke them from running skunks.

krautcreek.tripod.com
I've got blueticks. Websites is outdated but gives you an Idea.

I don't have any dogs right now but I had a walker hound I bought at 8 months until she passed. My dad and I went coon hunting with a couple of buddies several times in 02 03. Didn't know it at the time of course but dad died in 04. So I bought the pup in the Fall of 05 probably. Maybe 06. Just kinda seemed like a way to keep some memories. She made it till a few years ago. She's buried at the edge of a woods in the middle of no where under the first tree she treed a coon for me in. I just built a barn. I'll get a hound again sometime soon probably. My big idea is to have a kennel setup and have a good coon dog, rabbit dog, squirrel dog, and coyote dog. Four dogs would be enough to keep a guy busy especially if you pupped litters out of them.

The first story that pops into my head was when dad was with us still and we went with my buddies. The dogs struck in the back of the woods way back in there so we walked in and finally found them. They were on the bank of creek barking into ground hog holes so it was kinda hard to figure where they were. GPS trackers weren't out yet just the beep beeps and you kept that thing in the truck for when they were lost. lol. Anyway were standing on the bank looking across the creek to the other side and was a big hill over there. We don't have prairie dogs in Ohio but that would be the best description of what I'm trying to describe as to the holes in this bank hill on the side of the creek. Anyway what made it memorable was standing on the incline trying to catch the dogs that didn't want nothing to do with being caught and dang if the coon didn't come out of the hole and dart into another one. That happened over and over. It was a real show half falling down the hill, the dogs tangling the leads around our legs, falling into the shallow water, and trying to shoot a coon darting in and out of holes with a .22 rifle in the dark. It was a real shinola show and we got to laughing and laughing. It was like the pop goes the wezzle game where the heads pop up through the holes and you try to bonk it with a hammer. hahaha. I don't remember if we got that coon or not or if there was more than one or what but me and my dad laughed until our sides and cheeks hurt watching it all play out.

I've coon hunted my whole life. My Dad got me started and then I started competition hunting with some of his younger friends. Hit the competition hunts hard for about 20yrs. Had a lot of fun and made some great friends. Really liked the River Bend Flag line of Treeing Walkers. Still have an old female that is almost 12. Need to find a replacement soon. Absolutely love to hear a hound trail and tree. The older I get the more I love to hear a great track dog. Happy hunting ! Good luck with your pup !

Nice Dog box!!!

Im just getting back into hounds, with Ruby- Ann here.

Mostly for the Grandkids to learn.

Ive owned B&Tans, walker dogs, redtick, plott and Redbone

I used to love running hounds, walkers and blueticks but my knees are bad now and I can't get after it like I used to

Getting hard to run hounds here. The antler hunters get real bad upset if your dog gets on their leased property. Here in KS they have to let you get your dog if you contact the landowner but you can get a trespass ticket. Few years back a guy not far from here shot some coyote hounds. He said they were bothering his cattle and so it was decided he was within his rights.
I have plenty of permissions but a dog can be in the next section so fast nonhunters can not believe it. A dog hits a track he is going where ever the quarry goes if he is worth hunting. So now I don't own a dog. I do not like confrontation. Antler hunters who lease ground, and landowners, do have the right to say no. Can't have it any other way. It is a real shame that antler hunters get so fearful that somebody else will shoot a big deer however. I don ' t h ave a clue why they think a broke off deer hound will run "their" deer onto another property. Deer ignore hounds that are not chasing them.

I have dogs now and have had for 40 plus years .dogs now days are more for competition my experience is if you let them run loose they learn to hunt . but they hunt everything so be prepared to do a lot of correcting but you know that.

We have the same trouble here Danny. So much leased land for deer hunting its hard to run a hound. I have a couple of places that I have permission on that are big enough to run my hounds on but gone are the days when you could dump your dogs and not have to worry about which way they go or where you are going to have to go to get them back. Oklahoma used to have a law that if your dogs passed onto a place you didn't have permission on you had the legal rights to go retrieve them without having to inform the landowner. But the antler hunters got that changed. Now if your dogs tree on land you don't have permission on you have to contact the landowner and ask him if you can retrieve them. If he says "no" then you have to call the game warden and have them come help you retrieve your dog's. Not the kinda phone calls a guy wants to make in the middle of the night.

That's one reason I quit after 20 years, the other being health issues. Folks calling the law on you, getting shot at, trying to sneak into barns without any lights on lol. My Dad tells me stories about the 50's, said you could walk past houses in the middle of the night, owners would come out and offer you something to drink and ask if you got any coons. Times sure have changed

Have coon hunted with hounds since '70 and had my own hounds since '74. Still have 7 and 1 terrier. Never been w/o one.... Even in college...Will say something here that experienced hound men will already know but the fellows with less experience may not.... " If you DON'T allow a good hound (or dog) to teach you about its quarry, you will NEVER be as good of a furharvester (trapper, caller etc.) as you could be. A dog (even a junk runner) will show you where critters cross fields and roads, where they are feeding (and on what), where they seek shelter and a host of other traits that you won't find by merely following tracks. You have to be open and watchful---------eyes, ears, and now GPS of your dog's hunting and translate that into the animal behavior he/she is seeking and trailing. Silent or semi-silent dogs aren't as good of teachers (at night) as an open trailer and the emphasis seems to be in the kill and not the chase so you miss a lot of that exposure they are giving. Whether its a red bone down in the river bottom, a lab snooting pheasants in the cattails, a pointer locked solid on a covey, or a terrier working a brush pile,,,,,,, take the time to see and hear what they are saying about their pursuit....................... my take after 46 years of being "dog poor"........................................... the mike.

Anyone ever hunt coons with a German Wirehair Pointer / Deutsch-Drahthaar? I'd love to get mine to do it. How'd you train them to be persistent on the track? My dog would love to get hold of a coon but he tracks to fast and if he runs off a track he just keeps going to see what else he can find. How do I get him to want to stick with a track and and bay at the tree?

Never had my own hounds, but spent a lot of time when I was younger running them with my uncles in the Wisconsin river valley. We had access to a lot of land, through friends and family. One of my uncles even had a couple mules to ride in the bluff country.

I used to have a yellow lab that hated coon, had on one coon hunt with other dogs and he caught on. He trailed silent, but would bark treed, he had a different bark about coon, I could tell when he had a coon treed, just by his bark . He more than payed for his dog chow LOL
Dennis

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I've hunted hounds most of my life.. Hide hunt, competition hunt and pleasure hunt.. Probably 150, 200 nights a year... Good luck with your hound and enjoy!!
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Will "tree" bark every bluegill that comes by so far. Still working on this squirrel thing but he's still a baby.

Great looking dogs everybody. Love those walkers Larry. One day if I ever get rich enough I'm going to own another house of lipper bred walker dog. They were the best hounds I ever hunted behind and I have hunted behind all shapes, colors and sizes. When I was in school and my dad was trading dogs really heavy we hunted every night. Dad would bring home 4 or 5 new dogs every weekend and we would hunt them all week. The ones that showed promise stayed and the ones who didn't went down the road the following weekend. When you hunt that many different dogs you become no stranger to skunks, possums, deer, hogs, coyotes and armadillos among other things like dogs that tree squirrels at night and dogs that bay beavers. It was somewhat of a blessing in the later years when we just settled down with a couple of good walkers to pleasure hunt and got away from the trade dogs. I'm pretty excited about how my blueticks are coming along and can't wait to get them in the woods.

Davisfur,

Oddly enough that hound of mine is a grandson to Lipper. Lol has his mouth and athleticism.. the female he’s out of is a semen dog directly off him.

Ohio Boy, that is a funny story, lol... I could just picture it.

Wife aka the mike, that's really good advice. Seems like hunting with dogs could make you an altogether better sportsman and trapper if you pay attention.

LOL Danimal, bluegill dog supreme, lmao

Danny and Davisfur, I'm fortunate in that respect. There's tons of woods around the house here, and no one would really care if you get your dog off it, most of the landowners don't even live around here. In addition to that, I have thousands of acres of national forest land to hunt on. It's all full of creeks and small lakes, too. Only worry with the public land is otter trappers, but I guess that's just a chance you have to take. Coon season opens before trapping season does so there's times to hunt those lakes and creeks before people start trapping them. Once season opens I'll stick to the oak woods not near the lakes.

Love all the pics!

Hunting animals with other animals is just wrong and sick not only for the animals you hunt but those poor dogs that you hunt with, you sir and all like you should be ashamed. I can't think of a more repulsive thing you could do than hunt animal with another animal I'm just so disgusted with this behavior and oops wait a minute I'm not a liberal carry on gentlemen.

Seriously I have never owned a dog for hunting but some of my friends had some really good bird dogs that I had a chance to hunt with and they were quite impressive, had a great time when I went with them. I got most of my pheasants with one in particular and I always bought a bag of treats for that dog when I went , never once came back empty handed, I think it was an English pointer but I could be wrong. Don't know much about hunting dogs but I know when they are doing good.

Boy yotetrapper it would be nice to have that kind of access unfortunately most of the land around here is divided into sections and quarters and 80's and its not uncommon to have 2-3 different owners on one mile section of land. Coincidentally my bluetick came to western Oklahoma all the way from your home state!


Larry Hall I was almost certain from your pictures that your dog had lipper blood in his veins. It seems to me that that bloodline just has its own look that can't hardly be faked or duplicated. Our first lipper dog was a male dog that had been trained on hogs. After hunting him for several years we ended up acquiring his mother and his half brother who had been started on coon. That dog turned out to be the straightest most enjoyable dog I've ever had the honor of hunting behind. He was tight mouthed on track which made for short races and would blow the top out of a tree when he treed. Hunted him for 8 years before he started having seizures in the woods and never saw him treeing under anything that wasn't a coon.

Blue ticks here as well but been about 20 years since I last coon hunted.Sure miss it.

Was house’s clint the sire of house’s Lipper ? Back when I hunted years ago I hunted with a guy that had a littermate to Clint . I ended up buying a pup that was Lipper’s bloodline that was one of the best dogs I’ve ever owned by the time she was 9 months olds she was treeing by herself and holding split trees and not moving till you got there . But something happened to her when she was about 1 1/2 years old she went bat sh$& crazy you couldn’t catch her at all , if someone was with me she would leave the tree and a lot of the times she would leave when she seen the light coming never understood it I never laid a hand on her . My oldest son has a walker female now that has the Lipper bloodline in her , and I can see some of the same actions in her . The blue dog ( Blue 5year old ) his sire is a half brother to one of the Tennessee volunteers mascot And the bottom dog is my son walker 4 year old female(Susie )

I belong to a club in Eastern NC. We lease land to hunt deer. Hunting deer with dogs is legal but becoming rarer every year. Hounds used to always ruin our Saturday hunts, but we co-existed. Some hound guys were arrogant SOBs and others were very nice.

Used to coon hunt as a teen. Haven’t done it in over 50 years.

Off topic: had a blue heeler for 14 years that would track a wounded deer. What a pleasure she gave me when she found someone’s trophy.

I've watched hounds run right by deer and the deer just watched them go by. Buddy and I cut the dogs one night, standing by the truck getting our lights and Garmins on. Heard something behind us, a huge buck walked across the road 40 yards from the truck and walked calmly straight towards the dogs which had opened and were blowing down the ditch. I've been around dogs that would run deer, but just being in the same timber, in my opinion, doesn't bother the deer too much

I'll second that headache. Unless the dogs are actively running deer the deer really never pay them much attention. But you can't convince the big money antler hunters from the city of that fact.

That's the truth, I guess I understand where they're coming from, but they should go along a few times and see what actually happens in the timber. I believe it would change their minds

I would agree with you on that as well

A lot of people around here won’t let you coon hunt once deer season opens and it goes the same way with trapping but once deer season is over they don’t care .

i am a walker man though and though
dang legs and fake body parts wont let me night hunt anymore and i sure do miss it.
great looking pup ya got ang.

Tommie, Lipper was out of Clint per the pedigree.. Big deer antlers have just about ruined coon, fox, coyote and small game hunting here in the Midwest.. Hardly anyplace a young man or Kid can walk out the back door anymore and cut a dog loose or even jump shoot rabbits.. 14 cell phone activated trail cams would go off in the first mile and it'd look like a swat team rolling in.. Truly, we as hunters are killing our own sport.. My opinion anyways.. I have a number of farms I can still hunt Dec-Sept 1 and then I'm done during the hide season.. Primarily hunt state ground after that. Thank God we have a good amount..

Angela, you may live in one of the best kept secrets in the hunting world.. MS is a sports person's paradise.. I lived in Columbus a few years and really couldn't believe how few people and how much open ground..I've still got a number of dear friends there and travel back several times a year. Our son stayed on in Columbus, but just transferred to Corpus Christi TX so our visits will get less and less I fear. Great memories!!

I hunt treeing walkers. I’ve had them all at one time or another, but to me the walkers always start faster and there’s less trouble with trash. This was my dog Sam. He was out of My Only Reezen. I’ve always heard people talk about that once in a lifetime dog, and he was truly mine. I had taken him out of the pen about two months ago and put him on a chain under an oak tree so he could lay in the shade. Somehow he got loose and went in the road and got hit by a car in front of my house. He was a supper smart hound and a coon dog to the core. I’m going to miss him for a long time.

Yes it is. There is a lot of land taken up by deer leases just like anywhere else, but all the nearby public land kind of makes up for that. They also have really great hunting and trapping laws....or rather lack of laws, lol. The hunting and trapping laws is why we chose MS over the neighboring states such as AL, TN, and AR.


Sorry about your dog, CajunMan. The redbone in my profile pic is tied for my favorite dog along with my childhood best friend. 2 years ago at Christmastime she left the house to go hunting and never came back. I'd never owned a tracking collar in my life up until that point, but I have one now.

Buddy I hunted a lot without a tracking system years ago, just like everyone else, but I wouldn’t turn one loose now without one for sure. Best of luck with your Redbone. I’ve hunted with some good ones of those too!

Coon hunting is a ton of fun. Have owned some good hounds over the years, and some not so good.

Good and bad come in all breeds. I think it really depends on what you are looking for, and honestly what color you like. Research the bloodlines of your breed of choice; traits, styles and size can vary within a breed. All depends on how they have been bred.

You pack unskinned coons back to the truck?

Those fly tags work great.

I've hunted most all of the breeds out there but my favorite are walkers.we were running young dogs one night in a standing cornfield. the dogs had opened and were moving the track towards us.we had a older gentlemen with us and he was leaning against a walnut tree. I told him you better move because that coon is headed for this tree. he just laughed and stayed where he was, few minutes later here came the coon went right over the top of his shoes and up the tree. another time we were moving to another hunting spot driving down the road and 2 coon ran across in front of us. we pulled over and were going to let the dogs out when I noticed the coon ran up a electrical pole. the bottom one kept pushing the top one up until they touched the wires and got electrocuted. we laughed and said we didn't waste any bullets on those 2. the old boy is 80 years old now and when I talk to him and we get to talking about coonhunting those 2 stories always get rehashed over and we still have a good laugh. his son and I still hunt together. ive always liked a silent dog on track with a good nose. got a 4 year old walker male out of hardwood breeding that's silent ,deadly accurate and really nice tree dog.