Mouth blown calls come in two flavors; open reed and closed reed. Open reed calls can make a variety of sounds based on the amount of pressure that you exert on the reed with your lips and teeth, allowing you to vary the tone, pitch, and volume of the sound. With a single call you can squeak, bleat, grunt, howl, purr, bark, yelp, and chatter, and the first time that the damned thing buzzes your lips and tongue you might do all of those things at once, and without the call.

Closed reed calls are simpler; you blow into them and vary the volume by opening and closing your hand. I called my first coyote with an old Circe Jackrabbit, and I'm sure that if I went out again with it today I'd call a coyote, with a little luck.

The important thing to remember is this: If you get out in the brush and make a noise with a call, coyotes will come to see what the hell all of the commotion is about. It's fairly common for callers to listen to each other and think,

"What the HELL kind of a noise is he making?"

and coyotes respond to all of them.

1) They're cheap. You can buy a varmint call for $5.00-$10.00 bucks almost anywhere, and they'll call coyotes. Of course, if you elect to go with a mouth call, you will not save any money for the simple reason that every time you see one that you don't have you'll spend another $5.00 or $10.00 to get it. Mouth calls also go belly-up on a regular basis with blown reeds, trauma from being closed in truck doors and chewed on by calling dogs, and general planned obsolescence. Not only that, but they have a way of sneaking out of your pocket and landing on the ground, under the truck seat, at the bottom of a 75 foot cliff, etc. Some people will tell you that lanyards will solve this problem, but they are blind optimists.

2) The only thing that they need to work is you to blow into them. No chargers, no head cleaners, no batteries for the remote, no wires, no speakers, no tapes entwined throughout the guts of the call. They're light, too, which is a consideration when you are trying to carry a rifle, a stool, a portable blind, and two dead coyotes back to the truck.

3) You can fancy yourself an artist with a mouth call. In your fantasies, the centerfold is replaced by Charlie Parker, who gazes in rapt adoration as you begin with a dying rabbit series, punctuate that with a few yips and hunting howls, slide to a Ki-Yi as an excited adult turns on a pup, and finish with the "1812 Overture", during which you can fire your rifle into the air so that it sounds EXACTLY like the recording. Of course, none of this will necessarily help you to kill a coyote, but what the hell; it'll impress anyone listening.

1) Mouth calls require you to blow into them in order for them to work. This can become a problem, especially if you subscribe to the "constant calling" theory advanced by people like the Burnham Bros. (who have killed a few coyotes themselves). I've seen callers turn alarming shades of red after a few minutes of non-stop calling, and it's difficult to train a rifle on a bounding coyote when your heart rate is 170. On the plus side, if it doesn't bring on a heart attack, it's good aerobic exercise.

2) Mouth calls work while stuck squarely in the middle of your puss, and coyotes home in on that distress sound like furry guided missles. This can create a problem if you don't see the coyote in time to lift and sight your rifle. There are few sights funnier than a coyote standing nose to nose with a caller whose rifle is in his lap and whose agony is apparent to anyone watching, unless it is watching that same caller swear, whine, and cry after he tries his best quick-draw imitation and finds out that coyotes are LOTS faster then he is.