This week on Kentucky Afield.

It's a first for the show as we're taking advantage of a new opportunity.

And nighttime coyote hunting.

Next, if you're a bow hunter that enjoys projects, then you might love building a self-bow.

Then, we're headed down to the river to see if anything is willing to bite.

It's all next on Kentucky Afield.

Hello and welcome to Kentucky Afield.

I'm your host, Chad Miles.

Join us as we journey the commonwealth in search of outdoor adventure.

No matter where you live in the state of Kentucky, chances are you have coyotes very close by.

And a good way to help control the population is by hunting them at night.

Well I'm super excited to be out here tonight.

I'm gonna try my luck with a little bit of nighttime coyote hunting.

There's so much dedicated gear to being out here, and this is a perfect time of year to do it.

It's February.

It's cold out.

It█s right before the breeding season for coyotes.

And hopefully they're already out and about because coyotes are nighttime scavengers and hunters.

Now coyote hunting here in the state of Kentucky can be done day or night, year round.

But if you're going to use any type of means to illuminate a field or to help make any wildlife visible in a field like what I'm using tonight, which is an infrared scope or a thermal scope or any other type of light, it has to be done during a limited season.

Hopefully I can get out here and get set up, and use some coyote vocalizations, get a coyote interested, get them in range and hopefully get a shot.

Looky there.

Now, I don't know if a coyote is responsible for killing this deer, but it█s obvious that a coyote has drug this leg of this deer out here.

I'll tell you what I deer hunt this place quite a bit.

So, I have no love for the coyote.

All right.

Let's start out with a female invitation.

Chad right there.

There's one in the field at 1:00.

All right, here we go.

I don't know.

It came in to the right.

I tried to get on it.

I got down right where I thought it was at.

And when I finally saw the coyote I shot.

I don't know what happened.

It may have been a clean miss.

Oh, man.

Well I looked all over for that coyote and I guess it missed.

The good news is it's early.

And I got time for another set.

This is a spot that I like.

It's mainly because of the way the field is crowned where I can see all the way across the field.

So I█m going to get the call set up, tuck back in these woods, get set up on the bipod, give it a try.

All right.

We█re going to start out here with a couple of female howls.

Try to see if we got anything in the area.

All right, now I'm going to move to the yipping coyotes.

Oh, that was a bark, that was a coyote bark and it sounded like it's...

There it is again.

I should be able to see this coyote.

There he is.

I got him.

I got him.

I got him.

He's barking.

The coyote is moving to the left but I think I█ll still get a shot.

Oh, man, I don't see the coyote.

That's a that's a little further than I was wanting to shoot tonight, but it barked soon as I made a call.

I wasn't expecting it to be so fast.

I hope I got a coyote down.

Lets go take a look.

There he is right there.

Sure enough.

Oh, my gosh.

Well, I can tell you, this is not how I expected this to go down.

You know, you might see a coyote one every three or four times you set up.

This time I came out and put the call out, put a female howl out there and literally waited a minute.

And before I even got to put my next call out, I heard a bark.

This coyote was right on me.

It was literally 200 yards away.

And when that happened, I got an opportunity to see that thing actually barking on camera.

I see it carrying on.

It gave me enough time to get down, try to get a really good shot.

Thank God I was on my bipod and my shooting sticks.

I got down, I was on a knee and was able to put this coyote down.

And I'll be honest with you, until I walked through this field and saw this coyote, I wasn't sure I'd hit it.

My first nighttime coyote with the new rifle season here in Kentucky now it█s been in for a couple of years.

What a cool experience.

One more coyote off this piece of property.

Hopefully this is good for my deer, my turkey, my rabbits and everything else.

I'm going to get my gear and this coyote and get it picked up and get it out of the field.

And I'm going to be looking at my calendar and trying to look and see when I can get back out here and do this again.

I'm here today with Mike Hardin, who's the assistant director of the Fisheries Division.

Mike, I know you love to fish.

I love it, you know it.

We've been together.

I love it.

There is a new app that if anybody it's got a smartphone, has access to it and it's free.

And it's called Fish Boat KY.

Right, Chad in partnership with the Kentucky Fish Wildlife Foundation, who sponsored this app.

We helped put together this Fish Boat KY app to really help anglers.

What it does, it pulls the information that we already have on our website or from our fishing guide, but it puts some hot links on the front page, mostly on where to fish.

So all the data and information it's collected on a yearly basis by our biologists by be it fishing forecast, places to fish, structures being put in the water.

This is just a way to very quickly put it right at your fingertips.

It's at your fingertips now.

It has a list of all the lakes and all the species in each lake, and it rates them based on, as you said, the information that our biologists got the previous year.

One of the hot links is just the fishing map, and it'll have icons of all the fishing access sites on the state of Kentucky.

And you can just click it and it'll pull up information on that lake or that waterbody or that access site.

And also the FINS map is on there.

The FINS, the Fishing in the Neighborhoods program, same thing.

You can click on that and they'll tell you more about that lake.

That's another thing to talk about.

It has all the stocking information on it.

Length and size limits is all available at your fingertips.

Absolutely.

So if you're out and you are on a body of water and you're fishing for bass and all of a sudden, bam, I just caught a walleye very quickly, bam, you can figure out, okay, well, I'm on this body water.

What are the rules and regulations that pertain to walleye.

It will also save a picture your license.

Absolutely.

And that's one of the features I like best.

It gives you the option to download your license and so you can download it and it stores it on your phone offline.

And when you pull that up, of course, you see your license with the QR code.

And if for some reason you don't have your fishing license on you and you have it on your phone, you're in good shape.

And it's available on Apple and Android.

All your fishing forecast, all of your information that you could potentially need to know on where to fish on that body of water.

There here.

This information can tell you where to fish and hopefully help you be more successful.

It's just another tool to try to help the fishermen out there.

Yeah, well, I appreciate it.

Hey.

Thanks Chad.

Let's go check out and find us a place to fish.

Let█s do it.

As a lifelong archer, I've been considering building a self bow for a long time, but the first step is finding the right piece of timber.

We're out here on a beautiful February day in Woodford County.

I'm here with Joe Lacefield.

Joe, several years ago, you and I did a three part series on how to make a self bow.

That's right.

And we went through the whole entire process.

But you know what?

We kind of skipped an important step.

What was that?

Well, we didn't cut a tree and cut it into staves.

I had a tree that was already down, and I did split that tree, but we didn't actually pick one and cut it.

So that's the biggest part of doing it yourself.

The type of wood that we use that day for your bow was a what?

So the bow that I actually made for the show was a Kentucky coffee tree.

Tell me some other species of trees that make for really good self bows.

Eastern hophornbeam makes a great self bow.

Dogwood.

You know, both of those are white woods.

Hackberry is very underrated for bow because it grows straight.

It's very common in central Kentucky.

So it's a wood that█s available to almost anyone.

You told me your favorite is a tree that you find all over the state of Kentucky pretty frequently.

What is what?

Osage Orange.

Hedge Apple.

They were brought in to Kentucky as a living fence row.

Okay.

So if you wanted to find the perfect Osage tree, what would you be looking for?

You don't want to try to look for the perfect Osage to make a bow with out in a field.

Because when you get a tree out in the field, it just has branches everywhere.

You want a tree that's in the woods that's growing straight up, that has a pretty good crown.

Then you're going to have good growth rings because it's competing with the forest canopy for sunlight.

So that tree should be pretty void of limbs along the main trunk.

If it has a lot of limbs, you have knots you have to work around and all that, which makes a very complicated bow.

Interestingly enough, we're standing right here on the edge of this forest because you have been watching an Osage tree that as a self bow maker, you were like one of these days.

One of these days, that is a perfect tree to cut some staves out of.

And we're going to showcase what makes this tree really good.

And then we're going to go and actually cut some staves and get all the way up to the process to where we started our three part series several years ago.

That's right.

So, Bill, I know you've been making bows for quite a few years, haven't you?

Yes, I've been working on bows now for about nine or ten years.

Did you have a background in woodworking or what made you want to do this?

I've always enjoyed building things.

Even when I was a kid, I was always building one thing or another in my dad's shop and I started out with muzzle loading and started building some muzzle loaders.

That got a little expensive with all the hardware.

But I wanted something a little more challenging.

I always like to hunt.

So I got in the self bows.

When you build a self bow, do you build all of them to hunt or some of them look like pieces of art?

I mean, they literally have got that much time effort and energy.

And when you look at it, you're like wow, this thing's too pretty to take hunting.

Are they all built for the purpose of hunting?

I do make them to hunt with so you can beat them around.

You can make them as fancy as you want and take more time to do that.

But I do like making some that are pretty showy sometimes.

If you really want to get fancy with some of them, I've put snake skins on the backside of them just for maybe some decoration, but also can be used as camouflage on the back of it.

One that I've kind of developed and I've taught a couple of people how to do it is the feather back bow taking turkey feathers across their breast and over their shoulders and pulling those feathers and actually laying those feathers on the backside of the bow.

How many bows you think you've made?

Well, over 150.

Probably somewhere around that many.

Wow.

I spent quite a bit of time between, oh, 40 to maybe sometimes even 80 hours on a bow.

What would you give to be able to sit down and watch a Native American go through the process of building a bow?

Because I promise you, they had tricks that we don't know today.

Oh, right.

And they do it much differently.

You got to realize they built bows strictly to survive.

Yeah.

I build bows for a hobby and they built them to survive and probably had a lot more shortcuts.

It wasn't near as technical as we make it.

So it would be interesting.

This is actually a bigger Osage right here.

It is.

You can get some bows out of this.

You know, it has some branches, it has some knots, it has some wavy grain to it.

This is better than average as far as you look at a quality of an Osage.

This wood is really, really hard Then you get a knot involved in it and that's going to be much more difficult.

Right.

It's a really nice tree, but it's not the specimen that is.

Five or six years ago you marked this tree and you told me, hey, this tree right here has got a lot of characteristics that you really, really like in a tree.

It does.

It has a really straight grain, You know, it's not you're not seeing the grain pattern spiral around.

You know, it's called propeller twist when you have that.

This tree doesn't have knots.

There's a few places that there might have been a limb at one time, but for the most part, it is really, really nice.

It's about ten inches in diameter here at chest height.

You know, I think you can get with this one section at least four, if not five or six staves.

And then you're going to have a shorter section with what we call billets.

You can put two pieces together and make a bow.

Okay.

So we've got a couple of things to do.

We got to figure out where we're going to drop this tree.

What do you think?

Well, we're going to have to take it that way, but we're going to have to remove a couple of these other trees to keep it from hanging up off the ground.

Okay.

Now we can get it.

We need this how many inches?

About 70 or 80 inches.

Right?

Right.

At least six feet.

When you make a finished bow, it pretty much needs to be generally as long as you are a tall.

Ok. All right, So, Joe, now this is the log you've really been looking for.

Now that you've got it down, you can see the rings and everything else is going on inside.

Tell me what you like or what you don't like.

Well, it has really good ring ratios, meaning these thinner, bright yellow rings are thinner.

You want the thicker wood to be your bow material.

Mostly you see that you've got a dark ring and then a light ring well that light ring is a spongy material that when you're chasing the ring, you hit that and it's real spongy and quirky and pops right off.

And you know, you've got a pristine ring.

By scraping all of that light ring off.

The outside surface of your bow is really going to be this what you're seeing, this darker yellow.

The edge of the darker yellow.

You know, we have some wind check here on these dark marks.

So we're going to split based on those.

That'll be our first split.

And then I see another check here.

So basically what I'm anticipating us getting here is, you know, you kind of cut this like a pie.

And optimally, if my marker worked, you'd see six staves if it splits that way.

How are you going to split this?

So I█m going to take a wedge and get it started.

Then we're going to leapfrog wedges all the way down to the end until we get it in half.

There you go.

And then we're going to seal the ends so that they won't crack as water evaporates from the wood.

They're going to be stored in a location where they're going to be humidity controlled.

Right?

Right.

How can you tell, hey, it's time.

I mean, you can weigh it when you check it each month and it's no longer losing weight, then it's at equilibrium with what the relative humidity is wherever you're storing the staves.

Okay.

We got seven nice staves out of that tree.

That's pretty impressive for an Osage in one log, right?

It is.

You know, and it wasn't that big of a tree.

They were all really good straight staves.

It didn't have any spiral to it.

Late winter is the perfect time to hit the river and fish below the dams in search of sauger.

So I was sitting around the office today and had about 2 hours to kill and hey, it's nice outside springs here, the fish are starting to bite.

And I thought, you know what?

I'll go run and check on the river.

I love to stream and river fish, but in the springtime, what you turn into is a situation where the river or a stream might be perfect for 24 hours, 48 hour period.

And then all of a sudden you get the spring rains and it pushes the water up, stains it up, and might be blown out for a week or two.

There's nothing better than going and looking at the water, seeing the water color, checking out the flow and the height with your own eyes.

So that's what I'm going to do today.

It's a real quick trip.

Hopefully the river looks right, which is looking good so far.

We can pull a couple of sauger in because there's nothing better on the plate than a sauger.

Well, my first thought is that the water color looks great.

It's a little high, but when you get a lot of flow, you got to go up in your weight to keep your weight on the very, very, very, very bottom.

That's the one thing about sauger fishing or saugeye fishing that if you're fishing up in the water column, it's really hard to catch them.

You need to be on the bottom.

So I may have to go up in weight a little bit, keep this bait pegged to the bottom.

But otherwise this is possible today.

Let█s see what happens.

Well, I believe cast number one resulted in a hang up.

I'll tell you what when you get hung up like this instead of jerking and snapping and popping, if you just grab your line and give a constant, steady tug, most of the times you'll get that lure back.

This is 3/8 ounce head and it has a fairly light wire hook.

The reason I like that is because when you're fishing the river, you're going to get hung up constantly.

So when this hook opens up and allows me to get my lure back, I can just pinch it back down, and be right back in business without having to re-tie.

I'll tell you what, having rubber boots is something that I would highly recommend.

Being able to come out in the water and access a fish a lot easier when you can move out into the water.

Oh, here we go.

It just broke.

That's the thing about fishing down here.

There are so many fish in this stream that's got teeth, and so who knows what that could have been.

The heck is this?

It█s not fighting like a fish.

Oh, it's a stick.

We got something.

I don't know what it is, but we got something.

Looky there.

That is a sauger for sure.

Look at the barring on that fish.

Look how beautiful that fish is.

It's a 14 inch size limit.

We're going to check this.

See how close this is.

Because I'll tell you what, if this fish is over 14 inches, it doesn't get any better.

This is some of the best tasting fish you'll ever eat in your entire life.

Look how toothy they are.

If you get your line in there, they can take that line and they can cut it to it.

It's a pretty healthy fish.

We'll see how long this one is.

Look at that, little over 16 inches long.

Plenty good size to keep.

Perfect meal.

Very nice.

Now let's check in and see who else has been out having fun in this week's Ones that didn't get away.

Here we have Gage Hales Tabb with a whole handful of crappie that he caught at Lake Malone in Logan and Muhlenberg counties.

Nice job.

Check out this little fella.

Here we have River Wilson with his first squirrel he took while using a 410 shotgun.

Nice job.

Here we have Bob Terrell and a nice smallmouth bass that was caught in the Green River while Wade fishing with his trusty Zebco 33.

Nice job.

Here we have Eric Hudson with a nice, pretty blond coyote that was taken while night hunting with a thermal scope.

Matt Thomas and his nephew Corbin went out to Lake Cumberland and caught these giant black crappie.

Nice job.

Nate Geeze took this beautiful bull elk in Harlan County on a do it yourself public land hunt.

Congratulations.

Jared Owens took advantage of a nice day in March to hit Guist Creek Lake in search of crappie.

Nice job.

Caleb Richardson hit the woods in the late turkey season and he said birds were everywhere.

Here we have Jeff Wells, Roy Spencer and Jeff Bailey with three nice limits of crappie from Barron River Lake.

Here we have Conner Jones with a nice crappie that he caught at in Nelson County Farm Pond.

Here we have Eli with his first walleye, a 23 inch beauty.

Congratulations.

Bubba Cannon caught this nice largemouth bass from Logan County late February on a curly tailed grub.

Nice job.

Spring turkey season is right around the corner, and if you plan on taking a youth, you only have a couple of weeks left to get out and pattern that shotgun.

And remember, hunting and fishing on private property is a privilege.

Always ask permission and thank the landowner.

Until next week I'm your host, Chad Miles, and I hope to see you in the woods or on the water.