I'm not convinced that a loud vehicle won't hurt your success. Actually, I believe just the opposite.
It's one of those things that of course nobody can really know for sure, and I certainly can't prove. And I also think like just about everything else to do with coyotes, that it is different from one place to another, from one time to another, even from one coyote to another.
But... My own experience, has me believing that for a lot of the places I hunt, and the way I like to hunt them, a loud truck is definitely going to hurt your chances.
My calling partner used to drive an older Powerstroke at work. It was a loud SOB of a rough riding stinky pickup. But his boss at the time really likes our videos, and is into all kinds of hunting, and he would not only let us take that Powerstroke hunting any time we wanted, but he would let us use the company fuel card to boot (he was spending about $300,000 a month on fuel and just didn't care if we added a couple bucks to it). A company truck and free gas to go hunting, wooo-hooo! Well, to shorten up the story, our success went way down while using that truck. We eventually became so convinced that the loud SOB was hurting our success, that we chose to use our own trucks and pay for our own gas to go coyote hunting. Our success went way up again when we quit using it.
Like I said, I'm sure it's different in other places. But I think that in our situation, the only thing the coyotes are used to about vehicles driving by, is getting shot at from them. I think they tend to associate vehicles with danger (and very rightly so - the ones that don't, aren't going to live long...). And we like to call close to the truck. Usually don't walk more than a couple hundred yards. So I think it only makes sense that if the truck is so loud that every coyote within calling distance heard it pull up, and then we start calling a couple minutes later from only a couple hundred yards away, that some coyotes are not going to come to the call because of the truck they just heard.
Who knows, maybe we were and still are just wrong about it. But, both my partner and I are absolutely convinced that a loud truck is bad news for our style of hunting in the places we mostly go.
Oh, but the newer diesels are NOT too loud! My '04.5 CTD is quieter than a lot of gas motors I've owned, and it has been a great calling rig (when it ain't stuck...). I'm shopping for a new one right now, and both the new Powerstroke and new CTD are even quieter than my '04.5 is. I'm still undecided which one to go with. Duramax is super nice and quiet too, but I'm way too hard on pickups to go with an IFS rig.
- DAA