All the comments are appreciated. Yes, I don't know how I had the luck to fall in with this family... I came to the US on a work permit so I didn't know anyone and it can be really hard making connections outside of the work realm. After I finally got my green card and cleared the FBI hurdles, I set about trying to get started with predator hunting. I put an advertisement on the local Craigslist, which I ran for 3 months, starting mid summer. I had a lot of scam responses and a few people wanting close to $1000 per season for the "privilege" of shooting coyotes on their property. A few more dead end leads with women landowners who had the coyotes eating all of the pet animals. But they seemed to have a bigger distrust of men than the coyotes, I remember one in particular who stood me up on 3 different appointments. So I got pretty frustrated and let the advertisement expire. Then more than month later while on vacation in the Michigan upper peninsula (southern shore of Lake Superior) I got a voice message on my phone from the current farmer. We scheduled a meeting that I had to re-schedule to the next day and on the day we were originally going to meet, a pack of coyotes kills a sheep right next to his barn. Last year, he lost the majority of his lambs to coyotes and close to 20% of his adult sheep.
This year, I have helped him with some basic infrastructure projects to help them be able to get around properly on the land and make it accessible. We installed culverts to take the runoff from the barn roof and direct it under the driveway to get rid of that permanently flooded area. Put in a 20' culvert at the creek and built up the dirt about 4' high so that crossing the creek was easy and dry, and not a kamikaze scramble through mud, ice and foot deep ruts. The relations who had been living on the farm previously became old and inactive and allowed many areas of the farm to become wild to the point that it was near impossible to get through. Shortly after moving onto the farm, the old farmhouse caught fire and they lost nearly everything. The farmhouse was not insured, so the couple lived in a camping trailer and build a log cabin from wood harvested on the farm and cut in their own sawmill. Half way through that project the wife unexpectedly became pregnant with twins. Both parents were working low wage jobs, while doing all of this and trying to keep the farm going. Since I just started with my predator activities in September, I stayed away during deer firearm season, since family had first rights and rifles are forbidden anyway. However, by December, when I questioned if they had managed to score any meat during deer season, the answer was no. Apparently, between all the family members who had hunted, 1 person got 1 doe all season. So I decided I would give it a try for a few does during late muzzleloader season. The day after I set up my blind, I had 2 does down before lunchtime. So even though I had yet to shoot a coyote, evidence was starting to build that I could actually shoot.
My plans involve moving to Colorado, those plans have been in a holding pattern with my wife doing her nurse practitioner program. But I understand that her employment options will be much better once she is qualified. In the meantime, I have got first hand experience of many of the aspects that I will face when breaking ground on a new home. The last 2 weekends we put in a new septic drain field. I have had some reliability issues with my Bobcat loader backhoe, in real situations (broken down next to a swamp and needing to field strip some parts to go and get them repaired). So this has been a great learning experience at a cost much less than college tuition. I wish more people could experience it before they dive into the deep end and move out into the country on a whim...
) It looks like your best bet is a 160 yard zero which will keep you in an eight inch kill zone out to about 210 yards which is also about where you will run out of energy sufficent to presume a quick kill.