Coyotes use the night as protective cover for their forays. Most coyote hunters already know how effective calling can be during the low-light hours of dawn and dusk, but relatively few of us hunt during the dead of night, for one obvious reason: It’s hard to see. Even riflescopes with huge, light-gathering objectives are useless an hour past sunset on a moonless night.
That’s why you need an external light if you are serious about hunting predators at night. There’s no shortage of tactical lights and lasers that do a decent job of “painting” your aiming point, but if you want to illuminate a scene, you need more candlepower. You need a scope-mounted light like the rechargeable red LED CoyoteLight ($429; coyotelight.com), which is dimmable and has a Picatinny rail that can mount to a scope, the upper of an AR, or even a separate monopod or tripod.
I hunted predators most of last winter with a CoyoteLight, and while I had difficulty resolving targets beyond 300 yards, it fully illuminated coyotes out past 200 yards. And because I mounted the light to my scope with a set of customized rings, I was able to make the shot the moment I identified the target.