Do animals sometimes reject or ignore your calls?

[maestro]

Like are coyotes not always hungry when you do the prey call or are deer not always wanting to hear your mating calls? Seems like most animals ignore my calls. And how often to do them? Does calling too much spook stuff?

[Woodyplank]

There's no over calling in this game so blast away. Animals that are actively feeding or drinking at need zones are less prone to react to your calls, The best times I've found to use a caller are near rest zones or when animals are traveling from one need zone to another (like moving from a feeding zone to a drinking zone.) Predators are less likely to respond to a call than a deer or elk and they also tend to try and circle downwind of you before exposing themselves. A caller, of any kind, has only a 60% chance of working under ideal conditions. A callers range and duration can be found under it's description in the store. Hitting a caller two or three times in rapid succession is no more effective than hitting it once but feel free to blast away. The higher a degree of difficulty an animal has the less likely it will respond to a caller. Some species are more likely to respond to a caller than others. A blacktail deer doe is easier to call in than a whitetail, a roe deer is easier to call in than a fallow etc... Hope this helps.

[maestro]

I feel like my main problem is coyotes. The predator caller you start with doesn't seem to work at all on them. I'm trying to complete the mission: Harvest 2 coyotes in Cheelah at the Cheelah Lookout Point there's 2 coyote need spots here I sit between them right as they should be migrating and nothing not one now.

[Woodyplank]

Animals are distributed on our maps by home ranges. There could be several need zones of each type within a home range. With the exception of springbok all animals must drink at least once in every 24 hr game period so naturally, scouting along water sources is a good way to start looking for animal sign but....I've seen animals using a drinking zone located over 200 meters from an actual pond, river or stream. The devs love to throw little twists like that at us. Not all need zones get visited every day, some only 1 or 2 times a week. When we investigate a need weed or circle full of tracks we only get info about the time frame that particular weed or track circle was most recently used and by what species.
Several species can use the same need zone. I've had the same weed give daytime hrs one day and the next day I checked it again and got night time hrs. Yotes like rocks. Areas with lots of boulders with trees studded among them or along steep rocky slopes seem to attract them.
Yotes are easier to hunt now than they used to be. I've actually lured some low level yotes in within the Balmont region on the LL map using the hand caller but most of my Yotes have been targets of opportunity. I haven't hunted them since the last update but they've always required time and patience. If one is going to respond to a caller it'll do so within 15 game minutes so sitting in one spot for hrs on end is not the best way to hunt them. When I do a mission tied to a particular area and don't find zones or any active zones, I'll stomp through the areas adjacent to the designated mission area in hopes of spooking the desired species into the legal hunting area. Some hunters even use ATVs to do the same thing. Spooked animals will run until they feel safe (which the devs have told us in the past can be about 200 yards). The noise of an ATV can spook animals within 300 meters. Spooked animals these days generally don't return to the spot they got spooked out of for the remainder of the day/night. Fast traveling to a tent can spook things within 150 meters. Be cautious about how you go about slipping into a possible Yote location.

[Uncensored]

Originally posted by Woodyplank:

Not all need zones get visited every day, some only 1 or 2 times a week.

Well, that explains why setting up a tent 100 meters from need zone with smell neutralizer never leads to animals actually visiting their need zone, I suppose. Wish the game would explain more, instead I´ve been sitting in a tent for days and hours now without fun and success (for a mission). Calling them didn´t work either. How should normal people know how to be a hunter or what need zones mean in this game...but of course we get that radio signal that she found tracks in the morning, instead of explaining a bit of hunting to the player. Leaving my tent upset now.

[Findus]

@Censored The tutorials for Layton Lakes should give you an introduction to these kind of things, I believe, although I don't remember the specifics. There are also some beginner series by content creators like Flinter on YouTube, although ideally you'll want to watch a fairly recent one. The basics didn't change too much, though.
Finding out about these things on your own can be a lot of fun, too.

The smell neutralizer is pretty weak and if you mean an actual tent rather than a blind, then that doesn't hide you at all. And if you fast travel to a place, all animals in the vicinity will spook. You should also check if you are blocking their approach routes or if there are predators around. Lastly, staying in the same place for a long time will keep any animals that happen to be caught in a loop somewhere (mostly at the edge of the drawing distance) stuck that way.
If it's for a mission, then it's probably a blind. Unfortunately, some missions are broken in the sense that the required animals are less common in that area now compared to when the mission was created. See above for Woodyplank's tips in regards to chasing animals into the mission area.

@Thread
Coyotes are very observant and slow to approach, so you want to be hidden as well as possible. I'm not 100% convinced they actually circle around systematically, much less intentionally trying to approch against the wind. In the instances where I could see them, they didn't. My version of the game is fairly old, but so are these claims and I even believed them myself at one point while I'm a bit more sceptical, now.

I'm also not sold about animals having various need zones for the same time, seeing as there a plenty of reasons why they might stay away or be stuck somewhere and all the schedules I tracked seemed to be consistent, but I obviously haven't checked every species and like said, my version of the game is pretty old at this time.

[Woodyplank]

A tent is not a blind. Animals can see you quite well when you are inside a tent.