Genesis 9:2-4 Ministries

MOVED

2010-10-08T08:54:00.002-04:00

I have moved my weblog to :

Genesis 9:2-4 Ministries

I have decided to keep this version of the weblog available for archival purposes. The new site is built on Wordpress, and it has a whole lot of features that a simple weblog did not have.

Thanks to Blogspot and Blogger for giving me a good home since 2004. I really could not have asked for much more from you guys.

Please, drop into the new site and check it out.

Playing the Wind or J-Lo and Steve find each other?

2010-10-01T11:13:00.000-04:00

From the D&DH Forum

Cut N' Run

If deer always walked into the wind in Fall, wouldn't they all eventually end up in the Pacific northwest? Just kidding.

This all reminds me of a story:

O.D and Playing the Wind

As usual, I'm going take a completely contrary approach to all this. I guess it's just in me. But now that I'm starting to look at 30 years as a deer hunter, I guess I can start speaking with at least the appearance of authority-- either that or the appearance of foolishness. The older I get, the more these seem to appear the same.

I have to a large extent given up on the idea of playing the wind. I have stands that have been up now for going on a decade. I have hunted them under all conditions. Some stands probably have undergone a hundred sittings or more, and I cannot count the hours I have sat glassing the open pastures. If there is a direct correlation to wind direction and deer movement I don't see it. Oh, I know its there, but I just do not see it. I think I know why.

Any drunk will tell you it's Happy Hour somewhere in the world all the time. A good drunk will always have a list of holidays for every day of the year. The plain truth is, on a round planet everywhere is upwind of something else. Similarly, deer are everywhere. I will not say they randomly spread across the countryside, but they do wander around quite a bit. Patterns? Yes, there are patterns. There are resident doe groups that lead pretty regular lives. However, there are also a lot of deer moving from outside your immediate area onto the the property you are hunting, and those who we think of as residents do a lot of wandering of their own. The net of all this is a fairly chaotic picture. Keep this in mind as we go through things. I'll come back to it in a bit.

Then again.. . Let's say you have a really pat setup. I can remember one such setup. It was a peninsula stretching out into a cornfield. When their were crops in the field, the resident deer always used that peninsula to get into the corn. All tracks going into that corn were either to or from the peninsula, and at one point there was a 10-foot corridor at the base of the peninsula where the deer cut across a creek. I hunted that structure for several years. Wind? The deer could not care less. They came from acres around to feast on the corn or sometimes soybeans that were in that field. They came at dawn. They came at dusk. They always walked across the creek at that one point.

Now you have to ask yourself? What did the deer do when the wind changed? The other side of the corn field was a main road and a farm house (Trivia: That farmhouse used to be where Nick and Nina Clooney lived-- George's parents.) There was a junior high on another side. What? They were going to do an end-around from their beds and go through the junior high parking lot, slip across Mason Montgomery road and come in past Nick's house? Yeah, right. What did I do? I hunted that peninsula in all kinds of conditions. I changed up my approach from one trip to the next. However, I was always within 50 yards of that choke point on the creek. Yes, sometimes the deer winded me, but usually I set up one side of the corridor or the other. Did it make any difference which side of the corridor I set up? No, because I never knew which way the deer would approach the corridor-- upwind, downwind, or crosswind.

Now let's go back to that random deer thing. I know a lot of you think I'm speaking heresy. However, the deer rarely seem to cooperate with me. Maybe I'm special. If I do all my planning aforehand and pick the most likely spot the deer will come given the weather conditions at hand, I can be well assured that when the deer show up, they'll be coming from another direction. The deer I was planning for? They may have decided to go somewhere else for the next couple of days. Their friends from the other ridge have wandered in, and they see a great opportunity to feed on the acorns the other deer have left. They started out the day in a bed somewhere else, and see the oak grove I'm hunting from a completely different angle. Upwind? Downwind? Are they going to circle around the oak grove and go 500 yards out of their way just to be sure I'm not in a tree, or are they going to just go for it?

Look at it a different way. Last night I was making the haul back from S.Central KY up I-75 to Cincinnati. About 10 O'Clock, I got hungry. About that time I saw a Skyline Chili sign, and I started thinking about a Chilito. I took the exit and drove straight to the place. I didn't circle around looking for a better way in. I didn't worry about the bus full of nuns that I nearly ran off the road. I went for it. Do you really think deer do any differently? By the way, tell the nuns I'm sorry. It was a Skyline thing-- they'll understand.

It's always going to be upwind somewhere. One deer's upwind is another's downwind, and if deer get an urge to go eat, they are probably not going to get really, really cagey about how they get there. Your mileage may vary, but that is how I am beginning to see it.

So, if I'm so against reading the wind, what am I for? Structure. More and more, I see the basic topography dictating more about deer movement than anything. When you couple fairly gross topological features with cover and food, there is a package that will dictate the vast majority of deer movement.

With some planning and quite a bit of perseverance, I have found structures on my farm where deer habitually move. It may be a point here, a hint of a shelf there. It may be a saddle, or just the closest approach of two creek systems for miles around. These seem to produce predictable deer movement more than anything. That is, if I post myself in sight of one of these structures, I will see deer. Add the predictability of their penchant for showing up at dawn and dusk, and the odds go up even more.

Add wind? That's what I want to know. How can I add wind when I can never see a predictable pattern to it. I can post on a given structure. Watch the sun go up or down. The deer will show or not. Nowadays, I seldom go a whole sitting without seeing at least one deer. After nearly 3 decades, I can't say if that is because I have become a great deer hunter, or that there are just a lot more deer running around than there were when Regan was president. I suspect it is a combination of both.

Give me the benefit of the doubt here, and assume the deer show up. If they do show, they're not going to come from a predictable direction. Their noses aren't to the wind or against it. I have had deer regularly show up from 3 directions to converge on the same spot. Do I get busted? Yes, not as much as before I took the mothballs out of my pockets, but I still do on occasion. Now that I am washing my stuff in baking soda and making a point to bathe myself on hunting trips, I see a lot more deer. I get busted, but it is usually from a combination of sight and sound and smell. Beyond a certain level, I know I cannot control my odor after I leave the house, therefore I concentrate on the other two and try to move as little as possible.

This has all been written from the perspective of a stand hunter. What about other methods? It all applies, but it applies in different ways. On the ground, it is all still true, only more so. If you're in a ground blind, or still hunting, the chances of getting winded are higher. I have only to look at my own experience with this, and I am sure you will agree; for every deer that comes to you on a upwind quarter there are at least one or two that come from a downwind quarter. Did they somehow sense you and circle around to double check? Are they that canny? I doubt it. Most deer stumble through life the same way we do. They were just lucky they stumbled in just the right way. We're not talking about cervid master-minds here. These are dumb deer, probably no smarter than your average viewer of American Idol or WWE.

For going on 10 years now, I've been bringing guests out to the farm and taking them on walking tours. Some are hunters. Some are not. Usually whatever we're up to, it takes us past one or more of my treestands. Most times I tell people that there are treestands around, and they are tasked with trying to spy them. The result? Most people cannot see a treestand outside of close bow range. Most have to have them pointed out. Some need me to go up and touch it. Often times we bump into deer. The deer have a nearly similar track record. Sure, some will bolt away at 200 yards snorting madly, but for each one of those stories, I've got one to match it like the deer that I walked up on holding a flashlight last fall. (That was me holding the flashlight. Wow! J-Lo gonna be a judge this year-- ain't that the shizz?) . . . or the buck that followed me down the road a few years ago. I don't know what that deer had on his mind! It must have been Hulk Hogan putting that smackdown on Andre the Giant. I know it rocked my world and left me stunned for weeks.

Stalking? Look, I'm a walking landform (Think John Wayne gone to seed) Do you really want to take the word of a guy who has Size 14 shoes on how to stay quiet and go unobserved in the woods? If so, I have an inside tip for you: J-Lo is secretly in love with Steven Tyler, but doesn't know how to tell him. Look for the subtle signs this year. I'm sure you'll see them. Take it from a guy who's gone through five presidencies hanging out in trees-- the wind is not the most important thing out there.

One last story: One night, I was coming out from hunting. I was parked in the apron of the farmhouse (Nick and Nina's place) . Nick and Nina were long gone, and my buddy had rented it out to another family. It was a cold, frosty, November night and Jupiter was high in the sky. I pulled out my binoculars and started looking at Jupiter , and was treated to one of the best views of the planet I'd ever seen. I was able to see the 4 Galilean moons very clearly. It moved me deeply. About this time the guy who lived there came out to say hello.

"Whatcha doing?" he asked. I put down my binoculars, still reeling in the sublime moment. There were the 4 moons that showed Galileo that there was a world more wonderful and wider than the Universe described by Aristotle and held as gospel by the Church. It meant we were not the center of the Universe. It was one of the greatest realizations a man had ever had, and there I was seeing it fresh again, as it had been the first time.

"I've been watching Jupiter." I said. "This is great. You want to have a look?"

"Sure." I passed him the glasses and pointed out Jupiter.

"See the moons?" I asked. There was a long pause, followed by an even longer one. Finally the fellow put down the binos and handed them back to me.

"All them pretty lights," he said. "Them's stars, ain't they?"

"Yes," I replied.

"Thought so." he said. Without another word, he went back inside to watch TV.

I submit to you all that most deer do not surpass the tenant's level of intelligence. Given the chance to travel upwind, downwind, or whatever, most will chose with the deftness of the Turtle and ostensible wisdom of the Opossum to take the path that offers the shortest, flattest path to a good meal or a good bed. The rest? I dunno. Judge Judy's coming on soon. I gotta go.

Transporting your Deer

2010-09-18T17:28:00.000-04:00

Kenn wrote:
"...I just got my lic and permit to hunt a deer this fall. I'm using a 40lb recurve and have a place to hunt up near Marysville. I'm still a bit vague on field dressing, processing stations and such. For instance, with a small to med sized buck, will I be able to transport it in the back of my Matrix or do I need to get a truck? Do you have any sage advice?"

Congratulations! Finding a good spot to hunt is sometimes the hardest part of the whole thing. I was a bit vague on field dressing too. Go on Youtube and search "kyafield deer dressing" There's a great video there-- not quite the way I do it, but it'll work.

Hmmmm. Now we come to the part about the Matrix. Frankly I wouldn't let Morpheus catch you out roaming around. Agent Smith is everywhere these days. If you're comprimised, they may be able to trace your connection all the way back to Zion. . .

. . . Oh, you mean THAT kind of Matrix. You should be okay. However, I would make sure you have enough room in the back for all your gear AND the deer. Also, carry a 10X12 tarp to wrap the deer in. Once you're done cleaning there will always be some blood and it's a bear to get out of your trunk. You may also want to think about keeping something like duffel bags handy to take some of your gear up on the luggage rack for the ride home.

Whatever you do, don't pull the old trick of trying to tie the deer off on the hood. For one thing it really screws up the meat-- all that wind and the heat from the engine. Secondly, it is really poor taste to go around with a deer in the open. I (of course) don't mind seeing dead deer, but a lot of people take great offense, and there's really no point being in-your-face about it.

Good luck!!! Take lots of pictures.

The Deer Family

2010-09-09T19:30:00.002-04:00

So I see the guy who does my hay has been out and started work. He's late getting started. So first thing last night after returning to the farm, I go out in the truck to see how far he's gotten-- not far, but it is a good start. I was particularly interested in seeing if he'd managed to Rotovate the new food plot. The answer was no. Oh well.

I drive into the pasture that will hold the new plot . About halfway along here comes a doe and two fawn in through an opening in the fence and straight out into my path about 40 yards away. The dog and I were transfixed. The doe didn't seem to mind in the least. She was on her way across the pasture at its narrowest point and took a few steps here and there, but mostly flicked her tail and just took in the sights of a pleasant September evening.

I let my foot off the break for a moment and rolled forward to throw it in Park. That did not faze her, nor her two kids. Then I saw him. There was this big 10 pointer following them. He jumped the fence a few feet closer to the truck and came into the field and stood-- biggest deer I've seen on the place in almost two years. None of these 4 deer had the least bit of interest in my truck, myself or the dog, and the doe was only mildly annoyed by the buck's presence. They dawdled going across the pasture and disappeared.

Normally, I'd be thinking the doe and fawns would be hanging with another doe if anything. The buck? This is a tad early in the season for the bucks to be thinking about noogie. The relationship seemed entire platonic, too. It made feel old to watch them. The thought occurred to me how long its been since I had a toddler in the car oogling deer and talking in terms of "mommy deer" and "daddy deer."

It has also been probably 25 years since I finally figured out a basic truth about deer behavior was sheer rubbish. I don't know how many of you all started out with this idea but when I started deer hunting, it was widely held that if you see a doe deer, the important thing was to stay completely still, because the bucks send the doe out ahead to scout, poking them in the rear with their antler to get them to cross into the open spaces. I don't know how many doe I let slip by over the first few years of hunting waiting for that big buck I knew was lurking in the bushes. It took 30 years to finally see it come to pass.

A Ninety-Niner Speaks Out about Deer Hunting

2010-08-30T10:40:00.000-04:00

From Deer and Deer Hunting: For the Ninety -Niners

It's funny. I don't think a lot of guys get it. It could be that my hillbilly girlfriend's all-to-subtle ways are rubbing off on me, and I'm getting so subtle no one can catch my hints anymore. It could be as well that I'm the only Ninety-Niner on here. I doubt it. I just think most folks are trying to lay low on it. Shoot! It could be no one else even knows what a Ninety-Niner is, or how it relates to deer hunting.

Let me explain: If you've been on unemployment so long that your state and federal benefit has run out, you're a Ninety-Niner. The name comes from the Ninety-Nine weeks (just under 2 years) of benefits received.    I lost my job in July of '08. I fell off the back end of the system this past June. I didn't know I was a Ninety-Niner until a few weeks ago. That's when I heard the term used for the first time. We aren't considered unemployed anymore, so we don't count towards that 9.5% unemployment rate. We're . . . we're. . . we're just Ninety-Niners.

Ninety-Niners are not worthless lazy bums who got kicked off the dole. Fox News reported that 50-something managers like me in hi-tech professions probably are never going to work again. A company can't refuse us health benefits anymore, so we're just too much of a risk. I was let go a month shy of 50, and all my 49 year old cohorts were chased out or let go all in their 49th year-- thank federal guidelines for age discrimination starting at 50 for that.

So what does this have to do with deer hunting? It has a lot to do with deer hunting this season, at least for me. Being a Ninety-Niner will probably affect my deer hunting for years to come. This year, I can still afford tags and still afford the trips to Kentucky to hunt. We can still keep the farm. Next year? We'll see. So far the truck has kept running. The point is I know I'm feeling quite a bite. Reloading? All my big projects are on hold. Gun acquisitions? You got to be kidding. Bowhunting? I'd already gotten my medical waiver to hunt with a crossbow, because of my shoulder. I was at the new doctor's last week to discuss it (the old one had responded to the onset of Obamacare by demanding $1,500 cash before he'd see you) The new doc is talking surgery and rehab, while I'm just trying to budget for extra ibuprofen.

I'm probably not the only Ninety-Niner on here, and this is not the first time I have had to deal with a downturn in the economy and getting laid off going into season. As a result, I'm doing my best to talk about it, and I hope it does some good.

Take the Baking Soda-- The Shamanic Method thread as a for-instance. I didn't want to just get right in folks' face, but let's be blunt. If you're unemployed and you still think of yourself as a deer hunter, you're probably looking for ways to economize. Some folks are appreciating the advice and saying so. However, some folks have inadvertently hijacked the thread here and there-- once to discuss some kind of carbon sprinkles, and another to discuss Scent-Lok and various other products. The point is that it is obvious y'all have jobs and aren't thinking the same. It's a difference in mindset. For some, washing hunting clothes at $.10/load is a big deal, and $8 can be either spent on sprays removing invisible rays from your clothing or it can be spent on a youth tag. Ninety-Niners are looking for no-cost or low-cost methods.

Two years out of work changes your perspective. Eventually you come to see those thoroughly entrenched in the hunting establishment as foreign. Larry Weishuhn is a fine upstanding deer hunter, but a Ninety-Niner might think about throwing something at the screen if he has to sit through too many 30-minute infomercials for the Thompson Center Encore.   Ditto for all those folks who came back from Shot Show this year, and couldn't wait to tell us about the wonderful feeling they had running up their leg over Remington and Ruger's new offerings. I ain't bitter, but . . .

. . .let's just say the arrival of the big NEW GEAR issues along with the Cabela's catalog were not the big event they used to be. Walmart dropping their price on underwear and tube socks was.

For some, there just is not going to be enough they can spend to get that winning edge this year. A federal judge has declared Scent-lok's advertising fraudulent, but there will be some that won't think twice about plunking down $300 for a new set. For others, the idea of taking RIT dye to take out the fading in their old camo coveralls may be a godsend. That is a huge and growing disparity. Meanwhile the deer don't care if you're wearing HD, 4D or 1.5D camo. Fact of the matter is I filled my tags wearing brown duck Carharts.

I'm not trying to be coy about this anymore. If you can't afford a new ghillie suit or even a new hunting coat, take your old work coat and give it the baking soda treatment. Then go out to the fabric store-- bring your wife or girlfriend if it will make you feel better. Buy 2 yards of cotton duck camo. Put a hole in it, the way I described in the thread on ponchos and have your woman hem it up for you. I hunted that way for years. I didn't have dedicated cold weather hunting duds for the first 20 years of hunting, but I did have a green freezer suit from working in the frozen cheeseburger factory, and I could afford $10 worth of close-out camo fabric.

You don't need Barnes TSX or Federal Premium or Hornady Custom to kill a deer. Forget the fancy poly carbonate nosecones and all the other plow-whistles. Watch the ads. Remington Corelokt and Winchester Power Points go on sale. They will kill deer just fine. I used Remington Sluggers for years in my shotgun. They kill just fine. Don't let ammunition costs keep you home. Lordy, if you look at the price of beef and the price of a resident tag. . .Last season, I bagged two doe that went +170lbs live weight, and I was glad I went for the meat rather than holding out hope for antlers. Frankly, I've got several racks sitting around the house that are waiting for the taxidermist, but it may be years before they're staring back at me from the mantle.

I may be all wrong. It may just be our deodorants, but I've noticed a lot less traffic on here this year than previous years. It may be the Ninety-Niners are giving up on hunting, not buying tags and not hitting the forums any more. It is a shame if it is so. D&DH magazine relies heavily on ad revenue, so I am sure there won't be much in the way of homebrew solutions and make-do articles the way there was back in the Thirties. Back then Outdoor Life had an article a month on that sort of thing-- building your own knapsack to building your own cabin to repairing your own waders.

Nobody is going to use an old pant leg for a quiver (except me). Probably no one will want to read about using a wheel barrow inner tube for a ground cushion.   On the forum, however, we've got more latitude. JPH's forum piece on doing a homebrew camo job was spot-on. MSBadger's cardboard deer blind was right there. I always was a bit of a shade-tree gunsmith. Here's a pic from my piece two seasons ago. Yes, that's a 1/4-20 hex bolt on the scope:

. . . and here's Angus' custom youth rifle:

The whole project cost under $80. For some, a cheek piece made from duct tape is a joke. For my kid, it meant having a deer rifle that fit him. This year it got re-stocked and I taught Angus how to refinish. That was our big father/son project over the summer.

I didn't mean to rain on anyone's parade with this rant.   I figured if I came out straight on it, y'all would understand. My only advice to D&DH is that if you're stuck for ideas a Ninety-Niner's Guide to Deerhunting might be a good one. I'd offer to edit it. This sport can no longer be about the cargo we carry and the cargo we consume.

Bambi Killer!!!

2010-08-29T07:28:00.001-04:00

James P. Reilly: Bambi killer

Remember James, If the Good Lord had not wanted us to eat deer, he would not have made them out of meat.

Yes, I kill Bambi. Mostly I try to kill Bambi's aging grandfather, Bambi's spinster aunts and his older sisters. However, if Bambi shows up on the wrong day, he may get it. The sad thing of it is that about 50% of the herd's new cohort suffer mortality in the first year. Some of that is due to hunting, but there are a whole slew of other causes.

Bambi ( the antlerless bucks) and Bambi's Mom (dominant females) are my least favorite targets. It's fairly obvious why Bambi is not a good idea: you want the young bucks to survive long enough to grow into big bucks. In these parts, a big mature buck may go 300 lbs live weight and yield 90 lbs of venison. Little Bambi might only yield 20 lbs. Sadly, It is hard to tell Bambi from a young doe, especially at a distance and especially in low light. There are behavioral cues, but sometimes. . . well, sometimes things don't go as planned. The good news is that Bambi tastes about as good as you're going to get.

Bambi's Mom is another story. Deer are very matriarchal . The does have a hierarchy. The older does have a lot of experience in rearing young and keeping the doe herd safe and well fed. You'll see doe in little herds of 3-7 individuals, and these are usually a mature doe, her daughters and their fawns. Taking out the lead doe in one of these herds leads to considerable stress and confusion in the group. The better tactic is to shoot for the second doe in a group, or one in the middle. The trailers are often times buck fawns (Bambi).

Baking Soda-- the Shamanic Method

2010-08-12T09:22:00.000-04:00

Jake Simon August 12 at 3:36am
Shaman,

I hope all is well with you and yours!
I am curious as to how you use baking soda. Do you dump it on everything or do you just put it in with your clothing like you would use it in your refrigerator?
I am looking to try using it this year and am looking for any tips you would kindly share.

His Blessings,
Jake

Thanks for asking. Now that Scent-Lok has been unmasked, I was meaning to write something about how to kick it up old school. My method is based on an article I read probably 25 years ago. Prior to reading the article, I was going afield in wool that stank of moth balls and I smoked a pipe on the stand. I got turned around and got headed in a better direction immediately. Back at that time, there were no special Scent-Lok clothes and no scent killing sprays. I was frankly surprised when those all came on the market few years later. Baking soda seemed like such an simple, easy solution. A little bit of the stuff does an amazing job.

First let me talk about what goes on before the baking soda gets used. Right now I have a pile of dirty hunting clothes down the basement . Yes, it might be better if they were all stored in scent-tight tubs and all that. The point is that dirty clothes, left since turkey season can be cleaned up. Just don't let them mildew.

Second, let me talk about the baking soda itself. Baking soda, sodium bicarbonate, is used in baking and in certain industrial processes. It is a gentle alkaline. The exact reason for its effectiveness on odor is unclear. However, I have used it on everything from cat pee to pit stink to cigar smoke. If you can get it on the scent and you're willing to let sodium bicarbonate take its sweet time, it will take anything out of anything. Buying it in the supermarket in little yellow boxes gets a little expensive. However, for years I was able to find large sacks of the stuff at the local chemical supply house. It ended up costing me about $0.10 a load and a sack would last me three years or more. Most recently I found a good cheap source at Sam's Club next to the flour. It isn't quite as cheap as the 80lb sack, but it is still cheaper than laundry detergent.

As a detergent, it is not all that good, but nobody really wants their clothes bright and shiny when they are deer hunting anyway. If I walk through heavy wet clay and get mud stains on my pants, sodium bicarbonate will not take out the stains right away, but over time the clay and just about everything else leaves. Blood? If I get blood on my hunting clothes, I wash in regular detergent and then give them the sodium bicarb treatment I am about to describe. I use unscented detergent anyway. UV? Sodium bicarb has absolutely no UV brighteners. It will also keep you immune to elephant attack and alien abduction. Don't get me started on this UV hooey again!

First I take a cup of baking soda and throw it in the washing machine and send it through one short cycle empty. If I have some clothes that had blood on them, I may throw those in too to wash out any remaining detergent. This cleans out the machine, and gets it ready for the subsequent loads.

Sort your clothes in the following way: Outer layers to inner layers. Do the outer layers first. The theory is the most amount of human scent will be on the innermost layers. In the first load, I'll do jackets, bibs, pants, etc. In the last load, I put in underwear. You have to understand I have two sons hunting with me, and that is a lot of wash. It is okay if you just have one load, but if you are going to have to split it up, best to have it segregated. I usually do my socks as a separate load no matter what; I can line-dry them indoors too.

Add a cup or so of baking soda to each load. Wash on Cold/Cold with nothing but the sodium bicarb. If you can catch the load as it is going into the last rinse cycle, throw in another half-cup of sodium bicarb as it is filling. Otherwise when it is all done, go back and then run a separate rinse cycle and add in baking soda. This puts some extra chemical into the fabrics before you dry them. This extra dose of sodium bicarb may or may not be necessary. If I'm packing clothes away for a long time, I may not do it; the dry chemical will have time to work on them over the intervening weeks. If these are clothes I will be certain to wear the next week, I'll definitely try to hit them with the extra dose.

When a load is done, I take it outside to the back yard and hang them up on the line until dry. This is usually not a problem in the summer, but as the season wears on it can be a pain. The trick is to find enough time between Sunday night and the next Friday to get the clothes dry. If it is going to be raining in the early part of the week, I may hold off doing the wash until Wednesday. I have even packed wet clothes down to camp to dry. It is a problem, but it has to be done. Do not let the clothes dry in a dryer. Do not hang them up in places where they will pick up a lot of extraneous scent. A normal suburban back yard is usually okay, but watch out for your grill and smoker. In a pinch I have used my garage.

After stuff is dry, I pack everything in either a plastic leaf bag or a plastic tub. Tubs are nice, but when I'm trying to jam gear into the back of my truck, they are not necessarily the easiest to fit. Bags compress well. As I am packing the dry clothes away, I'm sprinkling a little bit of baking soda as I go. Into one big bag of clothes I may put half a handful or so. When I was first doing this regimen, I was always overdoing this part of it. It really does not require all that much. Again, if you have the chance to do so, keep the outer layers separate from the inner layers. Keep socks separate. In fact, I usually throw them in a plastic grocery bag and take them in my regular baggage.

Now for me. Before each hunt I try and take a shower and use sodium bicarb either as a replacement for or as a touch-up after soap and shampoo. When I'm done, I throw a bit of it into my still-wet hair, work a pinch under the armpits and into my crotch and then give myself a quick dusting of the stuff while I am still somewhat wet. Then I towel off. Here is another place where I used to go wild with the sodium bicarb. It does not take all that much.

I try not to reuse clothing, and especially not the innermost layers. Down at the camp, I eat breakfast in my long-johns and then dress out on the front porch. When I come back in the outer layer I might want to reuse later in the day gets hung up to air outside. Boots are not worn in the house and get a pinch of sodium bicarb in them between uses. Any clothes that are done for the day are taken off and put in a leaf bag for the trip home.

I have a set of insulated camo, a coat and bibs, as well as a set of boot blankets, a wool balaclava, and wool sweater that never see a washing machine. In fact, I have had all three for 7 seasons and they have never been cleaned or washed. However, I wear them throughout the latter part of deer season. These present a challenge, but sodium bicarb will do wonders used dry. What I do is air out the clothing immediately after use. After that, I pack them in their own nylon duffel with sodium bicarb. I pay particular attention to the crotch of the bibs and the armpits of the coat and sweater. Over the intervening week, the baking soda does its magic. A couple of years, turkey season has been cold and snowy starting out. I used these clothes for a week or two in the Spring, aired them out, packed them away in baking soda and they were just fine come fall.

Another trick I use keeps these outer layers from getting soaked in sweat and acquiring a stink. Let's say it's down around 32F and it's still an hour or so before sunrise. I take everything that constitutes my outermost layer, stored in its own duffel and schlep it out to the stand IN the duffel. This is one of those heavy nylon duffels they issue to the troops. It has pack straps. The duffel is a bit bulky, but it is relatively light and it beats wearing all that stuff on my body. I go out to my stand dressed in something like uninsulated bibs and a sweater. The weather is cold enough that I don't have to worry about working up a sweat. I get into the stand, haul up the duffel and climb into the last layer. Not only do I keep from sweating (and stinking), but I stay warmer as well.

How effective is my method? I have been busted at 200 yards by a deer downwind when I was not observing any scent control. I have also had deer bust me on the upwind side of a stand at 70 yards. When I'm doing everything I can with the baking soda, deer pay absolutely no attention to me-- upwind or downwind. I have been on the ground and had deer practically walking on me. Last year, I went through all season with only one hard bust on the stand, and this was a doe that caught me standing up to stretch.

Burn Out

2010-08-11T07:54:00.000-04:00

From the D&DH Forum:

DeerCamp
Super Member

Deer season is long, but as you all know the off season is even longer. My question is this, with all the books, DVD’S, magazines, and countless numbers of deer strategies out there, do any of you ever get “burned out?” Here in Michigan, there is about 51 days till bow season. I have all my stands placed accordingly, and feel good about their location. However I continue to read and watch all sorts of hunting related material. How do you cope with a “burn out?” It seems after all my hours and hours of thinking about deer, I have this “burnt out” feeling and the season hasn’t even started yet. Do any of you ever feel this and how to you cope with it? I try to put down the book, or watch a different show rather than hunting, but it seems nothing of interest to me.

I mean deer season in Michigan is 93 days long. Now I know I won’t be able to hunt every single day but believe me I will be able to hunt over 60 days with my current school/ work schedule..I couldn’t help but wonder if any of you ever get this feeling? I’m sure most do during the end of the season, however what about the so called “pro’s.” One would think they would want some time off as well..

But don’t get me wrong I love hunting, I just hate this feeling.

I know exactly what you're talking about. It does not happen to me as much any more, at least not the acute form of it. Burn out has been a regular feature of my deer hunting experience. It probably always will be.

The problem, as I see it, is that deer hunting in itself is a rather boring activity. It requires massive amounts of pre-planning, expense, etc. However, when you finally get it all put together, and your butt goes into the seat on the treestand on Opening Day. . .

. . . nothing. Furthermore, as I faced in a lot of years, nothing happens all season. Sure, the sun comes up, tracks across the sky and finally sets. The squirrels come and go. You have lots of birds, but the actual time you have with deer in sight could be counted some years for me in seconds. No sane man could do this week after week and not get to rethinking what he is doing out in the woods on a perfect beautiful October day. He really gets to questioning that sanity when the warm days of October slowly erode into the pin cushion pre-dawn freezing rain of November. By the time shotgun season rolls around in December, he promises himself that he will get out and stay out for good. But first he must pray to his absent and bitter god to help him get his butt unstuck from that blasted metal seat to which it is now caught in frozen embrace.

I see this process as a trajectory. Your will power is a rocket. Your enthusiasm for the sport is the fuel. Your target needs to be the end of season. You now know about how much energy you have to expend on your sport. You know what kind of drag can be exerted on it by family, work, etc. Eventually your will is going to be spent. The problem is timing it so that you give out about the time season runs out. That may mean deliberately starting later in the year to get ready. It may mean rationing the amount of hunting shows you watch. Every deer hunter needs to manage this.

Me? Look, I'm the guy who went so far into this that I made Deer Camp a year-round lifestyle. Most weekends I'm down there doing something related to deer and turkey. My deer and turkey have names. Eventually something has to give. What I have done to manage my will power is this:

1) I do not hunt deer in September. KY's archery season starts the first weekend in September. I wait until at least Oct 1 to start hunting. I don't like fighting the heat, and the deer are generally not around anyway. I focus my efforts on specific parts of the season-- Mid-October to Thanksgiving. That is when the deer hunting is at its best, and I can get the freezer filled without a lot of muss and fuss. I also don't hunt in January any more. Part of it is that I've paid my January dues. I know what it's like to lose feeling in my extremities. The other reason is coming.

2) I try and give myself a deliberate break. When I'm done, I'm done. After I get out of the woods, shut down camp, and finish my Christmas shopping, I get my rifles cleaned up and go sit on the couch. I try not to think about it again for a while. Usually the weather is most cooperative. Right about the time I'm ready to hang it up, Cincinnati weather has a way of telling me I am making a wise choice. Twice, I've had to make a mad dash back down to camp-- once at 1AM-- to get the water drained before The Big One hit. The power on our road at camp can be off for over a month at a time in the Winter. I usually pick up watching NFL Football during the last week of regular season and watch it through to the Super Bowl. Somewhere around there I get out my turkey calls and my shotgun.

3) Usually my deer hunting jag starts in July. It happens when I get trapped inside at home for a couple of weekends, because it is just too darn hot. About that time the Fall catalogs arrive. I get twitchy. I know better than to try and feed it-- at least let the throttle go wide-open. If I did, I would be insufferable to my family, worthless at work and I would be burned out by October 1. Rather, I let the bug hit and start off with a managed plan. Today, I'm teaching #3 son the rudiments of stock refinishing. Tomorrow, we're going to do some reloading together. Within the week, I'm going to have a couple of loads of deer clothes washed and packed. A little here and a little there goes a long way.

4) I've given up on TV, outside of D&DH. I DVR it and watch the episodes a little later in the year. I also save up a stack of magazines and don't start reading them when they first arrive. After nearly 30 years of this, there really isn't anything all that new anyway. Media just adds gasoline to the fire.

5) Budgets: I set a number and try to stick to it, and I try to squeeze as much out of a tight budget as I can. Well before season I have a target of what I want. I know when the stuff goes on sale, and I'm watching a few sites waiting to strike. I hold off on hitting BassPro at the mall and doing all my window shopping and impulse buying until I have the big stuff nailed down. This keeps the whole thing throttled back. To many lunch hours at too many sporting goods stores gave me an empty wallet and a bad case of pre-season burnout.

6) If it ain't right, it ain't right. If it gets to the last week in October, and I see a 3 day rain coming on and I've got deer in the freezer and I'm getting over a cold, I no longer throw the cough syrup and cold pills into the duffel and head out. I did. I did for years. I don't anymore. I've gone hunting with my foot wrapped in bandages. I've come out of the stand and changed into a business suit for a meeting. I've picked ticks out of my scalp in board rooms. Not anymore. I try and be the Taoist sage and go with the flow of things.

Despite all these measures, I've found myself at Zero-minus-Forty on the Opener, sitting in the pre-dawn gloom wondering what the heck I was doing, a grown man with a family and a good job, 15 feet in the air dressed in funny clothes. Now, I'm an unemployed 52 year old with nothing else better to do, and I still get to wondering. Hopefully, I get it all stuffed out of my head before I hear that first twig snap, the crosshairs come up and the safety comes off.

Publish Post

What made your most successful hunt successful

2010-08-05T09:23:00.000-04:00

My most successful hunts are nearly identical in details.

2003 Opening Day -- The Savage Spoke

2007 Opening Day -- The Savage Spoke Again

The story is real simple: I went to my favorite stand, climbed up and sat down. Shortly before sunrise, The Big One came out and stood broadside to me at short range. In 2003, it was the first rifle hunt out of this brand new stand. In 2007, it was a nigh-on repeat, except the buck had a hat rack considerably larger.

What made the hunts the most successful:

1) The Rut. In both cases, the bucks were in a feisty mood. In 2003, I witnessed a fight between bucks and managed to bag the winner. In 2007, the lesser bucks were all acting cagey and scared, because the big boy was taking on all comers. I blew a little half-hearted grunt, and that was all it took to make him come prancing in from a good 200 yards off.

2) The Stand Location: I worked for two seasons prior to this trying to find the optimal spot to locate the stand. I knew this was a hot spot from the beginning, but it had not paid off. What I had was a saddle offering the best, easiest traverse between two large creek systems. I had tried several places, and finally positioned a stand on the gully leading away from the western side of the saddle. In the process, I had tried a similar position on the eastern side of the saddle, as well as near a bedding area further down the western side. I made my final choice, because I had the best possible view over the most ground. Additionally, I was located in the midst of a stand of oaks that seemed to produce acorns that the deer favored. Truth be told, what really cinched it was the number of remnants of old rotted stands close by. As best as I can tell this location had been producing since the beginning of the Modern Era.

3) The Big Picture: I'm not going to try and kid you about my superior skills as a hunter. I am in a great spot in a great state. The farms around my parts have gone from tobacco to beef and are slowly going fallow. The deer outnumber the people. We're on the edge of one of the top B&C counties in the state.

On the emotional side of this, what made these two hunts so good was the feeling of accomplishment. This was the culmination of 20 years of work, trying to make time despite a lot of important commitments. It was the pay-off of several years of concerted effort to take the land I had acquired in 2001 and turn it into something better.

The rifle and load were both new in 2003. I'd been trying to find just the right rifle for me. This is probably my best stab at it to date: a Savage 99 in 308 WIN. The load mimicked a 300 Savage. This has remained my GOTO gun since. I am not going to say the rifle made the hunt, but I have to say having a rifle that feels just right does make a difference. It was worth the effort.

The last thing that made it all successful was that for the first time, in 2007, I got to share it all with all three of my sons. My younger two sons you have all heard about, Angus and Moose. They both hunt with me and are becoming avid outdoorsmen. You usually don't hear about Junior, my oldest, because he doesn't hunt. He has a bunch of things going on that keeps him out of the field, the biggest one being autism. For once, he got a chance to come out and be a part of it. Out of all my hunting experiences, the trophy I probably most treasure is this picture from the Opener in 2007:

So you STILL want a new Deer Rifle???

2010-07-31T08:24:00.000-04:00

This is a continuation from last year's diatribe on deer rifles.

http://blackholecoffeehouse.blogspot.com/2009/06/so-youre-looking-for-new-deer-rifle-huh.html

Which was a thread on D&DH

RE: So you want a new Deer Rifle, huh?

Larry Miller, the comedian, used to do this bit about the five stages of drinking. As part of one of the stages, you find you have spent arguing for the past hour against Astroturf. By the end of the next stage, you've argued for Astroturf. By the end of the five stages you are Astroturf.

I was thinking about what I wrote last year. It is kind of obnoxious to leave folks with the impression that my best suggestion for a deer rifle is a Savage 99, which has not been made since 2004, or that my Remington 7600 in 35 Whelen is a great choice as well. They're both great deer guns for me, but they may not be right for you. I was looking at my rack this morning and realized I have never found the "ideal" deer rifle.

What would be ideal for me? Let me take you through a tour of what rolls around in my head.

I used to go plowing through the new color brochures every year, as well as the big wholesaler's catalogs. When the Internet hit, it wasn't too long before I found I could download them. I read magazines. I did my comparisons. What did I find? I found I wanted them all. Then again, I wanted none of them. Every rifle I saw was a bit of a comprimise.

At one point in my life, I really wanted a full-stocked Ruger International, but Ruger didn't have it in the chambering I wanted. Another time, I got really hot on a Remington 700 BDL, but I was leery of the safety. I thought about doing a custom, but I could not see spending all the money for blasting something as mundane as a deer.    I did finally break down once and buy a Marlin 336 in 30/30 on pure impulse, but as a guy who spent most of his hunting career with a 30-06 , I always found the round anemic. After 30 years of going through this process, I have come to the conclusion that my ideal deer rifle does not exist. I know parts of rifles I have grown to love. I doubt I could ever put them all together.

Action:   Probably my favorite actions I own are my lever actions. I love the Marlin 336, but I am not enamored of a tube magazine. I love the Savage 99, but I prefer an exposed hammer.   There is also a soft spot in my heart for semi-auto's and pumps. I started hunting in Ohio, a shotgun state. Somewhere in the back of my head is a pump deer rifle with a hammer like the Win 1897, or a Browning BLR with a pump instead of a lever.   They just ain't gonna happen. I love the Remington 7600, and I loved my 742, but both have those problematic detachable magazines.   I love my bolt guns too, but. . . well, they're bolt guns. Really, for just the feel of it, my hands-down favorite is my 54 Hawken caplock. If looks could kill, the M1 Garand is it for me, but picking up a 10.5 lb deer gun is another thing all together.

Chambering: Last year, we were also talking about the ideal deer cartridge. My nominee is the 300 Savage. Others love the 7mm-08. However, I have seen the case made for everything from 223 REM all the way up to 45-70 Govt.   It really does not matter all that much; deer are not that hard to kill. My point in picking the 300 Savage is that it operates well in the range most hunters encounter most deer, and does so with a reasonable amount of recoil.    A few years ago I embarked on the process of designing the ultimate deer cartridge for myself. I made two attempts. One was trying to see if there was room between the 44 Mag and the 444 Marlin for a compromise. There wasn't. The second attempt used some pretty advanced software that was kind of like the Solver routine in Microsoft Excel on steroids. I fed in the whole Hodgdon reloading database and told the software to find me the best cartridge for delivering a shot on a deer inside 200 yards, optimizing for a variant of Taylor Knockout (TKO) versus felt recoil.    The software spit out a few suggestions. One was a 300 Savage load. Another was a light 35 Whelen load. It's favorites were a 280 Rem loading and a 6.5X55 Swede. However, if you look at these suggestions, you'll see that a lot popular deer cartridge comes close.   For instance, I'm sure you could use a 140 grain 270 WIN load and mimic the 280 Rem.   You could use a 358 WIN and duplicate the 35 Whelen load. It's just Hodgdon did not have the data to act as seeds for the program. The bottom line: Yes, one of those will do nicely; stay away from the extremes.

What? No 30-06? How can this be? The truth is that 30-06 and its near-twin 308 WIN are tad overkill. Overkill's not a bad thing, but remember that we're talking whitetail deer here, and your average shot will probably be inside 100 yards. The 30-06 is still probably the best overall cartridge for North American game, but as a deer cartridge there are those better suited. My rack is full of '06 and 308 WIN rifles. Overkill? I've hunted groundhog with 30-06.

Safety: I have had enough problems with safeties over the years, that I just don't trust them. Whenever I can, I carry with a cold chamber and rely on fast, quiet loading.   I prefer exposed hammers with half-cock safeties, especially with kids. You can look down and see instantly how the little booger has his safety set. I also don't mind the extra cross-bolt safety of the Marlin. I only engage it when I'm unloading the magazine. Ditto for the 3 position safety on bolt actions. However, if you do a lot of carrying with a hot chamber, your requirements for a safety are going to be different. Safeties should go on and off with as little fuss and as little noise as possible.

Barrel: Barrel length for normal whitetail conditions is largely a matter of taste. Shorter barrels reduce velocity, but not to any extent that you're going to have to worry about it at 100 yards. My Savage 99 is just a hair too long to be called an absolute joy to hold in my treestand. It gets caught on the shooting rail. On the other hand, I have to say that having a 26" barrel when shooting in a box blind is a godsend, because the farther you have the business end of the rifle outside the box when you pull that trigger the longer your hearing is going to last. Hint: blast energy seems to spread out to the side of the barrel more than directly back. Remember this when you buy a yute rifle for your kid.

Sights: My eyes are such that I'm really stuck with telescopic sights. For my treestand guns, I generally have a 1.5-4.5X variable set to about 2.5X . Optics are really a whole other subject here, but suffice it to say you should have thought this out before you buy your rifle.

Magazine: I have learned to truly detest the metal magazines that Remington has saddled its lines of pump and semi-auto rifles. They are my least favorite of means of holding cartridges. Still, I love the rifles. Tube magazines mean you need flat-nosed bullets; that is not a huge drawback for whitetails. Probably simple blind box magazines on most of my bolt actions are the best way to go. I generally load no more than 3 rounds anyway.   if I have to shoot more than 3 times, you're probably doing something wrong, and it might be a good idea to sit down and catch your composure.

The rest of it? I like a sling, especially on the long slogs. I like wood stocks, but I'm getting warmed up to synthetics. Secretly, I loathe those black rifles Jim Zumbo got all worked up about, but I'm not stupid enough to admit it and I also never get drunk enough to think it is a good idea to have them banned from the hunting woods. It would also be a bit hypocritical: I've hunted with an M1 Garand and an SKS. Just because they're a generation or two older don't mean the idea is any different. Trust me: it ain't about hunting.

Afterward:

Probably, if I was going to listen to all that stuff, I might very well go out and buy a Marlin 308 Marlin Express. But if I really was going to spend that kind of money, I'd probably go get a Browning BLR in 358 WIN-- the one with the pistol grip. Then again, a nice full-stocked Ruger MK II International stainless/wood in 7mm-08 still looks good, or . . . or. . .

From the shamanic archives:

Ode to a 30-30 PT I

What is the best place to shoot a deer?

2010-07-24T07:43:00.000-04:00

From Deer & Deer Hunting

About this time of year, we all get to talking about a list of "bests." What's the best deer caliber? What's the best broadhead? What's the best. . . I remember once having a fellow get on AllOutdoors.com (that's dating me) and ask what was the best camo for squirrel hunting. He had gotten an invite and he had never been before and figured he better buy a new wardrobe. I remember there was a lively discussion that came out of that question. The best?

So where is the best place to aim to kill a deer? I know I can give you my preference. I know when other pro-staffers check in, they'll have theirs. I have reasons. They'll have reasons. I know of some really bum places to hit a deer, but the best?

To start off this discussion, let me throw in a little personal experience on the not-so-good places. I shot my first deer just about 2 O'clock and a couple of inches north of the anus-- a Texas Heart Shot. It was a mistake. The doe crossed in front of me as I was taking aim on a buck. However, the doe went down and died quickly. I had minimal meat loss, and no involvement of the intestines. I was extremely lucky. A quarter century later, I watched my son shoot a small buck with his M1 Garand. The first round hit just behind the near shoulder. The deer did nothing. I encouraged him to take another shot. He was excited and took the second shot a little further back and it emptied out both the chest and abdominal cavities-- again, no serious involvement of the stomach or intestines-- they were laying intact on the ground. When we got to the carcass there was nothing left to clean. My son was extremely lucky. These two instances are fliers. My reason for including them is to show that, in the former, the worst possible situation may not yield bad results, and in the latter the best intentions can sometimes go awry.

I taught my kids that the vitals in the deer can be thought of as a soccer ball sitting in the middle of the rib cage. If you shoot the soccer ball, the animal dies, usually right there in front of you. How you reach that soccer ball is more a matter of taste.

My preference has been to leverage my bow hunting experience as much as possible and shoot for the chest. With a bow, you have a very narrow window of what is going to be an optimum shot. The idea is to get the animal quartering away from you and angle the arrow through the ribs, through both lungs and out the other side. When I became primarily a rifle hunter, I didn't change a whole lot except the optimal quartering-away angle now became more of a straight broadside affair. Most of my shots take out both lungs as well as the top of the heart. With the deer standing broadside, I point my crosshairs where the foreleg meets the body and then rise up about 4 inches up and 4 inches to the rear.

The advantages that I have found to taking this shot are several. In the vast majority of the cases, the animal goes down right there or I can stand where they were shot and see the carcass. The only meat loss is in the thin rib region. The exit wounds can be large if the bullet hits a rib on the way out. The blood trail is significant and short.

The disadvantages to aiming for the lungs and heart? Well, I caught my processor one day when he was having a hard time of it, and asked him if there was a chance he could give me a pack of ribs. Jake looked at me and snapped, "If you wouldn't keep bringing them in with their chests all shot up, I might be able to!" There was truth there. Honestly, I have never been all that attached to venison ribs anyway.

My preference is to stay away from the shoulder. That may be a bias based on my years as a bow hunter. Breaking a shoulder blade and taking out a foreleg, has been largely an unnecessary exercise. The few times I have managed to hit a shoulder blade, the animal went down right there. I suppose you could argue for a preference of meat: do you prefer ribs or shoulder roast? I have the shoulder roasts ground anyway so I get a bit more burger out of each deer. It is a matter of taste.

The advantage as I see to the shoulder shot is that it can preclude running. The disadvantage is that more meat gets torn up. Done right, the shoulder shot does essentially the same thing as chest shot. The lungs and the heart are involved. The animal goes down. Maybe the best thing that can be said for the shoulder shot is that it is farther away from the abdominal cavity than the classic boiler room shot that is my preference.

The Brisket shot: This is my least favorite way to reach the soccer ball, but I've done it. You're reaching the heart and lungs from the front. It's harder to get both lungs and the heart all at once. You also run a good chance of getting into the abdominal cavity. That's always a good spot to avoid. A shot through the front door will bring them down quickly. If they are in close and that is the only shot available, I will take it.

Now let's look at the shots that do not rely on the "Soccer Ball " model:

Gut shots: Ick. If you've ever blown up a stomach or seriously involved the intestines, you know this is not a good idea. The deer dies. How soon is the problem. A got shot deer may last 6 hours and cover a lot of ground in the interim. This is not a good place to aim. I have had two sincere gut shots to deal with in my career. In one case, my son shanked one on a doe, and the animal bedded right there. I finished her when we found her. The second was on a follow-up shot on a buck that I took in 2006. For some reason, the animal took one in the chest and was still alive when I got to him. Hint: deer with their legs drawn up underneath them are not dead. I walked up on him a little too close. The buck jumped up and started to run, and I threw an anchoring shot into him. It anchored him all right-- hit the chest and lungs by way of the stomach. I still retch when I think of cleaning that one out.

The Head Shot: A lot of guys who read military magazines think this one is great. A large number of guys who think they are great shots think this one is great. The problem that I see is as follows: for they guys who read military magazines, this is not the military and the target is not human. The anatomy is different. The motivation is different. Deer generally do not take hostages. I have never seen a deer put a knife to another deer's neck. Deer do not radio your position to artillery. You do not have to worry about return fire. If you take a chest shot at a human, it is hard to take out both lungs and the heart with one round. Front on, the organs don't line up. From the side, you have the arms in the way. Deer also do not wear body armor. The head of a human is also on a much shorter neck and it does not move as much in relation to the body. Yes, done right, the head shot is an instantaneous kill, but if it is slightly off, the deer can have its snout or lower jaw shot off and the wound causes a long lingering death by starvation.

The Neck Shot: Look, no one is going to argue that disruption of the Central Nervous System leads to instant incapacitation. The only arguments I can make against shooting for the neck are similar to head shots. Necks move around a lot. The target is smaller-- we're talking aiming at broomsticks vs. soccer balls. Clipping the esophagus instead of the spinal cord is bummer.

All the others: Having successfully pulled off one accidental Texas Heart Shot in my life, I can tell you that deer can die quickly no matter how bad you screw Wup. Deer shot in the femoral artery can bleed to death very quickly. Deer shot in the spine behind the shoulder blades can drop instantly. Finding the heart and lungs by way of the anus will work if you rifle and stomach are up to punching through all that intervenes. My answer to all these : don't do it.

If you get through thirty seasons and raising two sons into the sport with as few runners and as few lost deer as we have had, we can talk sometime around the campfire about the best place to aim. Until then, I wish you all the best with whatever you pick.

Update: I put up a poll. 88% of the respondents picked the boiler room. 2 picked the shoulder. One said "close to an access road"

2010-06-30T07:33:00.000-04:00

From D&DH Forum

Everyday Hunter asks:

Is it a moral decision to hunt or not to hunt?

Let's get philosophical. I recently re-read an article in Sports Illustrated (Nov. 24, 2008) on the decline of hunting. It ended with this sentence:
"Wolves do not make moral decisions, he decided. They just hunt."

So, if hunting is not a matter of morality for wolves, is it for man? Why, or why not?

Steve

My response:

Is hunting moral? Everything is moral or immoral to one extent or the other. A lot of it has to do with motivation. A man can go hunting and follow all of the game rules, engage in Fair Chase, but still commit an immoral act if his intentions are wrong-- say his motivation is to hurt living things. On the other hand, you have the example of the man who poaches to feed his hungry family. Is it a reasonable motivation, or is it just a sly excuse to get off being prosecuted? The question comes down to what is in his heart.

I could say that a man who goes hunting and does not contemplate what he is doing is acting immorally. However, I would also have to confess that the closest I have have come to achieving Bliss was while I was hunting. In doing that, I was able to shed thinking altogether. I could run down the bunny hole further, and say that any man who is not fully aware of what he is doing, aware of where his weapon is pointed, aware of what lies in the path of the projectile, etc. is acting in an unsafe and therefore immoral manner. Having said that, I will also say that all that careful thought, as well as the thought of the hunt, the dilemma that we kill so that we may consume life and continue living, the enormity of taking life-- all of that has to be turned off and we need to act in a state of non-thinking so that we can make a successful, ethical shot otherwise we are acting immorally. When we squeeze the trigger or release our arrow we should be acting mostly out of muscle memory.

Why I prize hunting is that it brings all this out. It brings all this out in me. I learn more about myself in a day in the field than I learn in a year of the rest of my mundane life. Hunting tempers me. It brings it out in my sons. Hunting with them got this fire of ambiguity going in them, and it gave me a chance to show them how I have been dancing with it all these years and let me give them guidance as to how to work with it themselves. I doubt we would have had the same talks over the years if we had been discussing golf.

High Court’s Big Ruling For Gun Rights -- from Fox News

2010-06-28T11:48:00.000-04:00

from: http://liveshots.blogs.foxnews.com/2010/06/28/high-courts-big-ruling-for-gun-rights/

High Court’s Big Ruling For Gun Rights

June 28, 2010 - 10:07 AM | by: Lee Ross

In its second major ruling on gun rights in three years, the Supreme Court Monday extended the federally protected right to keep and bear arms to all 50 states. The decision will be hailed by gun rights advocates and comes over the opposition of gun control groups, the city of Chicago and four justices.
Justice Samuel Alito wrote for the five justice majority saying "the right to keep and bear arms must be regarded as a substantive guarantee, not a prohibition that could be ignored so long as the States legislated in an evenhanded manner."
The ruling builds upon the Court's 2008 decision in D.C. v. Heller that invalidated the handgun ban in the nation's capital. More importantly, that decision held that the Second Amendment right to keep and bear arms was a right the Founders specifically delegated to individuals. The justices affirmed that decision and extended its reach to the 50 states. Today's ruling also invalidates Chicago's handgun ban.
Backgrounder:
WASHINGTON -- The Supreme Court appears poised to issue a ruling that will expand to the states the high court's historic 2008 ruling that individuals have a federally protected right to keep and bear arms, following an hour-long argument Tuesday. If so, the decision would mark another hallmark victory for gun rights advocates and likely strike down Chicago's handgun ban that is similar to the Washington D.C. law already invalidated by the justices.
Tuesday's lively arguments featured lawyer Alan Gura, the same man who argued and won D.C. v. Heller in 2008. He now represents Otis McDonald who believes Chicago's handgun ban doesn't allow him to adequately protect himself. Gura argued the Heller decision which only applied to Washington D.C. and other areas of federal control should equally apply to Chicago and the rest of the country.
"In 1868, our nation made a promise to the McDonald family that they and their descendants would henceforth be American citizens, and with American citizenship came the guarantee enshrined in our Constitution that no State could make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of American citizenship," Gura told the Court.
He argued the language of the Constitution's 14th Amendment forces the states to protect the rights guaranteed by the Second Amendment. The Bill of Rights, which was adopted in the late 18th Century, was then commonly viewed as only offering protections from the federal government.
It wasn't until after the Civil War that the Supreme Court in a piecemeal fashion began to apply--or incorporate--parts of the Bill of Rights to the states. It has used the 14th Amendment's Due Process Clause to incorporate most of the Constitution's first amendments but has not yet done so for the Second Amendment. Gura argued that another part of the 14th Amendment would be a better vehicle for the justices to make their ruling but there didn't appear to be enough support from the bench on that front.
Chief Justice John Roberts was the most vocal advocate of using the Due Process Clause to extend the Second Amendment rights to the states. "I don't see how you can read -- I don't see how you can read Heller and not take away from it the notion that the Second Amendment...was extremely important to the framers in their view of what liberty meant."
The discussion over "liberty" was a major philosophical theme of the arguments. Gura and National Rifle Association lawyer Paul Clement argued that the rights articulated in the Second Amendment are fundamental freedoms and would exist to all Americans even if there was no law specifically saying so.
James Feldman, lawyer for the City of Chicago, defended his city's handgun ban and argued why the Heller decision's Second Amendment guarantee doesn't comport with the view that it represents a vital protection of liberty that needs to be expanded to the states.
"[T]he right it protects is not implicit in the concept of ordered liberty," Feldman said. "States and local governments have been the primary locus of firearms regulation in this country for the last 220 years. Firearms unlike anything else that is the subject of a provision of the Bill of Rights are designed to injure and kill."
Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg dissented in Heller and wondered why the right to bear arms was necessary to extend to the states. "[I]f the notion is that these are principles that any free society would adopt, well, a lot of free societies have rejected the right to keep and bear arms."
Later in the arguments Roberts disputed that notion. "I do think the focus is our system of ordered liberty, not any abstract system of ordered liberty. You can say Japan is a free country, but it doesn't have the right to trial by -- by jury."
Roberts was part of the five member majority in Heller and there's a good chance Tuesday's case will result in a similar 5-4 outcome. All of the members of the Heller majority are still on the Court and at least one of them would have to rule against extending the Second Amendment protection in order for the opposing side to prevail.

Come On! Really?

2010-06-01T11:16:00.000-04:00

You know, the more I think about this whole Scent Lok thing the more annoyed I get. You figure an entire generation of hunters has been working under these assumptions about scent management. I am not saying scent management is bogus, but I am saying that Scent Lok and its ilk have certainly muddied the waters. For 20 years we've been hearing experts tell us this is one of the primary keys to successful deer hunting. I would be the first to admit that a lot of my thought has been down those same lines. I never did agree with Scent Lok's claims, but I always figured there must be something to the issue. My whole view of hunting has been clouded by this detritus-- and I never even bought one of their stinking suits.

Look at WoodsWalker. He's big on his ghillie suit. Mine has languished for years in the closet. Why? Part of it was that I found the suit to be overkill for my type of hunting. Part of it was that I was not all that comfortable in it. However, a major component of my dislike for the suit was that always stank of wet jute and no matter what I did, I could not get that stink out of it. Well ( DUH!) maybe Woodsie is right, and maybe a ghillie suit is the way to go, and it doesn't matter that it stinks like jute or hemp or that you can't throw it in a washer and do it in baking soda. It just may work, because the deer don't care.

Or cigarettes. Take ciggies. I know a bunch of guys who smoke-- here in KY it's more the rule than other places nowadays. They're successful deer hunters. How can this be? The deer don't care? If they don't care about that stink and they didn't care about whatever stench was leaking out of the Scent Lok suits and they don't care about rank, stanky ghillie suits. . . DANG! What do they care about.

Human urine? Nope, I know that ain't true. Human poopoo? If Scent Lok don't work and all these guys have been farting in their Scent Lok suits for 20 years. . . well, you do the figgerin', Braniac.

And what about all these experts that were telling us scent management was so important and how you really needed one of these stinking charcoal suits if you were going to be serious about the sport. Now what? Where they taken in by the fraud knowingly or unknowingly. Did they all go running off the cliff together like lemmings, or did they pull this off like a bunch of Chicago politicians. Are these guys rogues or rubes? My feeling is the the answer is, yes. One of those will do nicely.

I'm going to tell you a story to explain my answer. Take out of it what you want. Back when I was first getting into hunting, I acquired a neat little book. It was the 1939 edition of the Outdoor Life 'Cyclopedia. It was a wonderful little compendium of everything you could think of for the outdoors: fishing, camping, hunting, shooting, hiking. I treasured it. In fact, I have scrounged up more copies of it over the years so my sons would each have a copy. It wasn't until I got the farm that I got to try some of the stuff they suggested. A lot of it you can't do on public land or in a public campground anymore. Once I had my own place, I could do what I wanted.

Example: Here's the dream:

Here's the reality:

I tried for two season to build a hearth like the one in the book. There was no freakin' way that was going to work, and there was no freakin' way that hearth could be put together for a short-term camp that made any sense. Pounding that many stakes in was ridiculous, filling up the interior with that much dirt was ridiculous, and after one rain, the whole thing started to settle, lean, fall apart, and otherwise disintegrate.

I should have known better. They also had this picture in the book:

My comments from the summation of this project:

[quote]

Yeah right!

Okay, here are some study questions:

1) How many trees were cut down in the making of this home away from home?

2) Who the heck would actually build all that stuff for "but a few days"

3) Are they still selling the stuff he was taking without prescription?

4) Imagine trying to pull this off in a State Park Campground. How long would that last?

5) Imagine if you saw these two men in the woods today. I count only one mattress. Would you be expecting the wives to show up at any minute?

Imagine the caption : ". . . So I said to Bruce, 'Oh you wicked, girl! I was going as Bette Midler's Gift from the Oceans, and you stole my whole costume idea.'"

I see this as a new show on the Outdoor Channel: Queer Eye for the Straight Camper.
[/quote]

The stuff on hunting was just as bad. Some interesting facts from this tome:

1) Turkeys have to go to water first thing in the morning after they hop down off the roost. Therefore, the best way to hunt turkeys is to situate yourself between the water and the turkeys and ambush them.
2) Deer hunting with buckshot is a highly effective method out to 80 yards. At 80 yards, the average shotgun shooting 00 will put half a dozen pellets into the chest of a running deer. They even had a drawing.

The list goes on and on.

The point is that this compendium of knowledge of the outdoors was really a pile of drivel, put together by a bunch of fey city slickers that really had no idea what was going on in the outdoors. However, if they dressed it up and made it look good, guys would buy the book. That was the 1930's. Honest and truly, I don't think the folks who put out the drivel these days are any more in tune with reality than what they were back then. I'm not going to paint the whole lot of them with the same brush. However, between the urge to make money, the urge to make reputation, the urge to make deadline, and the urge to go with the flow, I don't think many people who create content for the consumption of hunters really have much room left for original thinking, critical thinking, or (for some at least) ethical thinking. D&DH is an exception in this, but D&DH also has to address their own involvement with Scent Lok over the years. I feel no one in the industry is immune from this. Everyone has Scent Lok's taint all over them right now.

What about me? First off, no one ever confused me with an expert on deer hunting. Second, I've been saying Scent Lok was goofy in both intent and execution from the get-go. However, I'm the first to say that scent management as a concept has ruled my deer hunting life since about 2 years prior to Scent Lok first showing up. It has only been in the past 3 or 4 years I have even started to question the extent of my anti-scent compulsion. It has only been since this Scent Lok decision came down that I have realized how totally taken in I am ( even though I was a Scent Lok skeptic) and started asking the hard question: What's really the truth here?

I Just Don't Get it

2010-05-27T07:31:00.000-04:00

For every crazy instance I have in the past 30 years of deer busting me at some un-believable range, I have one or more crazy stories about deer that walk up on me while I'm taking a dump or eating my lunch, coming to watch me erect a stand, or while I'm climbing into my stand.

My point here is that we've all had these various mindsets, mostly around a deer's fantastic senses of hearing and smell. Now all of a sudden we find out the fancy scent suits weren't working. Instead of being invisible to the deer, thousands of hunters over 20 years were running round the forest in overpriced rain suits. That has to say something about the original premise.

Here's a mind bender for you. Let me set up a situation. This has happened to me more than once. The property I'm on is divided roughly down the top of the ridge by a treeline following an abandoned road that follows the top of the ridge. It affords the easiest access to the back of the property. It also passes across the top of several hollows, and it frequently happens that I'll bust up deer on my way down that road, either bedding or loafing at the tops of these hollows.

Now, I try my best to get past them when I'm on the way to the stand, but sometimes it just doesn't work. I try to keep my scent managed as well, but sometimes I slip up. I may have grabbed yesterday's shirt by accident or whatever. The deer are quick to let me know. But here's the weird part. Often times, the deer don't run away. They snort, they stamp, but then they follow me a hundred yards down the way and they bust me again, and will keep this up for a half mile. It's like they're playing a game of "You Stink!" and I'm the stinker.

We see a similar version of this when we're camping. The deer know we're there. The deer can smell the campfire and the other various stinks plainly. Yet, they come up close to the tents and bust us as if they're surprised. On a 3 day campout, it gets to be a quite humorous--the same deer, the same time of day. It's a variation of the You Stink! game.

To a lesser extent, I see a third variation of "You Stink." I will bust a doe when I'm out and about on the farm. That doe will then circle and come up on me 2-4 additional times, usually circling from upwind to downwind, and repeatedly bust me. Once should be enough for a deer, especially when it's a hard bust.

Now what's up with that? If I am really perceived as a threat, why keep coming back? It's me. You know it's me. I've been this way lots of times before, what's your point?

Why I think it is important that we keep questioning all this is that deer don't seem to think about us the same way we would think of a predator. If they're deliberately encountering a potential predator, that speaks of a different sort of motivation. I'm not going to fall into the trap of saying "You Stink" is really a human-type game. However, there's got to be a component to it that is different from our way of thinking.

Along with the buck-in-the-bushes chestnut, there are two more that stick in my head from my early days. Maybe you've heard them. One involved the idea that you could lure deer in by playing a radio, soft and low in the woods. The idea was that you took a transistor radio, tuned it to a music station and then put it on a stump and stood back and waited. The other was that a deer hunter could lure in deer by cooking his lunch over an open fire. The former was one I never got around to trying. I did try cooking my lunch in the woods a couple of times. Nothing ever showed up, and then I got into the whole scent reduction kick and figured it was not a good idea to be sitting around a campfire if I wanted to stay scent-free.

Let's just say for a second these worked. Let's just say deer really do get out and play "You Stink" and saw the radio trick and the hot lunch trick as a chance to count coup on us. For the past 25 years we've been poo-pooing these tricks as superstitions, sitting there all fat and happy in our Scent Lok suits, sprayed down with UV Killer. It makes you think, don't it?

BTW: I saw a version of the radio trick a few years ago, but I don't think the hunter had it right. He rode out on his ATV, parked by the property line and turned on his boom box and played heavy metal head banging music as loud as he could while glassing for deer. After 15 minutes, he rode off, and you could hear the heavy metal playing over on the next ridge and the next until it finally disappeared. My guess is that he had been watching TV too much and thought you had to bring your own background music on the hunt.

Towards a New Understanding

2010-05-26T08:32:00.000-04:00

I caught myself this morning while I was writing a response to a fellow on another forum who was defending his use of Scent Lok clothes.

I would agree up to a point. Reducing the amount of stink your body is throwing off is a good idea. The results can be dramatic too. However, I have also had some experiences where it caused me to doubt the whole premise.

I had two nice bucks in velvet IN my turkey blind this season. They came in on the downwind side too. In fact, I have had several encounters like that over the years in the off-season. I am left to conclude that deer are at least seasonal in their worries about humans.

I have shot deer on Saturday and had the same herd back under the same stand on Sunday. I have also shot deer and had their neighbors go on munching grass. Even more dramatic, I shot The Big One back in 2007 and had to wait a half hour while other bucks came out and sparred under the stand after I shot their Boss. The stand I shot him from was adjacent to the family campground, and we go there frequently throughout the summer.

I am beginning to question exactly how in tune deer are with the whole concept of their own mortality, and exactly what we are doing out there in the woods. Mind you, this comes from a guy who has 200 acres all to himself, and I am on the property most of the year doing things that show no threat to the deer. I am sure that in high-pressure areas things may be different. However, I am more and more convinced that the idea of crawling into a $300 charcoal suit and forgetting the wind is far too simplistic a view.

What the heck am I saying here? Look, I am still not sure that we have a good handle on this thing. Think about what it means with Scent Lok going down in flames last week. It means a LOT of experts, folks we trusted for their opinions on deer behavior were caught wearing what amounts to a $300 rabbit's foot. Yikes! What does this mean?

If I look back on what I was being fed to me in the way of serious deer hunting knowledge back in the late-70's and early 80's, it was largely superstition and anecdotal advice. If I look back farther, and I have a collection of some nice books going back to the early 1900's, there is a lot of the same. Folks did not really understand deer. They were largely extirpated, and it has only been recently that the herd sizes have grown to the point where they could be observed as anything more than a set of tracks and an occasional white flag in the woods.

My feeling is that we're still stumbling for the truth. Do not get me wrong. Wearing a three day pit stink in a treestand is still counter-productive in my eyes. However, I am going back and seriously reassessing what I have seen over the years and trying to filter it through new eyes.

Let's just assume that Scent Lok's claims are bogus. That means that folks have been putting on these suits that don't work and going out in the woods. Some of these hunters have been claiming terrific results. My first response to this is that something else that they did, namely addressing other issues of personal hygiene and laundry reduced their scent signature and affected the outcome.

But is that all there is to it? My personal feeling is no. I think the new understanding needs to go deeper. I don't have answers either, only questions. For instance, I've been around cattle more in the past decade than at any other time in my life. The neighbors farm beef cattle. I have even let them pasture a few on our place at times. What impresses me about these beasts is that they are not dumb. They are pretty intelligent, but unlike horses, they seem to have a world view that makes it hard for humans to cozy up to them. It's an alien mindset, very oriented to the herd. Humans are tolerated, but with a high degree of what seems to be mistrust. I am not saying deer are like cows. However, the more I am around cows, the more I can see where I just don't get them, and they just don't get me. It means I probably don't get it with deer either and vice versa.

What if their ideas about us are different? What if we fundamentally do not understand them? What if they don't have the same understanding of mortality? Of prey/predator? Outdoor writers are taught not to anthropomorphize animals-- put human ideas into their heads. However, what if we have not gone deep enough in this?

I go back to one fundamental understanding I had when I started deer hunting. A bunch of people told me a basic truth: if you see doe come through, get ready. The bucks will prod the doe with their antlers and send them out ahead to see if their is danger. Every time I saw doe, those first few years, I always held off shooting. I always figured there was a buck somewhere in the bushes and if I waited, he would show himself.

Bunk. Of course we all know now that bucks are chasing doe in the fall. They prod them with their antlers to try and get them to breed. When doe are not ready they run off. This is the Chase Phase of the rut. However, look how that one erroneous piece of anecdotal fiddle-faddle fundamentally screwed up my whole view of hunting deer. I went through 5 seasons waiting for that buck to come out of the dang bushes.

Now we have come to a crossroads. If you assume that this Scent Lok thing really is bunk, we really need to reassess what it means. We have taken for granted that scent reduction/elimination was a fundamental pillar of contemporary deer hunting, but here are all these experts telling us "Wait! Them doe's is just scouts. There's a buck back in those bushes somewhere!" Remember that as the herds were growing two decades ago, we were all being fed the idea that scent management was a primary concern and a generation of hunters have all relied on this basic fact, just as I did the buck-in-the-bushes tale.

As a fellow who not only believed there was a buck waiting in the bushes, but saw it with my own eyes, I can tell you that having your underlying understanding skewed really horses up what you think you're seeing. If I had not picked up a copy of D&DH magazine and seriously begun to read up on the rut, I would still be out there seeing doe running through the forest and waiting for the buck to come out. I am going back and trying to re-evaluate my vision of how scent management has factored into my deer hunting, and I think we should all do the same. What have we observed and not really seen? What have we seen and misinterpreted? What have we failed to recognize, because we assumed scent-management was the answer?

As I said, these are questions. I'm just asking them. I don't have the answer.

Becoming a Hunting Curmudgeon

2010-05-24T08:24:00.001-04:00

So I was showing KYHillChick the latest on Scent Lok, and letting her read the piece on building an outhouse next to my tree stand. She screwed up her face a little and said, "Why do you do that?"

"What?"

"You're such a. . . you're always such a . . ." We finally agreed that curmudgeon was probably the closest fit, although we tried a few more epithets on for size during the process.

I don't know. Honestly, I don't. I would like to think it is a gift. A lot of folks are not that pleasant about it. I believe in the premise that a life well spent is done so in service to others. Since this is one of the few gifts God gave me, I have to do what I can with it.

I wasn't a cantankerous, contrary, old coot from the start. Although I was a little eccentric early on. I do remember that I was wide-eyed and amazed when I first started shooting with my buddies, and even more so when I started hunting with them. One thing that did separate me from others was that I had deliberate goals in my life, and I was saving money. Deer hunting was not high on the list of priorities in those days, so I tried to get by as best I could with what was at hand. I bought a used bow. I bought my hunting clothes from the Army/Navy store. When I saw some of my friends dumping gobs of money on the best of the best, I could not figure out their problem. They made fun of me when I showed up at the archery range with a quiver made out of an old pant leg. They called me cheap, but I figured I could go out in the woods and get tag soup my way just as easy as theirs.

Being a cheap bastard was probably the genesis of it all. Don't get me wrong. I too went through that phase where everything in the store started looking like a good idea. I still have shelves stuffed with all that gunk. The demands of my job, and the hunting regulations of the State of Ohio came together next to push me along my way to curmudgeonhood. In those days I worked a full 8-5 job. Ohio did not allow Sunday hunting. If I was going to hunt, I had to fight my way out of town in Friday rush hour and drive 3 hours. I was lucky to have the tent pitched by 11. I had about 4 hours sleep, got up and hunted a full day and then drove back Sunday. I wanted every advantage. I tried calls, scents-- the works.

I was also bound and determined to shoot a nice buck, because that was the magazines all talked about in those days. I passed on shots on doe nearly every time I went out, but I did not want to waste my one tag on a doe and screw things up for the whole season. Again, Ohio's game laws were slowly working on my brain, tempering it into a curmudgeon's. The doe seemed far too easy. All I needed was to make a little bit more of an effort.

Then I started to lose access to the places I hunted. I got married and agreed that I would just hunt 1 half-day a week while we were building our family. I started getting squeezed harder and harder. Then my wife decided I should give up hunting entirely. Then I went through the divorce, and I had my two small sons to deal with and getting out to bow hunt now became a half-day once every other weekend sort of thing. When I got to about twenty years as a deer hunter, I had nearly had enough. Before my epiphany, I was trying to cart a big climber on my back along with my all my gimmicks and a full-sized deer decoy into the woods. Then my buddy died that owned the land I was hunting, and I knew that was probably it.

When we fell into the farm, I was forced to very quickly jettison all the unnecessary deer hunting garbage in one swell foop. We took possession well into Kentucky's bow season. I had to scramble. Not only did I have to leave behind all but the essential gear, but I also had to throw out treasured ideas.

1) Scent: I suppose I could have gone out with my scent bombs, scent drags, etc. that first season at the farm. The thing of it was that I had promised myself to do just the bare essentials. The other side of the problem was inescapeable. The first season we had no running water. My pre-hunt preening was down to sponging down with cold water. All I had was baking soda-- I never did believe in that Scent- Lok stuff.
2) Climbers: This was my first hunting land all to myself, so the first thing I did was go out and buy some cheap stands and see if I could leave a stand up and not have it stolen. I had been a climber guy for 20 years, but I have to tell you that climbing stands are a sport unto themselves. To some extent deer hunting takes a back seat to getting up the tree. It was positively luxurious to hunt out of a stand that did not need to be moved.
3) Other gimmicks: The decoy went into the shed and stayed there. I left all my calls behind. I did not have time for salt blocks. I tried to put out a feeder, but the mechanism failed.

. . .and I got deer! In fact, I got two deer! The next season as well! The more I started to look at it, the more I started to see that I had spent over twenty years acquiring and reinforcing superstitions. No, I did not have to be 25 feet in the air. No, I did not need to pull a scent drag behind me. I did not need five different calls with me at all times. The list became longer and longer. Eventually, I took my lessons and started to expand on it. The point became that if I truly believed something about deer hunting was true, I ought to test the contrary position. If I HAD to have rubber boots on to be an effective deer hunter, I ought to try a pair of leather work boots and just see if it made any difference. If I HAD to keep my urine away from deer, I ought to try whizzing off the stand. If I thought camo worked, I ought to go back and try no camo just to see if there was an effect on my hunting success.

So far, the one thing I can tell you that does not work is going short on personal hygiene. Deer hate pit stink. I have found that you can get away with leaving your underwear on from morning to night, but you better change them. I have also found that a little bit of baking soda here and there goes a long way. I am probably using a third of the stuff I was when I was at the height of my scent regimen.

The rest of it? Deer are curious animals. They are fairly intelligent. They are also creatures of habit. Yes, you may screw up a stand hunting it too much. However, you can kill a deer out of a stand on Saturday and come back Sunday and see deer. You can also bump a deer out of its bed at 0600 and have that same deer come visit your stand at 0800. Go figure. Last season, I whizzed off my stand every time I went out, and had three good shooters come by. I did get busted once, but it was because the deer saw me stand up and she caught me unzipping. I bagged my two deer wearing duck brown Carhart bibs.

So there you have it. Being a curmudgeon does not buy me all that much. I certainly do not sell a lot of magazine articles when I write about it. It does not make me more handsome, more handy or closer to my God. It just ends up being one cantankerous old coot telling things as he sees it. If it saves another man from stepping in the same dog piles, then I have done some good.

___________________________

ScentLok Nailed!

2010-05-17T07:17:00.000-04:00

http://www.heinsmills.com/cases/Scent_Lok.html

Scent Lok Litigation
On May 13, 2010, United States Federal District Judge Kyle found that ALS, the manufacturer and seller of Scent Lok clothing, and Cabela's and Gander Mountain, both of which sell Scent Lok and their own private-label clothing using Scent Lok technology, falsely advertised the ability of their Scent Lok clothing to eliminate odor. The Court found that “Defendants have published countless advertisements” almost all of which “utilize the slogans ‘odor-eliminating technology’ or ‘odor-eliminating clothing.’” The Court further found that the experts agreed that the Scent Lok clothing “cannot eliminate odor, even when new.” The Court held that all advertisements that used the words “odor-eliminating technology,” “odor-eliminating clothing,” “eliminates all types of odor,” “odor elimination,” “remove all odor,” “complete scent elimination,” “scent-free,” “works on 100% of your scent 100% of the time,” “all human scent,” “odor is eradicated,” and graphics demonstrating that human odor cannot escape the carbon-embedded fabric are all false statements as a matter of law. In addition, the Court found claims that the Scent Lok clothing could be “reactivated” to “like new” or “pristine” condition to be false as a matter of law.
The Court will issue an injunction to prevent Defendants from further false advertising.
The Minnesota case is now ready for trial. The remaining issues in the Minnesota case are the amount of damages to be paid to each plaintiff and the award of attorneys' fees and costs to plaintiffs' attorneys.
Because the Court earlier denied Plaintiffs' motion for class certification, Plaintiffs in the Minnesota case are only able to recover damages for their own purchases. However, the injunction against false advertising will benefit all future consumers of Scent Lok products in Minnesota.

Wow! I 'm stunned. You mean one of the pillars of modern deer hunting has fallen? I see a bunch of authors suddenly scurrying to remove entire chapters of their books on advanced deer hunting techniques. What's next? UV reduction technology?

Why some wag might even suggest this whole scent-hype was unnecessary and that if we'd just been washing and showering in baking soda. . . no, that would be just too much for the public to swallow. Having magic scent suits that could miraculously recharge themselves in a clothes dryer is much more believable!

However, I am not completely surprised. In fact, your D&DH pro-staffer was already on the job last Fall looking into new clothing technologies. I personally filled both my tags wearing brown duck Carhart overalls, and can vouch for their effectiveness. This year I am going to investigate a new wonder-technology: wool. It's supposed to stay warm even when wet, and it is made of 100% natural fibers so the deer smell it and think it is just another animal. You recharge its scent nullifying capabilities by storing it in a garbage bag with a pinch of baking soda between wearings. I have a Cabela's commando sweater made of this miracle fiber that has gone 10 years without seeing a washing machine or dry cleaner. I have taken every deer for the past decade wearing that sweater.

Just remember: you heard it from your D&DH pro-staffer first!

Mineral Licks

2010-05-16T10:29:00.001-04:00

I was out refreshing my licks yesterday; it was too wet during turkey season to get the truck out into the pastures. The ones that were already well established had been hit hard. I started one new one, and I am going to see how that goes.

My opinions on licks have changed over the years. I started out by throwing out a block of salt in the Fall and wondering why I never saw deer. Over the years I figured out that:

1) Deer start hitting licks in early Spring. By August, they're pretty well off them.
2) The peak of lick activity I've seen is June to mid-July.
3) Location is the key. You can't just throw out salt and have a successful lick. Putting a lick near well-traveled corridors is the best. You can bend those trails a little to, say, bring the deer closer to a stand, but you won't drag deer 1/4 mile out of their normal location to visit a place they'd never go to on their own.
4) There is such a thing as too many licks. It is like putting too many McDonald's in an area-- eventually the competition between locations hurts the profitability of all of them.

When I begin a lick, I start with pure mixing salt-- no dicalcium phosphate or other additives. My feeling is deer don't like the taste of dical. After they're hooked on a site, then I'll add the extra minerals. Every year, I try a few new places on the farm. Some work, some don't. I have two sites that are perennial favorites for the deer.

So when is the best time to do a lick? For me, the best time to start is probably March. I then refresh the lick in May and add in minerals. To refresh an old lick I throw out the last bag in September. (Huh?) The deer aren't going to hit the lick, but the salt will be there in the Spring when they get interested. This saves me worrying about it in February and March when everything is too soggy to get a truck back to the licks.

How do I do a lick? Don't use blocks. Use rock salt, pellets, mixing salt-- whatever. I dig a hole about a foot deep and about 1X3 or 2 X3. Then I throw in the salt, cover it back over and mix the salt and dirt together as I go. I save a handful of salt to put on top as a tease. Deer eat the dirt, and never get a chance to get much pure salt. Too much salt all at once is bad for them. This makes them work at it a bit, and it also gives them some trace minerals from the soil.

Here's a good article on licks I use as a guide. It's written by our local wildlife biologist:

http://fw.ky.gov/mineral.asp

Remember that licks are not magic. They got the bad reputation of being unethical from generations of hunters using them during the Spring and early Summer. By Fall, when most hunting seasons open, deer are not interested in salt licks. Yes, I have seen a few deer come and visit a lick over the years, but it is much less frequent than May and June.

Why use licks? For one thing, it habituates the deer to particular travel routes-- especially doe. Deer are creatures of habit. You get them traveling in a certain way, and they will keep doing it throughout the year. Second, and this can be debated, is that deer do a lot of their own horticulture. If deer find something like paw paw, they'll eat paw paw and then pass the seeds. That is true with a lot of what deer eat. What I find is that having a lick around gets deer hanging around. The next thing you know there's more of what deer like to eat growing around the lick.

SuperCore Tags Out

2010-04-28T11:58:00.000-04:00

For a textbook kind of morning, it was a cold one. 35F. It did not seem to bother the gobblers though.    We were pretty well bundled up as we checked into the blind overlooking the Mother of All Honey Holes. Yes, we'd been there before. Yes, we had not seen much action out there so far this Spring. However, I figured that one side faced East into a pasture that got a lot of early morning sun. If the gobblers needed a spot to warm themselves, there was not any better to be had on the farm. SuperCore was looking for his second bird. I was still looking for my first. The gobblers started hammering as soon as we got settled in.

Mister Moto had stuck to his habit. He was roosted about 80 yards away, just inside the woods. About a half-dozen other gobblers were within earshot. The sun came up. They lingered for a while and then pitched down. Everything went quiet. Drat. It was not even 0700 yet. I did just enough calling to keep the boys on notice that there were hens at The Honey Hole-- nothing to demonstrative-- just a little here and there. I was hoping somebody would come back an cut in on me. Nothing. We settled back, poured a cup of coffee, adjusted the hand-warmers and waited. I have just about written off Moto. He seems to be the kind of gobbler that is stuck on the sound of his own voice, and that is about it.

After a short while, two bucks in velvet came by for a visit. One nearly came into the blind. I clucked a little and that was enough to convince them not to come any further. On the other side, a herd of doe came out to feed in the food plot on our back side. They played around a while and then took off. It was all a nice show, but not what we had come for.

A call came out of the woods to the south of us. It was a deep, clipped yelp. Nothing like what you hear on the tapes. It sounded like a turkey hunter that doesn't quite have the hang of it yet-- very hesitant.   It had the quality of one of those balloon rubber single-reed calls you used to find twenty years ago. Yawk. Yawk-yawk.   Yawk . Yawk-yawk. This is the second time I have heard it this season. It always freezes me, because I cannot quite tell if it is another hunter. This time I let out an improbable string of yelps to answer. It shut her up, at least for a bit. When she turned back on again, she was closer and more insistent, but from where she had moved and how she was calling, I finally became satisfied that we were not being hunted. She kept on calling here and there. I could tell she was moving around, and a hunter would have never been able to move that fast through the cedar thicket she was in-- at least not without sounding like an elephant on a rampage.

Then we got our first sighting. Two jakes came from the opposite direction. They poked their skinny pencil necks up, and then continued on through the pasture. The gobbling had been shut down for over a half-hour by this time. I was not sure what we were going to have come in next. Verale still had his mask down, and the sun was now shining off his white hair and his face. I had him get ready.

The setup we have is a bit over-concealed. There is some kind of sticker bush growing out in front that makes it hard to see both in and out, but there are shooting lanes we've tromped down. We're in the middle of a 10 yard-wide raised fence line with 100-year old oaks providing the bulk of the cover. I usually take the high spot, with my back to an old lighting-struck trunk, so I can get a better view of the overall situation. The other shooter has a nice log to rest his back. I did some feeding calls and used a long stick to scratch in the leaves. By this time, I'd fumbled around and found a hickory striker and brushed up the center of the slate on my Heirloom Double-Barrel pot call. I let loose with the best imitation I could make of the hen I had heard, only I spiced it with a little double-clutch.

Bingo! Two nice shooters came out of the woods to the south and started making a beeline for our end of the pasture.

"Don't move." I hissed. "Two of 'em. Coming in on the right."     SuperCore had his gun barrel pointed in a good direction. I put the crosshairs on the one open spot in the fence line that I could find. The lead gobbler held for a moment and then rushed past the opening. I saw a nice beard, but did not have time for a shot. They were both keying on the sound SuperCore had made as he shifted his feet.    One head came up over the sticker bushes. Then another, about 5 feet to the right of SuperCore. The lead bird clucked and then cake-walked out into the pasture to give himself some room to strut. SuperCore dropped him at 10 yards, just as the bird stuck his head out one last time. I have this crystal picture of the head and neck suddenly disappearing and the bird's tail cartwheeling through the air.

This was a solid two-year old. The spurs looked fresh and untouched from fighting. His legs were lean and his beard was pristine. He looked like a teenager compared to the old boy SuperCore nailed on Monday. SuperCore is now tagged out. He skedaddled back to town to see his girl right after cleaning his bird. His first bird went back with him-- considerably larger carcass even though they both weighed 20 lbs. The new bird was packing a lot more fat on his breast.

I am giving the Mother of All Honey Holes a rest for a day or so. After I finish this, I'm packing up and heading off for Gobbler's Knob for the rest of the day to test my meddle against the grandsons of Mister Natural and Silent Bob. I don't expect to be back before supper.

SuperCore Scores in a downpour

2010-04-26T12:00:00.000-04:00

When I got up this morning, I was hard at work trying to convince myself it just wasn't going to happen. The lady on the weather radio told me it was raining, winds gusting to 25 mph, and 52F. That is not my idea of turkey hunting weather. I went out on the porch and got hit with stinging drizzle-- not even the dogs wanted to go out. SuperCore was not all that enthusiastic either. After a strong cup of coffee, we decided it couldn't be all that bad going out to Midway. At least there we would be in under cover:

Yeah, I know. That isn't exactly my idea of a turkey blind either, but it beats sitting inside. It has windows that open front and back and the shutter opens out like an awning. We went out really early to beat the next band of rain and got settled in. I had the South window; Supercore the North. Along about sunrise one of the big boys sounded off about 70 yards to the West. I waited a while and then let him have a nice run of excited yelps.

Around sunrise +45 Supercore spotted a gob and three hens at 200 yards, hanging out in front of MOHH (Mother of all Honey Holes). They loitered there for a while, and could not decide whether to stay put, wander into the woods, or come down towards the blind. I gave them a little lost call and a few clucks, just above the noise of the downpour and they turned our way. One hen held back and the gob stayed with her, strutting back and forth. Eventually the party moved down towards us and the hens passed by the blind and entered the food plot on my side. About this time Mister Moto started cranking from just on the other side of MOHH and started coming too. I threw some heat out the back of the blind-- didn't faze the hens any, and I got the idea that Moto might be coming in. The gob out in the field picked up the pace as well, and drew closer to the blind.

The gobbler got behind some tall yellow clover, and SuperCore stuck his barrel out through the window and when the gob stuck his head out again, SuperCore let go a salvo of #5 at 25 yards. The hens scattered. Moto went berzerk and turned on his auto-gobble. We saw the wing of the other gob turning over as he rolled down the hill into the woods.

I had SuperCore hole up, rather than go fetch the turkey immediately. We switched places in the blind and I started laying out some aggressive calling. Moto faded at that point, but the calling got the hens that had been scared off from the shot back out into the field. We kept working the scene for another 20 minutes, and finally decided that was all that we were going to see for a while. We left the blind and went to look for the bird.

No gob! We went to where he'd been shot and the pasture was clean. It took about five minutes of looking to find him. At last we located him. The gobbler had flopped and rolled about 20 yards and finally expired in the fenceline leading into the woods. We cleared out of Midway and headed back. The gobbler went a hair over 20 lbs, but SuperCore said it felt more like 40 on the way out. We stopped about halfway back and had a cup of coffee from my thermos.

The bird was a bit of a fooler. In the field he looked like a 3-beard mature gob with good spurs. Even after i got the tape on him, I was still having trouble deciding if it was 2 or three beards. One went just a hair under 11 inches and the other was 7. The third beard? You can see what we were seeing in the pictures, but when I got the beards off and got them straightened out it looked like part of the gobbler's larger beard had been knocked off at some point. There were 11 inch strands and 8 inch strands, but they were all intermingled. It was a huge beard however. The spurs went inch-n-one-eighth on one side and and even inch on the other.

Here's a pic of MOHH. It's in the back right corner of that treeline.

The Blind Squirrel Gets Ambushed -- A Pre-Season Tale

2010-04-10T12:49:00.001-04:00

I got to thinking about things as I was walking out this morning. This is still a week before the Opener here in Kentucky. You're not allowed to use calls. Of course, you can't carry a gun either. Still, this is getting to be one of my favorite times of season. It becomes a matter of "by woodsmanship alone" that a hunter gets in close to turkeys. For some of y'all, that might be anathema, but there are a lot of facets to this sport that are not to everyone's taste.

In the pre-season, one of the keys is that you have to do a lot of listening. The gobblers and hens are doing all the talking. It is a great refresher course in calling, and you end up being schooled by the masters themselves. This morning, for instance, you could hear that the gobblers were not walking on the hens. They did not seem all that hot to get down and breed. However, that was not the case. I was situated such that I could hear a lot of hens. There was at least one in every bunch that was getting hot, but the gobblers themselves seemed to be more interested in gobbling to each other. It turned out that the action was a lot hotter than I would have expected, but the gobblers and hens were all sort of negotiating who was going to come to whom and the result was a compromise. They kind of met in the middle, and the middle just happened to be where I was sitting.

I do not claim to be a master woodsman. I prefer to think of myself as a "blind squirrel" sort of hunter. If you stay at it, eventually you get a few nuts. Today was one of them. I honestly had not expected that much. I went out in brown duck bibs and an old camo M-65 jacket. I was not expecting close encounters. I just wanted to listen, maybe glass a few turkeys ,and go home. The overnight low had dipped down below freezing, and usually that shuts them up good.

I had fun listening to the gobblers come awake. I was at one of my early morning listening posts without much cover, just leaning against a tree and sitting on a boat cushion. Some of the flocks did not call at all before flying down. Some gobblers only gobbled on the roost. One only got to cranking after he hit the ground. By sunrise +:15 it had all pretty well gone dead, and I laid back a little and poured myself some coffee out of the thermos. I was leaning way over to my left to try and catch a listen to some hens that had plopped down on a hillside about 50 yards into the woods when I spied what looked like a bushel basket out in the little clover plot a hundred yards away. I could barely make anything out through the sun, but sure enough there was a gobbler. Then another bushel basket rolled in and then another. Shortly a flock of a half-dozen hens came down from the nearby knob and were making their way towards the clover, when the gobblers all ran out and chased them down into Dead Skunk Hollow.

What the Australian TV dudes all say: "But wait. There's more!" A gobbler came up on my left less than 20 yards out and started cranking. In short order, the gobblers down in Dead Skunk got tired of chasing the girls and came back up on my right and started parading right in front of me. Less than 10 yards out, I had hot steaming gobblers strutting and spitting. I had no face mask. I still had the thermos in my hand. All I could do was stay still and try not to breathe heavy. Next came the hens, including a ( they're not piebald, and they're not albino, what do you call them?) white hen. The gobblers made short work of chasing them away again.

Then I realized what I was seeing. It was the gay gobbler herd from last year! Instead of jakes, they're now 2-year-olds. But they still like each other's company more than anything, and I was getting the full floor show. I suspect the big-guy, the mature gobbler that sort of acted as their ring leader last year was the one just down the hill that I never quite saw. He was the only one gobbling. The rest were all just spitting and drumming. By the time it had all peaked, I had three groups of three gobblers and the ring leader all out there in front of me. They then adjourned to the clover field for a little bit of strutting. One gobbler must have gotten pecked on or something, because I saw him take off and fly down into the creek bottom. Eventually it all started to fade, except for the hens that had now decided to come back out of hiding and feed.

All this took close to an hour to unfold, and I had hardly moved a muscle in all this time. That's a little dangerous at 52, and by the time I could finally move on the boat cushion my one leg had thoroughly gone to sleep. I crawled off in pain trying to get some blood flowing in the leg again and probably sent the hens scurrrying, but at this point I was well past caring.

So what did I bring back from sitting with the Masters? Lots. For one thing, I am ever more convinced that there is something to this idea I keep having that turkeys do a lot of subtle negotiations about who is going to go where after flydown. I wish I knew more about what they're saying, but it seems to go way beyond a simple declaration of each other's relative level of horniness. Second I am flat out amazed that the pattern I described last Spring-- this single sex grouping of gobblers persists now for its second season. I suspect it was the glut of surviving males from the cicada infestation in 2008 that caused it. What I find interesting is that the gay gobblers are still as gay and flamboyant as ever.

I'm sure this is not really what is really going on; I mean they're not really queer. However, I think there is a dynamic here worthy of note. Turkey harvests had been kind declining here locally, and then 2008 came and the turkey numbers exploded. For some reason, they seem to be clinging to these same-sex groupings a lot more than I have ever seen. There is probably a link.

Lastly, I am amazed at how I could just be sitting out in the open in old school camo-- no headnet and holding a shiny thermos of coffee-- and have these birds put on such a show at such close range. I know they saw me, saw the steam coming out of my nose and off the coffee, but for some of the show, they seemed to be actually displaying at me. I've been at this for close to 30 years, but today was something very new.

And a Good Time was Had By All

2010-04-07T06:48:00.000-04:00

There is not a whole lot you can complain about when you finish off a season like this one. Angus had a good time. I had a good time. The turkeys had a good time. Nobody got hurt.

I am starting to count down the number of KY Yute Seasons I'll be hunting. Angus, soon to be 12, is my youngest. You can only hunt as a Yute until 15. #2 son, Moose, turns 18 this year and has to sit on the sidelines with the rest of the grown-ups, waiting for the adult Opener. Every year we go out. Every year we get our butts whipped. Most years we freeze, but we keep coming.

This would have been warm, even for midway through the adult's season. The Saturday Opener was up in the mid-60's at first light. Our early pre-season   scouting forays had been dismal-- nothing but far off gobbles way down in the bottoms. However, there had been a few stray gobblers showing up the past few days leading up to the Yute Opener on Saturday.

Saturday was the first normal day of turkey activity we had seen. It was subdued, but well within what we would expect. Almost overnight, the gobblers had come up on the ridge, the hens had come up, they had regrouped into normal Spring flocks. The gobblers all seemed henned up, and generally unresponsive, but it was nice to see things back to normal. At 0845 a gobbler came out to strut in the field in front of us, but for 20 minutes we could not get him closer than 30 yards. Angus was shooting a 20 GA that patterned well out to 20, but that was about it. Finally the hens at the other end of the field started to move off, and he followed.   We followed too.

We caught up to the gobblers and hens at one of our food plots. A week ago, just our butts moving in the leaves had brought in one of the gobs to SuperCore. Now, doing things right and for real, we could not move two gobblers away from 4 hens munching clover on the other side of the plot. After an hour of fruitless effort we gave up. The weather was starting to turn, and they had been talking high wind and storms. We got back to the porch just before the first of the rain hit. By Noon, we were taking 35MPH sustained winds and rain squalls.

By 5 that afternoon, I woke up from a nap and found a nice fat gob out in the back, about 200 yards from the house, following a wholly uninterested hen. They stayed around for the better part of a half hour.

Sunday was an absolute zoo. I have never heard so many gobblers at once up on our ridge. The place where we set up was smack in the middle of a dozen gobblers, but they were almost all roosting with hens. When the hens flopped down and wandered off, so did the gobblers. There was one half-hearted gobble to our North, but again nothing seemed interested in honoring our calls.

Along about 0915, Angus decided he needed to pee. I knew we had turkeys probably within 80 yards of us at the time. It was going to be dicey, but some things just have to be done.   I turned my attention away from the fields and talked him through handing me the shotgun and then crawling on his knees over to a spot that looked reasonable where he could get the job done without standing up. Angus forgot to pass the shotgun down low and raised the barrel vertical. With that, I heard a noise and turned. There was a gobbler that had just come over the top of the hill to our North and was bearing down on us about 15 yards away at a dead run. He did an about-face and ran back the way he came like we'd tried to set his tail on fire. Oh well.

That was it. Nothing else showed up. We tried a couple other places, including a long wait at the food plot we'd been at the day before. It was getting late, and the kid had to go back for Easter. Angus is still the best young caller I've ever seen. Normally he can call them right to the end of his gun. He'll be back out with me when the adults take to the field in two weeks.

Poacher dragged off from Deer Expo

2010-04-07T06:45:00.000-04:00

Johnny Clay is in big trouble stemming from a 2009 deer he claimed as the #1 bowkill in Kentucky. The problem is that it now seems likely it was poached with a rifle in Ohio. Oooops.

This guy is from just upriver from us in Adams County, Ohio. As I understand the story, Johnny Clay claimed he took the buck on a Lewis County, KY WMA. He had this elaborate story about how he'd arrowed the deer in September and then spent over a week tracking it. When he finally found it, it was all gone but the head.

Later, a neighbor of Johnny's came up with the same deer on his webcam, only this webcam had been on the other side of the Ohio River, back where Johnny lives in Ohio. Ooops.

There had been a lot of controversy over the buck on KentuckyHunting.net. There were a bunch of people that had trouble swallowing the original story. Johnny and his supporters were on there, swearing it was all true.

The whole thing came to a dramatic climax when the CO's carted off Johnny and his deer from their booth at the Lewis County Deer Expo in early March. Johnny is in deep do-do, probably most of all for carting the head across state lines in order to perpetrate the hoax.

If you want more on this soap opera, I can recommend the following reading:

http://www.kentuckyhunting.net/forums/showthread.php?t=92972

and from when the stuff started to hit the fan in January:

http://www.kentuckyhunting.net/forums/showthread.php?t=90625

Illinois man faces animal cruelty charges :: Prairie State Outdoors

2010-04-07T06:43:00.000-04:00

Illinois man faces animal cruelty charges :: Prairie State Outdoors

ST. LOUIS (AP) - Prosecutors say a man from Calhoun County in Illinois possessed and sold DVDs of himself hitting, maiming and killing deer with his vehicle.

The St. Louis Post-Dispatch reported that 38-year-old Jarrod Lee Hayn of Kampsville, Ill., was arrested last week on two federal animal cruelty charges.

A link to Hayn’s Web site (http://www.deergonewild.com) shown last year on Prairie State Outdoors.com drew angry response from numerous readers. The Web site is no longer operating.

Although he had been indicted last month in federal court in St. Louis, the document remained sealed until he was taken into custody.

The DVD at the center of the case is called “The Deer Commander - Sudden Impact.”

Hayn’s attorney, Edward J. Fanning, told The Associated Press on Monday that an appeals court has ruled that the statute under which Hayn has been charged is
unconstitutional. He said the issue is pending before the U.S. Supreme Court.

Prosecutors did not immediately return a phone call seeking a response.

Tim Schweizer, a spokesman for the Illinois Department of Natural Resources, told the Post-Dispatch that the agency’s conservation police worked with federal authorities on the case. “We heard from a number of hunters, both from Illinois and around the country” who had seen the video and complained, he said.

What Is the Hardest Part of Turkey Hunting?

2010-03-28T09:14:00.000-04:00

From Turkey and Turkey Hunting

The hardest part for me? That's changed over the years.

It used to be just finding birds. Then it became finding the time in my life to get out and hunt. Then it became making sense of what the birds were doing. That right there takes you through the first 20 years or so of my life as a turkey hunter.

Now I have my own land, I get to hunt a minimum of about 10 days a year, and even though the turkeys still laugh at me whenever I go out, I am starting to have a glimmer of understanding. Yesterday I was out with Supercore and practiced putting him on a bird-- no calls (KY prohibits calling prior to season), no gun, no nothin'.   BTW: Supercore is also starting to have a spark of understanding on this. It is heartening to see him grow as turkey hunter.

The hardest part for me now a somewhat self-imposed restriction. I have my own 200 acres, and it sort of limits me. Here's how: I'm not sure exactly how many individual turkeys are coming on that 200 acres. You see a flock here. You see a flock there. They're not wearing name tags. I generally go by counting heads and sex. But let say there are 50 individual turkeys that come on my place; that's the biggest number I ever counted in a weekend, so that is the upward limit.

If those 50 turkeys are not in the mood, I can't pick up and go somewhere else. I'm just going to take a rough guess and say there are 12 huntable gobblers and jakes out of them.   If a poacher comes on the property and kills a couple I'm down to 10. There are now 4 hunters sharing the place -- 2 sons and Supercore. That's 10 huntable turkeys for 4 hunters. By the end of the Opener, those turkeys have seen our best stuff. They're now wise to us. Furthermore, these are not captive birds. They float on and off the property, and most of my neighbors hunt as well. Some hunt better than others, and over the course of the few weeks we have to hunt, these gobs get a pretty good idea of what we are all up to. For all the shots you hear on Opening Weekend, there ain't that many birds showing up in the Telecheck register. They've been called to and shot at.

I am somewhat reminded of the cartoon with the Coyote and the sheepdog. Every morning the two meet at the time clock and punch in and go to work. Coyote spends his day trying to nail a sheep. Sheepdog tries to nail the coyote. At the end of the day they grab their lunchboxes trade pleasantries and punch out. That's kind of how it is with me. Somewhere in the midst of it all, I'm supposed to convince one of these well-schooled birds to walk out in front of my shotgun.

I'm sure y'all have it just as bad, especially on public land. I'm not trying to complain. This is 200 acres of heaven. However, I have to realize that my game on one contiguous 200 acre parcel is considerably different than a pro who travels to 5 states, or even a regular guy who hunts 4 50 acre parcels. The turkeys and I are locked in together. This is a turkey hunting cage match. I'm not going to be able to travel 10 days and hit 10 different parcels and give each group my "A" game. "A" game is over on the Opener for me. I have to come up with a new look and feel to my routine every day.

For those of you who look at this as a "by-calls-alone" sort of thing, I see y'all's point. Believe me, I treasure the memory of the days when I thought I could walk out of the cabin with a noble swagger, lay down a couple owl hoots and go to work.   However, somewhere along the past 9 seasons I found I'm not the best caller who can charm two mature gobblers in on the first weekend of season. My realization of the situation changed. In August 1914, the Germans thought they could take Paris in a matter of weeks. 4 years later they realized that wasn't going to happen. This is trench warfare transposed to the rolling hills of the Trans Bluegrass. I try an artillery barrage followed by a lightning break-out. The turkeys counter by mining no man's land. I try tanks. The turkeys resort to gas. Lately, I have suspected the turkeys of trying to tunnel up to my trench lines. I now have the Acme Mfg. catalog in front of me. Did you know they have a Wile E. Coyote signature series of turkey calls?

Finally!!!

2010-03-27T14:46:00.000-04:00

I just sent SuperCore home. He was down this morning scouting with me. As you remember, SuperCore is the longtime friend that I coaxed into deer hunting turkey hunting. This is his first season. KY's Spring Gobbler season doesn't start until mid-April. I just wanted to take him out and let him hear some real turkeys.

As it was last weekend, the morning flydown was a complete bust. We heard a few gobblers, but they were a long way off. About 9, we knocked off and came back to the house to warm up and get some coffee. Morning temps were about 28F when we started. After we'd been sitting a while we went off looking for sign and to see if there might be a quiet flock out trying to get warm in the sunshine.

I had already glassed this one pasture and saw that it was empty, and we went round to some of my blinds in another pasture so that I could show him how just pulling a cedar bough up in front of a tree can be a very effective blind. We were on our way to check out the family campground at the back of the property when I spied some deer out in the same pasture that I'd already glassed over a few minutes before. It was getting on towards 1000 by this time and I guess they had slipped in while I was talking to SuperCore about the blinds. Anyhow, we knelt in the treeline and watched the deer for a while.

Then I saw a big black spot coming across the field. Huzzah! It was a big ol' gob going in and out of full strut. He seemed to have some hens or something over our way that had his interest, and we were lucky to get down and out of sight before he made us. It took about 10 minutes for him to come all the way over. I wish I could have called to him a little, but alas KY forbids mimicking the sound of turkeys from March 1 to the start of season. Still, Supercore and I made enough noise shifting our weight in the leaves, that I guess he heard enough to keep coming. I saw him for a moment. I told SuperCore to get his gun up and. . .

Well, really SuperCore didn't have a shotgun. We were just out scouting. But Supercore did get into his stance behind a cedar and did a good job of performing an air-shotgun with his fingers in the general direction of the gobbler. Sure enough, the gobbler popped out again less than 10 yards away. Supercore would have had him dead to rights. The turkey ducked back down and I whispered to Supercore that the turkey was doing an end-around to check us out. Ten seconds later, that gob poked his head up above the weeds a few yards to the left and SuperCore's trusty phantom shotgun counted coup on the gobbler a second time. By now the gobbler knew something was up, putted, punched his afterburners and took off for the far end of the field, scaring the deer as he went.

Later, as we went back over the exercise I had to admit that I was not a turkey hunting genius. It is never THAT easy, and that in 28 seasons, I had a) never had a gobbler come in on transient noise alone b) never been able to get the drop on a gobbler when I was just out walking and had him strut right up to me c) never had gobbler come up, and examine me so acutely and then come back for a second look d), e) , f). . . bottom line, this had been a gift from the forest and it would be a long time before he got to see the likes of it again.

The one other thing to note: outside of putting after we had been busted, that gobbler never made a sound. He was a dead silent customer. This could be part of the problem with the turkeys, and why I've not been able to get on any in 3 weekends of scouting now. Something may have these boys seriously lock-jawed. The other thing I'm a bit surprised over is seeing a lone mature gobbler out in the middle of a field with no hens. We'll have to see. Next weekend is Yute Season, and Angus will be at bat.

Tomorrow Angus will be going out to spot with me. Moose is coming along too. They'll be arriving soon, and we still have Moose's shotgun to pattern. More later!

Disappointing Scouting Trip

2010-03-27T14:44:00.000-04:00

I originally wrote this last Monday after my first weekend of scouting for the KY Spring Gobbler Season. Since then, I'm hearing back from folks that the general consensus around these parts is that the turkeys are out there, just not up on the ridges and they're not hot and vocal as they usually are this time of year:

March 22, 2010

This is my second weekend down at turkey camp this year. We're in SW Bracken County, KY, up in the Trans-Bluegrass between Cynthiana and the Ohio River. I spent two fruitless mornings-- only a few gobblers sounding off and no sign of hens. Normally my fields are full of turkeys this time of year. The neighbor said he'd only seen a couple since the snow left.

Saturday afternoon, I went out driving. We had to go into town to pick up a few things, and I took the long way, figuring we'd see turkeys along the way-- nada.

It wasn't until we were on the way home, again out riding a back road, that we finally spied a flock-- 5 hens and a gobbler. He was strutting up a a storm down in the bottoms of Snag Creek.

So here are my questions:

1) What's happened to all the turkeys? I'm on a ridge. The roads are mostly on ridges. Are the turkeys hiding in the bottoms or what?
2) This isn't a die-off, is it? I mean, they're still out there, right?
3) Are other folks seeing this, or is this a fairly local thing? It felt like somebody had wound the clock back to 1990.

My one theory on this is that we did not have a good acorn crop last Fall. If the turkeys did not have food, they would have gone somewhere else and that would probably be the bottoms. We're only 2 miles from the Licking River. However, I hope they make up their minds to come back up on my ridge before seasons starts; it could be a long lonely Spring otherwise.

Distance: The Working Comfort Zone -- Pt 2

2010-03-23T07:34:00.000-04:00

From Turkey & Turkey Hunting

flatrock9:

I often wonder why I spend money on choke tubes and high dollar shells that are designed to be shot at extended ranges. I have decided this year that I am gonna get outside my comfort range some. I feel comfortable with what my gun can do out to 50-60 yards. If the opportunity presents itself and I can't get him in my comfort range, I will try a 40-50 yard shot.

See, that's what I'm wondering too. My point in all this is we keep expecting them to show up at 50 yards, and really the gobs are running in much closer. On the one hand, we spend all Winter stewing over those long shots, we get ever-more-expensive ammo to shoot out of ever-tighter chokes and then the darn things pop their heads up at 5 yards and we hit 'em in the head with the wad-- or worse yet, shoot over their heads.

What first really cued me to all this was back when Nitro first starting making a splash. I got into it online with a well-known mfg's pro-staffer over the need for 70-yard-capable ammo. My point wasn't that it was unethical, just impractical. If I showed up with $7/round ammo the turkeys would laugh at me. The pro-staffer was all over me-- I got a good flogging for that one. He even called me an Old-Schooler-- first time I heard that epithet (That was before I came here.)

You know what? A few months later, there he was showing off his gobblers and they were all taken within a normal pedestrian range. I forget the exact numbers, but I think it was inside 25 yards or such. I didn't say anything.

My personal feeling is that there is no great difference in the sport if you bag one at 25, 50, or 75 yards. I know some of you all think differently. The point here is to ask if it's just me or are the turkeys not being fully cooperative in all these extended-range heavier-than-lead baseballs-at-50-yard plans?

Last weekend I was down at the farm, doing a little bit of scouting. I've got a series of rough blinds set up down a fence row, about every 50-75 yards. It wasn't planned that way, but that's how it's come about. The turkeys never seem to cooperate when it comes to being at the right place at the right time. I go hide with my back to Tree X, and they show up in the field 10 yards from Tree Y. I pile some cedar boughs up by Tree Y and they congregate next to Stump Pile Z. Once in a blue moon, I get it right. It hadn't dawned on me until last weekend that I have this near-continuous string of blinds stretching a quarter mile now.

Anyhow, I visited all the blinds last weekend, and looked to see if they needed any work. I got into each blind and sat and then I got out into the kill zone and looked in. Here's my point: standing up in each of these blinds I could see waaaay out across the pastures. Sitting down, I had a horizon line sometimes no more than 25 yards. I forget over the Winter how folded the land is out there. I think pasture=flat. Nope. These are pastures that were cleared by hand by pioneers. Nobody brought in a bulldozer or a grader. Then I got out and looked from the turkey's point of view. Even kneeling doesn't cut it. It's down on all fours. When you get down there, the view to the blind has pretty good concealment all the way to sometimes 10-15 yards. Now remember, this is cleared pasture and food plots. I'm not in the woods yet.

More later, y'all.

For those of you who haven't, grab an envelope and try the exercise for real. You can see, as I was writing it, I surprised myself how close that Working Comfort Zone really is.

The Right to Hunt

2010-03-19T08:12:00.000-04:00

From : The Right to Hunt

Posted using ShareThis

The Right to Hunt
March 19, 2010 - 6:00 AM | by: Douglas Kennedy

Turkey season opened in South Carolina this week, and like years past James Earl Kennamer, bagged a bird the first day. “Hunting is part of my life,” he said, as he waited for a flock early Monday in Estill. “It’s my touch to nature.” But these days when Kennamer straps on his cammo pants and loads his double-barreled Zoli 12 gauge, he can’t help but think of all of hunting’s regulations and limits, and he fears for the future.

“I'm worried about having legislation passed by different entities that want to stop hunting,” Kennamer said as he walked through the swampy woods of the 950 acre Woodstock Plantation, about 40 miles north of Savannah Georgia. “I’m worried they will one day get rid of hunting altogether.”

The lifelong hunter now supports a ballot initiative in South Carolina to change the state constitution and give hunters a permanent “right to hunt.” Kennamer says “It will keep local entities from passing legislation that would stop us from having a place to go hunt.”

That’s exactly what animal rights groups say is the problem with the initiative. “We think there are so many better ways to enjoy nature than killing a piece of it, “ said Ryan Huling a spokesperson for People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA), the main opposition to the initiative in South Carolina. “PETA as an organization exists to remind people that there’s really no difference in abusing cats and dogs to abusing deer and fish. These animals all feel pain in exactly the same way.”

It’s that kind of sentiment from PETA and other similar groups that have recently sent hunters to collect signatures all across the country.

In the last 15 years, “right to hunt” measures have passed in 9 states including Alabama, Minnesota, North Dakota, Virginia, Wisconsin, Louisiana, Montana, Georgia, and Oklahoma (Vermont declared hunting a right in 1777).

PETA has opposed every single one. “If we're going to have the right to hunt and fish,” said Huling. “why not have the right to shop and golf? We're talking about making things that are legal, extra legal for no apparent reason.”

Huling predicts these initiatives will only lead to frivolous lawsuits in the future. “If hunters are going to open the flood gates like this, you're going to see them demanding longer hunting seasons, larger bag counts, lower age limits. There's really no end to this.”

Kennamer calls that “ridiculous,” stating hunters have a vested in interest in small bag counts and age limits. “We want hunting to be around forever, that’s all.”

Hot Wild Turkey Porn

2010-03-17T09:08:00.000-04:00

I lent all my turkey porn to SuperCore, and then I got had a this sudden and insatiable craving for some over the weekend. All my Drury Brothers were over the river at SuperCore, all my good DVD's and VHS tapes. So I decided to go on YouTube and see what I could find.

"Turkey hunting" is a good search string. "Hot Wild Turkey Porn" is not. Yikes.

Distance: The Working Comfort Zone -- Pt 1

2010-03-15T12:27:00.000-04:00

From Turkey and Turkey Hunting
We all have a comfort zone for distance in bagging turkeys. I don't want to talk about ethics, but just personal comfort. It would be a question that would just hard to glean anything meaningful if I just asked you "What is your comfort zone?" Everyone has a different way of looking at it. So here is how I want to frame the question so that we can get some workable data. First off, think about all the turkeys you have shot and the distance they were shot. This is not just about kills, but about shots-- times in which you were confident enough to turn off the safety and let fly. There may be a couple that went a bit too far or that you thought were risky going in. We'll throw those out-- we're not discussing maximum range here. I know there are those of you who have 3.5" guns shooting Nitro's out to 70 yards, and you feel confident with them. That's a different question. This is something different. Take a look at the closest 80% of your shots. What was the distance? We'll call that "Working Comfort Zone."

Was it inside 20 yards? 30? 40? 50? 60?

I think 80% is a comfortable cut-off. If we apply that to my situation, I've got 1 bird in 28 years that I've taken right at 40 yards. Over 60% are inside 20 yards. I'd say the majority were even close-- more like 15 yards. There have been a few in the 30-35 range. The 80% cutoff would probably leave me at 30 yards. it may be closer-- more like 25 yards, but I'm just guessing.

. . . that's stupid. I did the actual calculation and ended up with 14 yards. Yikes! That's closer than I thought!!!

Remember, this has nothing to do with your longest shot or how far your shotgun is set up for. My current shotgun can do at least 50 yards. It can probably to more, but I don't even pattern at that distance.

I posed this question a bit differently a few seasons ago on another forum. What I found out was this: of all the guys who had confidence that their shotguns would pattern effectively out past 50 yards, the maximum distance that 80% of them had taken a shot at a turkey was 43 yards. They might have been already to dance out to 70, but the turkeys were only being cooperative out to a little more than 40. In my situation, I can regularly see turkeys out to 400+ yards on my farm. However, when I'm hunting on the ground from my field edges, the folds of the land knock that down to sometime less than 40 yards. I can stand up and see a hundred or more. If I get back into the cedars that distance goes down even further.

See what this means? For me this means that turkey hunters in general may be pursuing a range that is largely impractical. I am not saying heavier-than-lead loads are wrong or that extended choke tubes are wrong. I'm just saying that the guiding motivation may be all wrong in that the opportunities to take gobblers out past that Working Comfort Zone may be few and far between.

There are a few old farts on here that may be able to give me an amen on this, but I remember back to a time when a good trap gun made a good turkey gun. If you could throw lead out to 40 yards, you had a great gun. Nothing has really changed in all those years, certainly not the turkeys.

My motivation for this is not to be on a soapbox. However, I was working with SuperCore the other day--the guy who I'm outfitting for his first turkey hunt. We got into this discussion. You can pretty much see where I'm coming from on this topic. It got me to thinking. Do I have this wrong? Am I in the minority on this?

Here's how to do the calculation. Quickly jot down all the distances of all the shots you've made. You don't have to be really exact-- just guess. There may be ones you don't want to admit to-- even to yourself. That's okay. Write them all down just count them-- this isn't an average. Let's say you have 20 shots on birds in your lifetime so far. 80% of 20 is 16. Okay, that means knock off the longest 4 shots and give the longest range remaining. Let's try one:

20
10
25 -- longest #4
32 - longest #2
17
18
12
15
25 -- longest #4
51 -- longest #1
22
17
47 -- longest #3
14
6
15
22
21
18
20

20 total shots (count hits, misses-- everything!)

20X .8 = 16 -- That's 16 birds that were certainly in your comfort zone.

20-16 = 4 -- Count off the longest 4 shots. Look for the longest remaining. In this case, I just threw out random numbers, there were two shots at 25 yards. Knocking off one would give you the 80%. Saving the other as the longest remaining one gives you an answer of 25 yards of Working Comfort Zone. Roughly speaking, that means that 80% of the birds this guy flipped the safety on were at 25 yards or closer. That's longer than my numbers, but that is still a chip-shot for even a 2.75" 12 GA shooting normal high-brass pheasant loads out of a modified choke. Heck, you could probably use a low brass squirrel load and get away with it.

Try it and see what number this gives you. My guess is that the number folks get as their Working Comfort Zone is much shorter than what they have their turkey guns set up to do. The next question is: Do we really need to be setting up our guns for these longer distances? What is the Practical Working Limit?

Some Days, It's Like You Don't Know Squat

2010-03-15T08:35:00.000-04:00

From March, 2009

On the way back to the house, I didn't know whether to write this up as a stunning success or a miserable failure. I guess any time the turkeys reveal something to you, it's a victory.

Back in early March, I had Angus out scouting the bottom end of Hootin' Holler. It's one of the larger hollows on our place and dominates the eastern half of the property. We named it so, because the owls frequently nest along the south side. It is also a place that our turkeys frequently use for roosts. Over the Winter, we had a couple wind storms, at least one nasty ice storm, and all this was on top of Ike blowing through in September. On our trip through we found that a lot of the smaller cedars had gotten bent over and although the largest cedars were fairly untouched, the medium-sized cedars had been decimated. On the side of the hollow that runs up to Gobbler's Knob, we took the opportunity to pile up some debris next to a couple of likely looking tree trunks and built ourselves a nice blind.

I went back to visit it this morning. My idea was to just sit and see if I could get a better feel for the goin's-on. Hootin Holler is a key to several of our hunting venues. Although we have not hunted it directly in the past, we frequently hunt the birds as they come out to feed in the adjoining pastures. Why we don't hunt Hootin' Holler outright is a long story in itself, but I'll leave that for later.

Gobbler's Knob has a road that leads close to the top before dropping down to the bottom on the other side where Hootin' Holler Creek empties out into Willow Creek. I use that road to make time when I'm hunting the bottom, and it also was the best way to get to the new blind. Lo and behold, as I got to the top, there was a turkey there to greet me-- up in the top of a tall tree on the other side. Off she went.

I took another few steps and another flew off-- they were so high up in the trees, they had to pitch down to lower trees before finally getting to the ground. The next thing I knew I was surrounded by turkeys, and they were all getting honked off at my intrusion and flying away.

Normally, when you bust a roost, that's the end of it. Not today, not by a long shot. I continued on to the blind and every 50 yards or so, here's another turkey, up in the top of a tree busting out. Bummer. I had counted a dozen by the time I got to the blind and sat down. Then the light came up a bit more, and there I was staring at turkeys on the other side of Hootin Holler. Again, they were in the tops of the tallest trees. Again, each one took a turn hopping down from a tall oak to a cedar and then hitting the ground and running off. After a half hour of this, I was quite demoralized and thought about just going home.

However, I figured I would wait until the last of Hootin' Holler had emptied out. I waited a good hour and a half after sunrise and then started making my way over the cedar debris and headed home. Before I got to the pasture that leads off the front side of Gobbler's Knob and on to the way home, I knocked two more birds off high roosts that I hadn't scared on the way in.

The reason I make this confession is that first I don't know why the turkeys would choose to roost so high in the tallest of trees. Second, I have never seen turkeys so spread out. Usually they're clumped all together in the branches of a dead oak or hickory, usually about halfway down to the bottom of the hollow. If they're not there, they seem to like to camp out in cedars on the lee side of the hollow. If I had to make a guess, I would say the change in roost selection is due to the destruction of the medium-sized cedars. Y'all down there in the hardest hit from the ice storm, Western KY and such, should be looking out for this.

My other guess is that my flocks have exploded, due to the cicadas coming last Spring and giving a boost to the poults' survival. Flocks that used to consist of 4-5 individuals are now trying to cope with 11-15. In some places my flocks have fragmented into 2-3 sub-flocks, roosting near each other. This spreading out may be an extension of that.

This is the second time this year where my attempt at non-intrusive scouting has ended up with massive busts in places I had not expected. The first time I chalked it up to a fluke. Now I'm throwing in the towel-- my ability to predict the whereabouts of my flocks has gone out the window. I'm going to stick to glassing from afar until the beginning of season.

Later:

Well, here's another thing we can add to the "Don't need to try THAT again" Category. The Eastern Wild Turkey does not respond positively to interactions with the Great Highland Pipes. Little Angus, my 10 yr old, is a bit of a bagpipe prodigy. He was practicing his pipes this evening out on the front porch. KYHillChick and I were out on the back of the house enjoying happy hour. Angus cranked up his pipes right about the time the flock of turkeys I busted this morning came out of Hootin Holler and started making their way back to roost across the pasture. Angus let fly with a hearty hornpipe. That stopped them dead in their tracks, necks cranning to see the source of the noise.

No, they didn't try to fly off. No, they didn't run. They just stood there, all 12 of them, and watched. I can't say as they particularly liked the pipes. But they didn't do a scalded cat act either. After a while, they disappeared into the nearby saddle, only to emerge a bit later and a bit closer.

My immature collie, Jay, was about halfway to them by this point, and just after they poked back up, Jay came bounding in at them. About this time Angus came around the house and the turkeys made an orderly exit towards the back side of Gobbler's Knob. Normally a dog, a human, and a bunch of paraphernalia in his hands would have been enough to get turkeys to take off in fifty different directions at once. I'm not about to declare the Great Highland Pipes a turkey attractant, but . . .

. . . as I said: we'll file that one under "No need to try THAT again."

Coming back to Camp/ On Locator Calling

2010-03-07T08:41:00.000-05:00

This may be weird to y'all, but there is nothing that quite compares in my life to being away from camp for 2-3 months and then coming back in. I spend the whole winter fretting about the place. It's weathered ice storms, tornado and so on, and it is always such a relief to see it. In the time away I've had to deal with the holidays and the stresses of life at the plant. I really get to missing the place.

What's more, there is a perfect time capsule of the end of deer season waiting for me, right down to the paperwork for the taxidermist and the processor. In between coming through the door and getting the first fire lit, I see where my life was when I walked out and it shows me how much has changed.

It's getting so the first trip back in late Winter is more than Christmas, and the there is nothing quite like the feeling I get when the water's back on, the fire's built and the bags are in from the car, and I can finally go out back to my spot and look out over the fields bathed in moonlight and take that first sip of good scotch. In a little while, I will have to get the grill going and put the steaks on, but for that one brief bit of time, I can be at peace with the world.

. . . but so much for that.

You know, I seem to learn more about turkey hunting just sitting on the back of the house in the morning than anything else this time of year. Take this morning for instance. I went out at 0630. Sunrise was at 0700. I owled and got nothing and started owling every 5 minutes or so.

0635 -- First gobble. It came from Dead Skunk Hollow. Not only was it the first of the morning. It sounded miserable-- clipped and garbled and. . . then I got to thinking. This guy was not gobbling the previous morning. This might be this turkey's first gobble ever. About this time the crows cranked up and a barred owl down in another hollow close by the house started up.

0650 -- The crows came over and mobbed the owl. The owl turned himself inside out with a chuckle, but it took a good long time for a second gobbler to sound off. This one was way down in Hootin' Holler.

0700 -- Sunrise. Everything was quiet.

0710 -- Geese started up from the Linking River bottoms. Both the first and second gobblers responded. This is the second year in a row I've heard winter gobblers responding to geese over crows and owls. Remember that guys: goose honkin' may be an ace in the hole as a locator. The geese moved up Willow Creek and then settled into a place in the bottoms nearby. This in turn set off everything-- turkeys gobbled, crows, owls. Finally the coyotes, a ridge or more over to the north, chimed in. This lasted for 5 minutes and then everyone suddenly decided to shut up and get on with their day.

Turkey Camp Reopens

2010-03-06T12:16:00.000-05:00

The Hole in the End of the Stump Turkey Camp officially reopened yesterday for the 2010 KY Spring Gobbler Season.

Good news:

The lights, the phone, and the water came back on without a hitch. I also got a cell signal on the first try.
There were no dead mice
There were no signs of live mice

Bad news:
The back door blew off one of the barns, but that is no big deal.
No Turkeys-- at least they weren't out with a banner to greet me.

Tomorrow I'll get down to the arduous task of sitting at my shooting bench, sipping coffee in the cold pre-dawn and owling off the front porch when it gets about a half-hour to sunrise. From there I'll venture to the back of the house and listen for Blythe's flock to come down off their roost. I don't expect to hear any gobbles for a week or two, but you never know. It's a dirty job, but somebody has to do it. I should at least hear Blythe and the rest of the hens squabble a little over who's going to lead the morning procession up to the stock pond.

Weather,etc. permitting we will be opening the official T&TH table at Roosters this Saturday night. If you don't know who we are, ask Orey, Joanie, or Frank to point us out.

At 5 minutes to sunrise this morning, a gobbler sounded off. He wasn't on my property, but it's a good sign anyway. My guess this is Mister Moto, my year-round gobbler. He was still gobbling when I left him at the end of deer season. He has a cedar thicket and a little spot of pasture over on the neighbor's property. I 've tried to call him over a couple of times, but he does not want to cross the creek. This morning, he had a buddy that joined him. He was even further out. They shared a few gobbles together as the sun was rising and then gave up. It was 27F-- I couldn't blame them.

I owled when I first got out this morning and did so again about every 5 minutes until Moto got cranked up. One thing that impressed me was how upset it made the crows. After about the third barred owl call, the crows started yacking and one came directly overhead. He then let out a string of calls and this brought even more crows. Pretty soon, I had crows for as far as I could hear going off and these in turn set off the roosters way over at a farm on the next ridge. When Moto finially joined in, it wasn't from my owling, but from the hub-bub created by the crows.

My point in bringing this up is that we have all gotten to talking about locator calls recently. I think it's important to understand how much a little bit of owling or crow calling can have a powerful effect on the woods. I really set the whole end of the county off this morning. More and more I am restraining my locator calling and focusing on just listening. I see this at home too. I'll go out on the back porch as I'm drinking my first cup of coffee and sound off with an owl or a crow, or a hawk. The next thing I know I've got the whole neighborhood cranked up. Try it, the next time you're on your way out to work in the morning-- let off a few locator calls and see what it does. Even in fairly urban neighborhoods you'll see what I mean. You can get every bird in a half-mile radius in a tizzy.

I heard one batch of hens this morning way down in Hootin' Holler. They weren't feeling very vocal, and flopped down without much fanfare and disappeared. It'll be warmer over night tonight. We'll see if that gets them a bit more active.

____________

Interesting threads on KentuckyHunting.net

2010-02-25T07:48:00.000-05:00

I found two interesting thread on KYHunting.net regarding big bucks in KY and IN:

http://www.kentuckyhunting.net/forums/showthread.php?t=91957 -- Is Indiana going to overtake Kentucky as a trophy state?

http://www.kentuckyhunting.net/forums/showthread.php?t=91941 -- What single reason makes Kentucky a trophy state

The general consensus is that KY's rise in antler score can attributed to going to a 1-buck limit. The proposition that Indiana is overtaking Kentucky is arguable. The original statement came from an IN official.

I agree that the 1-buck limit has probably done the most for KY's herd than anything else. When I hunted Indiana back in the early 90's I was seeing much bigger and better bucks in places like Dearborn and Switzerland counties. KY was a spike-n-fork type of scene. In those days you could take 2 bucks in Kentucky.

I would not agree that 1-buck limits are a pancea. I think it was a good call for the state and for the time. There is also some talk about KY's poaching problem. I agree; it has a major impact on the herd. I don't know how it stacks up with other states.

Scouting for Turkeys -- PT 2

2010-02-25T07:03:00.000-05:00

Scat, feathers, dusting bowls, etc. are all icing on the cake for me. There are two signs that tell me there are turkeys around: tracks and scratches. I look in creek bottoms and along roads and tracks. If there are turkeys about, you'll see tracks in the mud. If these are not forthcoming, I look for scratchings in the leaves. I'm not saying the others are useless, but . . .

Scat and feathers: Turkeys leave them everywhere. They are a great bonus/
Dusting bowls: Around here, they don't start dusting seriously until after season ends. For dusting, you need bugs. Bugs don't really start bugging my birds until after the temps get above 70F on a regular basis.

What's good about tracks is that you can concentrate your search along a structure-- creek or road or field edge, and if there are turkeys about, you'll find a track. A freshly plowed field is a magnet for turkeys, and you can pick up their tracks at the edges.

Scratchings are okay, but they will actually keep for quite a while. Scratching made in December will still be there in March. It is hard to tell sometimes how fresh they are. Tracks on the other hand can be easily read as long as you know about the precipitation pattern over the past 2 weeks or so.

One backup scouting trick I can recommend for my area is to look for clover. In the Spring, my turkeys are big on clover. Their craws are filled with it. If there is clover and their are turkeys, you'll have scat, feathers and the works all through the patch. If there is lots of clover and no turkey sign, the area holds no turkeys.

The greatest gift you can have in the Spring is one of those slow-approaching thunder bumpers. If you can get out and and listen, the gobblers will sound off in response to the approaching thunderstorm. In 10 years at the farm, I've only been able to use this a couple of times. The best seems to be a late afternoon storm or one at sunrise. However, if I knew a storm was coming and I had an area to scout, I'd be out in the truck, driving around listening.

BTW: Don't do this without a vehicle. You want something safe to dive into before the storm gets too close. Also be careful not to drive out into a field or down a hill or something that will get to slick for your vehicle to get back out.

Scouting for Turkeys -- PT I

2010-02-25T07:00:00.000-05:00

First off, I'd go out to a place and walk it during daylight and check for sign:

1) Tracks and scratchings
1) Feathers
3) Scat

As a rough rule of thumb, if you find turkey sign, you'll be within earshot the next morning of some turkeys on the roost. If you have the time, hunt around in the surrounding woods. You may find a roost, with a large helping of feathers and scat around it. If you back off and wait until late-afternoon, you might catch them coming back to the roost.

The next morning, go to the spot you found the sign and stand patiently beginning about 45 minutes before sunrise. By ten minutes after sunrise you should have heard something. Up here along the Ohio River, our gobblers don't start gobbling reliably until mid- March, but the hens are sounding off every morning. Wait until well after flydown and spend your time marking where the sounds are coming from and what directions the turkeys go after they come off the roost. You may or may not find a roost tree on the previous afternoon's scout. After the birds come off the roost, look around for it.

My method of scouting is less invasive than others. I don't use locator calls. I hunt in an area of farms, and there are enough natural sounds to make turkeys sound off on their own without further encouragement. It just requires patience. I also feel that crows, hawks, owls--owls especially, and woodpeckers are a good bellweather of turkeys. If I have a good year for owls on my farm, it's usually a good year for turkeys too. The same goes for coyotes. Crows? I don't know why this is, but when I hear crows calling in the morning I usually know turkeys are close by.

Before I hunted where I am now, I used to hunt in the Big South Fork region of KY/TN where it was about 90% public land. This was a completely different gig. The way I scouted was to go back on the gravel roads at sun-up and drive a couple minutes, and listen, drive a couple minutes and listen. The idea was to cover as much area as possible, listening for turkeys. After that, I'd get out and go look for sign-- usually there would be a spot along the road with a track or two and then I'd go from there. Then I'd mark up a topo map with all the info. Every turkey gobble I heard, I shot an azimuth with a lensatic compass and estimated the distance from the GPS waypoint I marked.

One reason I gave this up is that I'd do all this scouting and then come the Opener, I'd drive out to these spots and find every turn-out filled. The local guys had been doing the somewhat same thing as me.

During these trips, I used a barred owl call until the turkeys were off the roost, and then I would switch to a crow call. Once the sun comes up, you can get the local crows going by doing a wounded-crow or fighting crow or crow distress call. The crows in that whole area may respond and that in turn will set off otherwise recalcitrant gobblers left and right.

The shamanic Nuclear Option:

A bird watcher gave me a trick years ago for calling in every bird in the area:

1) Hawk call
2) Crow call -- That "Come here!" call
3) Squeak. Kiss the back of your hand like a small animal getting attacked.
4) Crow alert call followed close on by the Wounded Crow
5) Pish -- pishing is the sound a lot of little birds make when there's trouble in the woods. You just blow through your teeth and "Pish! Pish! Pish!" -- you do that a few times and then go silent.

What you've done is painted a sound picture of a predator coming into the woods, and gotten a curious crow interested. A crow goes to investigate and gets into trouble, and then alerted all the little birds that there is serious trouble. Crows, woodpeckers, hawks-- you name it will all come to investigate along with every other bird in the forest. I'm fairly certain I could go out right now and pull one of these runs off in my back yard in the burbs and have a murder of crows or a phished-off hawk close-in within 10 minutes. What this does for the turkey hunter is cause such an unholy ruckus in the woods that turkeys are bound to sound off if they're in the area. It have also seen it draw in curious deer and coyote-- you name it. This is also a fun trick to play in a public campground right around breakfast time.

Mistakes Made While Turkey Hunting.

2010-02-19T12:58:00.000-05:00

There's very little I feel I do right in turkey hunting. I don't think I'm an expert on the birds, I'm not that good a caller. I know my own birds pretty well, but mostly they give me the slip and stand there laughing at me. Wherever I have the barrel pointed, the gobbler always seems to show up somewhere else and usually it is from a quarter where I will have a devil of a time getting turned around. I misjudge distances and time. I fall flat on my face when I'm trying to be sneaky. I miss easy shots. The list is endless. They say hunting turkeys under modern rules is the hardest game in North America. I believe them.

You would be better off asking when have I gotten it right? The answer would be seldom, and those rare times stand out like crystals of shining brilliance on the face of abject muck. It is hard for me to reconcile those successes with the rest of my turkey hunting career. It is as though somebody else did them.

But that's not the point. I got into this sport for a whole other reason. It became clear early on that I was not going to be a great turkey hunter. It took me several seasons before I could even blow a mouth call. It took me years to even get a bird into shooting range, and more to get a shot. I missed. It took years before I had another shot. That was not the point.

There is a church up on a hill east of Downtown here in Cincinnati where every year the faithful come out on Good Friday and crawl up the stairs from Downtown to the top of Mount Adams reciting the rosary. All told you have to go up 150 steps. Nobody keeps score. Nobody hands out trophies. The only people that know how or why they did it are the people who do it. Most of those people have no clue why I hunt turkeys, but I know why they go up those stairs. I am a turkey hunter.

KYHillChick had a music professor back in college that told her, "Anything worth doing is worth doing mediocre." She never understood the prof. It always stuck in her craw. She told me and I understood right away.

It is not like I gave up trying. In fact, you can see a general progression over the years. I have gotten better. In fact I am running out of room to hang turkey fans. I have several in the freezer I am not going to get to for a while. It is not like deer hunting for me. I've gotten deer hunting down to where I can pretty much get a deer in the scope anytime I go out. Turkey hunting is and probably always going to be a supreme struggle for me. Mastery is not even a pipe dream when it comes to turkeys, and I prefer it that way.

I want something in this world that is always going to be a struggle for me, something that I can always be a rank beginner no matter how long I do it, and something that never gets routine and never gets boring. I always want to have the turkeys laughing at me. I want something that is ultimately futile and appears ultimately ridiculous in my life, and I want to practice it until I die. I want to be a turkey hunter.

TreeRooster's Tale-- The Annual Safety Post

2010-02-18T10:55:00.001-05:00

From TreeRooster at Turkey And Turkey Hunting Forum

In the spring of 2005, I had just finished a turkey hunt in Colorado with my friend James a couple days earlier. James headed to Kansas for another hunt and I was on the road to Black Hills of South Dakota. As I drove near a cell phone tower my phone beeped. It was a message from my wife. In an emotional and broken voice she said; “Gary call me, Fred shot James”

James was hit with a Remington #5 Hevi-shot from approximately 40yds (shooters estimate). He was just getting up from a calling position and was in full camo, including face mask and gloves. He had at least 139 hits. One was within millimeters of an artery to the brain. One or Two passed through his lung. Two are, to this day, lodged in his heart.

Below are his Xrays

Let me get up on the soap box for a minute;

My job as a tree climber has some inherent dangers in it and when I first started learning to climb trees my boss said, "Gary, there are 2 times when you will be a danger to yourself. When you are afraid, and when you think you can't get hurt". I think the 2nd situation applies to us turkey hunters. If you think you can't get shot, for whatever reason, you are a danger to yourself. If you think you could never shoot someone, you are a danger to others. James was shot by his BIL that had over 40 years experience hunting and he was shot on private land.

Just like driving we can hunt defensively;

Always assume someone else could be in the woods with you, even if no one is supposed to be there.

Set up your decoy so if someone were to shoot it, the shot would not hit you. Use folds in the terrain, a tree as a block, or plenty of open ground behind the decoy.

Think about hunter orange (hat or flagging tape). Maybe while carrying your bird out, or possibly even a flag at your set-up. You don’t have to use it but at least asses the situation.

TreeRooster: That was a heart wrenching story, but I'm so glad you posted it. If you don't mind, I'd like to reprint your post on my weblog.

Last year about this time, we got into a similar discussion, and I caught a bunch of heat over my assertion that a frightening number of turkey hunting accidents come from long-time veterans shooting other hunters in mistaken-for-game accidents, and that the average experience was about 8 years as opposed to 2 years afield for comparable deer hunting accidents.

Veteran turkey hunters do not realize that it is their own experience that makes them dangerous. They really and truly "see" a turkey. Fan Club 's story about the guy shooting into the bush is a sharp contrast-- an inexperienced deer hunter hears a noise and fires. Turkey hunters' minds actually synthesize a turkey out of what they're seeing. Perpetrators overwhelmingly are certain they saw a turkey, and are convinced the accident came from shooting through the gobbler and hitting the victim on the other side. The forensics tell a different story. Most times the hunter sees a turkey where there is none. His brain, experienced with several seasons of dealing with the chaotic nature of the woods, synthesizes a turkey. Guys have been shot as close as 8 yards from this sort of occurrence.

Once you realize that, you're on your way to being safer. As a turkey hunter you are somewhat powerless to control the problem from the shooting end, the best way to tackle this is by hunting defensively. TreeRooster, you are dead on. It is the recipient of the shot that has the best chance to avert this sort of thing.

1) Hunter Orange: On the Opener and when I hunt public land, new land, or near my own property line, I wear an orange baseball cap when I'm out moving around. The turkeys are going to run away at 450 yards whether I'm in full camo or not if they catch me moving. That's not the issue. The problem is getting another hunter's attention, and letting them know there is a human out there. I put the cap away when I'm set up, but it might be a good idea to hang it on a bush or up in a tree by your set-up.

2) Eschew Red White, and Blue: Turkey hunters see a brief peek of a red sock-top, or a bit of white underwear and something inside their head manufactures a whole gobbler. Red, white, and blue are the three colors that experienced hunters key on. Those are the three colors you must keep off your kit.

3) Decoys: Be very careful in laying your decoys out.

4) Big trees: Always try to put a tree at least as wide as your shoulders at your back. If the hunter comes in and sees you head-on, you can possibly warn him. It's the guys coming up on your blind side that you won't be able to give a heads-up to.

5) Gobble calls: Tell me, is there anyone out there that has luck with gobble calls? My personal feeling is that they're well-nigh useless. Dangerous? You bet.

6) Stalking: We've been round and round about this. I've been on my belly a few times. I personally see nothing wrong in putting a strategic sneak on a gobbler to get a better angle. However, I'm doing it alone, mid-week of season on my own property, and there's no one around for a half-mile in any direction. Some guys say this isn't being safe enough. One thing I gotta say: you're not going to fool a gobbler if you try to deliberately close the distance on him in the woods , thinking you'll get the drop on him. He will see you long before you see him. Dangerous? You bet. This is a major cause of accidents, or at least it was before Hunter Ed starting making an impact. The problem is that the hunter is all keyed up to do a snap-shot on the gobbler. His sensibilities are on a hair trigger. He sees a flash of color (some guy wiping himself with a handkerchief at 10 yards) and . . . you get the idea.

Last year we had a bunch of guys, seemingly experienced hunters, who argued against all this

a) Thought it could never happen to them
b) Thought anyone who would shoot at something that wasn't a turkey should be barred from the woods
c) Thought that anyone who went out into the woods unable to distinguish between a red sock flashing and a gobbler's head should stay at home and watch cartoons.

These are the kind of guys who shoot other turkey hunters. It's okay for them to be the way they are. I'm not saying they're all that wrong. It is inconceivable for me to think that I'd kill another turkey hunter, or that my brain would synthesize a whole living turkey out of nothing. Still, the stats say that is exactly what happens. You need to be defensive. Don't argue the point that it's only some doofus that would take that kind of shot. If you've been in the woods more than 8 seasons, you're the doofus.

The Forgetful Deer Hunter

2010-02-16T04:27:00.001-05:00

I once left my release at home. Luckily I had a shooting tab in the case.

I've left the black powder at home before the ML Opener. Luckily I had a spare pound at the farm.

I've left ammo at home, but I had a spare rifle handy.

I've left my safety harness home a couple of times. I didn't realize it before I got into the stand. I just sat quietly until it was time to go in.

I once left my boots behind on a backpacking trip. Luckily I had an old pair of work boots in the trunk that did me just fine for the trip.

I've been so absent minded during my life outdoors that I actually plan to forget things. Most of the time I forget something. Most of the time I have a back-up.

One of the more irritating parts of having a year-round deer camp is that I can never remember if something is back in the city or down at the farm. If it turns up missing, I don't know where it went missing. As a result I have to start six months ahead of time getting ready for a given season. Most of what I'm taking turkey hunting has already been put in a trunk down at the farm during deer season. Most of what I'll use during deer season is stashed away during turkey season. It leaves me 6 months to sort out the unknowns. Thing like license holders, and skinning knives that move between seasons have to be stored according to certain rules. I keep everything stored where it was last used. For instance, my hunting license and buck knife are stored in my turkey bag until Squirrel Season. Then they're put in my squirrel bag. When I deer season comes in, they get put in my deer bag. That's another thing I do: Every season has a bag-- except coyote. Coyote has a waterproof box with the electronic call and the speaker already inside. If I find something that I lost, it goes in the appropriate bag until I need it.

Everything has a hat too. This sounds a little obsessive/compulsive, but it's not. It's actually just handy. If I lose my turkey hat, I have a squirrel hat or a deer hat to fall back on. You get the idea.

I learned back in grade school that I had a penchant for misplacing things. Therefore, there are some thing that I found it was easier to just buy enough that it never much. Combs-- there's a good one. I bought so many cheap combs that I never had to worry about having a comb to put in my pocket. One day I decided to find all the combs I had-- filled up the top of my dresser. I do the same thing with some of my hunting gear. I can't tell you how many grunt calls I have.

Another trick is to always buy the exact same thing over and over again. Take socks. If you buy the same socks over and over again, you never have to worry about putting together a pair.

Guns and ammo. I usually have the ammo pre-positioned at deer camp well before season starts. I leave it there after I'm done sighting in. Before that, I always tried to pack ammo and rifle together-- not in the same container, but at the same time. Rifle goes into the case; Ammo goes into the suitcase. Important rule: always put at least one magazine in with the rifle. There is nothing quite so useless as a Rem 742 with no magazine on Opening Day.

There was something else I was going to say, but . . . I forgot. I'll see if I remember later.

Afternoon Turkey Hunting

2010-02-12T06:55:00.000-05:00

There are some states that ban the hunting of turkeys in the afternoon. The feeling is that it puts too much stress on the birds. This leads folks to wonder if hunting turkeys in the afternoon is such a good thing. My feeling is that it probably makes no great difference. I would not be too worried about perturbing the turkeys through afternoon hunting. I am forever bumping turkeys, and it never seems to change their habits. We have an extended back yard. Here's some pictures of it:

Pooh Corner-- the shamanic thoughtful spot

In the evening, I can be on the back of the house with KYHillChick sipping our cocktail and have turkey coming from all sorts of directions. They come up towards the house and all of a sudden catch sight of us and spook. A day or so later, they're back. We have one flock that roosts within a hundred yards of the house. They are by no means tame. They are by no means accustomed to our presence. Every time they see us it's like we're breathing fire and biting the heads of poults. Still, they keep coming back.

Another situation I can point to is the habit these birds have of roosting on the shooting rails of my buddy treestands. Every few years, a flock will decide my treestands are the best place to roost. Now you would think these birds would have enough of it after the first time I climbed up the ladder in the dark. Fact of the matter is that they usually wait until I'm fully up the ladder before busting, and once they've taken a fancy to my treestand, the process has to repeat itself over and over to the end of deer season. Meanwhile, I have to put up with the filth and the fright.

Check out this Blog--Treestandguide.com

2010-02-10T05:48:00.000-05:00

I want y'all to go check out Scot Manaher's new weblog, http://treestandguide.com/

Scot is Scotman on the Deer & Deer Hunting Forum. I've been quite impressed with what he's had to say there, and I'm happy to see he's found his muse.

Tell him the shaman sent you.

My First Turkey Hunt

2010-02-07T10:33:00.003-05:00

My story started about this time of year back in the early 80's. I was sitting around the kitchen table with my buddy, John. I was grousing about the fact that my first deer season had ended, and I was going to be bored until next Fall. John said he would help me find a spot to hunt for next year and called an old friend of his that lived over in Hocking County.

Gordon owned 80 acres of orchard on Rt 93, south of Logan. The freeze of 73 had killed off most of his trees, so he'd had to resort to some interesting alternatives that grew on the property. A lot were jellies and such made out of things like dandelion, sassafras, rose hips. He sold them all from a barn market out at the road.

Gordon answered John's call, and after a short introduction, John handed the phone to me. Gordon said I was welcome. The deer always came along and knocked the fruit off the trees and the turkeys would knock the blossoms off in the Spring. I was welcome to whatever I wanted.

Turkey? Hmmmm. I had never thought about turkey. I looked up the subject in a book and then read about them in the Ohio Hunting Rules. I had to apply for a tag by mail. Within a few weeks, I'd borrows my Dad's Win Model 12 trap gun, thrown together some camo, and gone out looking for some calls and ammo.

I ran into a guy at the Sportsman's Headquarters in Sharonville one Saturday. I'm still trying to figure out if it was Dick Kirby himself. The guy put a Quaker Boy Grand Old Master box call and some mouth calls and a Benn Lee tape and gave me some encouraging words.

I went hunting with another buddy of mine, Big Bob. Bob had a heck of a time getting out the door that weekend-- spent half a day looking for a shotgun it turned out he'd lost. Then we had to go to a buddy of his to borrow a 12 GA O/U. We finally hit Gordon's farm about 11 PM that night, set up a tent and went to sleep. Well, at least Bob did. Bob snored like buzz saw.

The next morning, we got up and out at first light. I whipped out my box call in a likely spot, a stump pile overlooking a large creek bottom. Halfway through my first run of yelps I had a gobbler answer me. I was hooked for life. Bob pointed in another direction and wandered off. I chased the birds all morning down in that creek bottom-- had no idea what I was doing. Legal hunting ended at Noon. At about 1130, I was camped out in some thick bushes overlooking a small pond. A hen stuck her head out for a brief moment and then took off. That was it. Hunt over.

Bob had found a stump and smoked cigarettes for about an hour and then gotten bored. I found him up with Gordon, swapping yarns. We packed up and headed back to town.

Educating SuperCore

2010-02-04T07:15:00.000-05:00

Supercore made it over to the house yesterday for some tutoring. Now mind you, I used to work for this guy when I taught at the local college, so I felt the need to do this right.

Supercore brought a couple of candidate shotguns, but neither had the right stuff. Then he mentioned that he had a Mossberg 500 laying around home. That's probably going to be the one. I'm going to meet back up with him over the weekend.

I lent him a bunch of books, including Ray Eye's
Practical Turkey Hunting Strategies: How to Hunt Effectively Under Any Conditions

I also gave him the DVD of T&TH last year, all 7 issues for supplemental reading.

We watched my VHS copy of J. Wayne Fears   Hunting the Wild Turkey-- it's been out of print for probably 20 years, but it's still the best beginning turkey hunting tape out there. I raised two sons on that tape.

He also walked away with some Ben Lee cassettes and Spittin Feathers 1 and 3, a Dixie Darling box call and a Quaker Boy pot call, all on loan.

Then we hit Bass Pro.   I wanted to make sure SuperCore had at least a couple of easy mouth calls, and a crow call and some box chalk.   There weren't any big bargains on the other stuff, but I was able to show him things like choke tubes and sights and such, so it was not a huge waste. Honestly, I think he may be better off talking to Heirloom Turkey Call -- the prices aren't that far off from all this blister-packed industrial stuff, and he'll end up with better calls.

We had a good time at the ammo display, comparing prices between Remington Nitro-Mags and Hevi-Shot. Then I mentioned Nitros. It didn't sink in at first that I was talking about $7/round ammo.

For additional gear, I've recommended WingSupply.com.    Of course, I'm going to recommend that he eschew a vest and go for the $14 shamanic turkey bag from WIBag.com

I figure the next step is some early pre-season scouting in a month or so-- get him out right about the time the gobblers first start sounding off in the morning. By then, he'll have at least an idea from the tapes and such what he's seeing and hearing.

So what else do I need to cover? SuperCore is lurking here. Your advice is welcome.

How to keep your feet warm?

2010-02-02T13:35:00.003-05:00

I start off with a liner. Wigwam makes good liners, but you can substitute a Walmart white dress sock.

Next comes a RedHead wool blend hunting sock. It has a thick pile.

After that comes my Browning hunting boots. They're an all-leather boot sealed with beeswax. They have Thinsulate insulation. I forget how much. KYHillChick calls them my Herman Munster boots. If there's snow on the ground, I switch to a waterproof pac boot with a thick felt liner.

After I get on the stand I slip on boot blankets:

This gets me down into the low 20's comfortably. If it gets colder than that, I'd dump a chemical heat pack in each boot blanket.

One thing that also helps is isolating your feet from the platform of the stand. My stand is made of expanded steel mesh. It makes a great heat sink. When it gets cold I take a second butt-pad-- one to sit on, and one to stand on.

Warning: Be very careful. I had the mishap several years ago of accidentally tying my laces too tight. I was using a different mix of sock, and I guess I got carried away. After 4 hours on the stand, I realized I'd lost all feeling in my feet. I'd started to freeze my feet before, but never up in a tree. Down on the ground, the answer is simple-- build a fire. Up in a stand? Hmmmm. If you can't feel your feet, how are you going to get down? If you take your boots off in the stand, how are you going to get your feet warm? What I ended up doing was loosening my laces, pulling off the over-sock, dumping a heat pack into the boot and then lacing back up. There was enough room for me to wiggle my toes and get the circulation going again. Down on the ground I was able to walk it off. This incident convinced me to buy the boot blankets.

Hints: If your have chronically cold feet and hands, look at a warmer hat. Those chemical handwarmer packs? Don't use them on your hands, put them in your coat as close to your heart as possible. I stick mine in the front pocket of my bibs. It warms the blood circulating through your heart and then that warms your extremities. If one is not enough, put a second under your hat. If your hands get cold, put them between your legs-- bare skin to bare skin. The best way to have warm feet is to keep your core and your head warm.

Who's a Turkey Expert?

2010-01-22T05:01:00.001-05:00

From Turkey and Turkey Hunting

I'll stand up and raise my hand. I am a turkey hunting expert. There isn't anyone alive who knows my turkeys better than I do. However, that only covers 200 acres of ground in the Trans-Bluegrass of Kentucky. Of course, even I occasionally leave a tag unfilled, and most days I get skunked, so I guess you can all just thank me for sharing and I'll sit back down. Nevermind. Sorry.

The point of it is, you might think I was an expert turkey hunter if you came out to my farm and we went out together. I'd seem to know exactly what was going on in the turkeys' heads and I'd seem to have an uncanny sense for where they would be and what they would do. However, what you would not realize is that I've been doing it over and over on the same turf for almost a decade, and it is nothing more than having a good memory. Turkeys, given the same piece of terrain do pretty much the same thing, year to year and generation to generation. If you dragged me off my home turf and put me some where else, I'd not do so well.

There are a few times I've hunted with an expert here and there-- even a minor legend. This is nothing against any of them or against any of the current experts and legends out there. It's just that everyone takes time to get used to the situation on the ground and adapt what they know to what is at hand. Some guys have a broader range of experience, but the turkeys are capable of laughing at us all equally.

We have had some serious self-styled experts on here. Some of them even had acolytes that would sing their praise. If you got down in the weeds with it, you would figure out sooner or later they were really good at timing. One expert on here talked about going out and taking the turkeys' temperature, and if it wasn't right for his taste, he'd go home and wait a day.

Having my own 200 acres is both a blessing and a curse. On the one hand, I have my own plot and I can control who hunts it. On the other hand, if the turkeys are having an off day, so am I. I can't pick up and go somewhere else. What it forces me to see is the whole evolution of my season as it unfolds. I can tell you for a fact that there are maybe less than 5-7 days in our 3 week Spring Gobbler Season where my gobblers are really open to being called off the roost, called away from hens, or susceptible to run and gun. On the other hand, those 5-7 days are usually incredible. Anyone out on those days with a modicum of experience would think themselves a turkey hunting genius. Gobblers come from 500 yards off. Gobblers pitch down off the roost and fly right to the end of your barrel. Gobblers stop strutting in front of hens and run right to you. Even I get to thinking I'm an expert.

The big difference between me as a turkey hunter back in the early 80's and me the turkey hunter of 2010 is that I've now seen that bigger picture. I'm not THAT much of a better caller. I'm not THAT much of a better woodsman. I don't make as many boneheaded moves, but given the chance I can still make the turkeys laugh.

DIY Hale Bale Blind

2010-01-21T10:10:00.001-05:00

On page 35 of the March 2010 D&DH magazine, Les Davenport's article has a full-page picture of a DIY hay bale blind. I was wondering what went into it, and went looking on the web. I found 2 sites:

Great pictures on how to build 2 blinds:

http://sports.webshots.com/album/78524239waMytX?start=12

Good instruction on how to make the hay look natural:

http://bowzone.ca/index.php?page=the-real-crop-hay-bale-blind

Has anyone tried this? I would think it would work great not only for deer but turkey hunting as well.

The Case for Cheap Bullets

2010-01-18T09:35:00.001-05:00

Well, not really cheap bullets. "The Case for the Standard Hunting Bullet for Whitetail Deer," is probably more accurate, but it sounds like a master thesis. This is just a rant. "The Case Against Premium Bullets" sounds mean spirited and negative.

I am going to speak heresy here. I am not enamored with premium bullets, not in the least and certainly not when it comes to deer hunting. I guess I'm just an old fud, but I can still remember a time when Remington Core-Lokt WAS a premium bullet. Normally I just sit in the back and stay quiet, but I figure this forum is about the last place a master reloader is going to go for information. A beginner might, however. The old veteran reloader has his mind set. You, the guy who might be reading this, may be more open to a different opinion.

Let me begin this rant by giving you my background. First, I'm a deer hunter of 28 years' experience. Second, I've been reloading for myself since 2000 and have not shot a deer with factory ammo in over a decade. Third I have seen a lot. I have even seen bullets under-perform. However, I have never seen a well-chosen bullet fail on a deer. Also, I am not going to address the issue of Elk in Colorado or Moose in Newfoundland. My experience is centered on hunting whitetail deer in the states of the Ohio River Valley, mostly Kentucky. The deer that arrive in my sights may go up to 300 lbs-- my largest to date went 270 lbs live weight.

Let us also define our terms here. For this discussion, let me use three terms. There are a few mainstream bullet manufacturers out there with names we recognize. Remington, Speer, Hornady, Winchester, Sierra. These are the bullets you find in the reloading manuals. These are what you generally think of as non-premium bullets. These we will call "standard bullets." "Premium bullets" will mean any bullet that has a significant price differential above a standard bullet and that has some touted feature or capacity above a similar standard bullet. "Cheap bullets" are bullets that are from an unrecognized source or whose major advantage is that they are priced under a standard bullet. An example: The standard Rem Core-Lokt .308 150 Grain PSPCL currently goes for $0.25 apiece. The Remington Accutip goes for about $0.36 apiece. I have seen a similar imported bullet that I would not trust for about $0.11-- we'll call that one cheap. That 11-cent price is probably outdated. For that you could probably now buy the bullet, melt it down and resell the alloy and turn a profit.

The standard bullet we are discussing here is basic cup-and-core design. Most standard bullets are made in this way. A lead slug is forced into a guilding metal cup with a lot of force and by some means or other the lead and guilding metal are caused to stay together. Remington calls their method "Core-Lokt." Hornady calls their method "Interlok." The idea here is to keep the lead and guilding metal together while it is going through the deer. The guilding metal is supposed to peel back, the lead core is supposed to flatten out and form the classic mushroom shape. A standard bullet does this. A premium bullet does this. What's the difference?

Supposedly the premium bullet does it better. How better? Bullet manufacturers have two basic criteria: retained weight and diameter of the resulting mushroom. There are going to be a lot of other features and measurements, but these are two that count the most. You want a bullet that opens up just enough and at the same time sheds a minimal amount of mass. The bottom line is supposedly better penetration and a superior wound channel. However, it is never a good idea to equate penetration through ballistic gel or wet newspaper with what it is going to do to a deer. The other problem is that the window for that performance is remarkably small. If you measure your next deer, you'll find even a barrel-chested buck may only be 48" in circumference. That's only 16 inches of deer the bullet must traverse and most of that has the consistency of jello. By the time the bullet travels half that distance, the decision as to whether the deer is dead or not has already been made. The question only remains as to whether the bullet will exit and leave you a second hole for a blood trail. In 28 years, I have seen only one standard bullet not leave the deer and this was on a brisket shot. Comparing retained weight and expansion usually is a moot point. Under normal conditions, good luck finding the bullet-- it's buried in the dirt somewhere on the far side of the deer.

Accuracy? Sometimes a premium bullet may be better than a standard when it comes to accuracy. Whatever bullet works best in your rifle-- but be honest about it and start cheap and work your way up. Yes, the Sierra 140 grain might not shoot well in your rifle and the Nosler Accubond may shoot better, but did you try the Hornady Interlok first? Accuracy is also one of these things where we talk ourselves into a lot that just is not so. Normal hunting accuracy for deer is about 4 inches at 100 yards. If you can keep a rifle to that benchmark, you will probably be able to kill a deer. Normally you can get a lot better by just playing around with the load a little bit. 1 MOA or 1 inch at 100 yards is going to be just fine. You can get there with a Barnes TSX, but you may also be able to get there with the Remington Bulk PSPCL, and you won't know until you try. Some time go over to MidwayUSA.com and read the remarks about Remington and Winchester Bulk Bullets. These are bullets that are sold by the bag. The customer comments are usually along the lines of "ugly, blemished, irregular. . .", but if the guy actually takes them out and tries to shoot them: "Great Accuracy!" "Kills deer DRT!"-- I'm paraphrasing. The point is that ugly bullets are not necessarily ineffective.

The other issue about accuracy is how far folks really shoot deer. I get email from guys asking for the best bullet for offhand shots at 300 yards, when you know darn well they probably are going to be shooting accurately at 50 yard at most. My admonition: Stop watching so much TV. Leave the spotting scope home. Get up and move your silly buns closer and use a rest. Guys fill their heads with magazine ads and TV hunting shows. Yes, it may make sense to have a bullet that promises 25% better concentricity if you are hunting elk and taking 600 yard shots out West. Where I hunt, you could probably drop bowling balls out of your treestand at them. Hmmmm. I wonder. . .

A lot of folks think that a polycarbonate dohinkus on the end of a premium bullet is some great godsend. The fact of the matter is that hunters are a fastidious lot and it galled them to see all their soft-pointed ammunition with distorted points. Yes, a disheveled looking point will cause accuracy problems. However, adding a dohinkus will not turn a rifle that shoots 8" groups at fifty yards into a 1MOA rifle. It possibly won't even turn a 1 MOA rifle into a 1/2 MOA rifle. At normal deer hunting distances, inside 200 yards or so, the difference is pretty cosmetic. Yes, you have a nice pretty bullet to put in your rifle, but is it worth all the extra cost when you are shooting at a kill zone the size of a basketball? Okay, maybe a soccer ball.

There's always the Buck of a Lifetime or Hunt of a Lifetime argument. I've already shot my buck of a lifetime. He walked up to my treestand a couple of years ago, and I shot him and he ran a few yards before piling up. I shot him with Hornady Interlock .308 165 grain SP's. I shot him standing broadside to my stand about 30 yards out. When I opened him up, his lungs and heart were gone. He left a blood trail a blind man could follow. Before I switched bullets, I'd have to have a serious reason-- even if it were the hunt of a lifetime. I would have to try what I know already works and see how it performed at the range I expected to shoot. My wife plugs milk jugs at 450 yards with her 30-06 and Hornady 150 grain Interlok FMJBT's, so I know a standard bullet will work as far as accuracy. I bought her 500 rounds for Christmas-- don't you just love wives who shoot? They're so easy to buy for.

Don't get me wrong. You will have bullet failures. Eventually you will find bullets that do not do what you expect. I have had two such situations. Neither one could be scientifically tied to the bullet, but I changed the bullet and the problem went away. In the first case, I experimented with loading for a 30-30 for my kids. My son had problems. I myself had problems. In one of the strangest cases of my life, I put three 150 grain Hornady Interlok slugs into a small doe standing at the base of my stand, and she went on feeding, despite an 8-foot arterial spurter coming from the other side. I switched to Winchester 150 grain PP and the next deer went down like she should. In the second situation, I tried a .358 200 grain Remington PSPCL out of my new 35 Whelen on a monster buck and he just stood there glaring at me. I put two more into him before he decided to give up. I was racking in the round #4 when he fell over. I switched to the round nosed variant of the same bullet and the problem never repeated itself. In the 30-30 case, I think my boy was probably jerking the trigger. My experience with the rifle was a bit of a fluke. In the 35 Whelen case, there is a possibility that the Remington 200 grain PSPCL was built a little too tough for the game and did not expand well. If I really forced myself to think about this hard, I'd know the bullet was not my problem, but changing bullets made me feel better. In any event, I did not need to resort to a premium bullet to fix my problem.

One might assume that I have some deep seething hatred of premium bullets from all this. I don't. What I am concerned with is several situations that crop up:

1) Folks think you need premium bullets to kill a whitetail deer and fail to experiment much, because the cost is so high.

2) Folks have a mishap when hunting, usually losing a deer, and blame the bullet before looking for another reason. The simple truth is that a modern hunting bullet is usually the least of your worries.

3) Lack of practice usually is the worst cause of lost deer. Folks go out and fire a couple of rounds to get sighted in and then do not bother to practice further, because the ammunition is so doggone expensive. Making affordable ammunition is one of the chief reasons why folks get into reloading in the first place.

4) Folks substitute magazine-inspired superstition and barbershop physics for common sense. There is no such thing as going too fast to expand. There is no magic threshold velocity for "hydraulic shock" versus wound channel. There is no such thing as bullet failure if the bullet is never recovered and there certainly is not if you find the deer dead with an exit wound. Bullets do not gain velocity after they leave the barrel.

The bottom line here is that you can't spend your way out using common sense. You cannot simply buy the most, the biggest, the ultimate and be assured of anything. The occasional deer is going to run. You are going to shank the occasional shot. A bullet you have been pole-axing deer with for a decade is occasionally leave you scratching your head. It is a natural part of deer hunting.

Let me lastly bring a simple mention to cheap bullets. I left that definition fairly open and general. Here is what I worry about with cheap bullets. I can buy Remington or Winchester bullets in bulk lots of 500 or 1000 and be fairly certain that the bullets are the same as what goes into their production ammunition. That is about as far as I am going to go in a hunting bullet. I am not going to knock any manufacturer or any bullet. However, if you find yourself offered a lot of Golden Ocelot 7mm, you venture down that road at your own risk. I find great value in having repeatable performance out of bullet. I can go to the store and buy 165 grain Hornady and be fairly assured I'll have the same bullet I've been shooting for a decade. If I don't you can bet Mister Hornady will get a nasty letter. I've bought my share of weird off-brand ammo and components, but over time I learned. It is one thing to punch paper. It is still another to see a nice buck in your scope in the proper toes-up position.

Okay, I'm done with my rant for now. I don't mean this to be the last word on the issue either. I am making a proposition that I think deserves to be debated. The right of an individual to shoot $1/round bullets is not at issue here, nor is it's ethics, nor is religion. I know there are guys out there that worship the Nosler Partition or the Barnes TSX, and I respect your zeal and commitment.

How do I prepare to go hunt turkeys

2010-01-16T12:13:00.002-05:00

From: Explain your hunt

First off, let me remind y'all that I'm turkey hunter that hunts his own 200 acres. I can go out on my front porch in the morning and owl and have gobblers sounding off a full 360 degrees.

When the alarm goes off, I usually take my bag of calls out onto the front porch and put them out on the table, and then go in the house and start getting ready. I put on the coffee, and grab the latest weather report. I suit up and then go out on the porch and try out a few calls.

To me this step is important. I want to know how my calls are going to sound after they've been exposed to the current conditions. Some calls, especially box calls, sound great in the house, but can go bad as soon as you hit the woods. It takes me only a couple of minutes. The guesses I made the night before usually are right. Once in a while I still need to swap out a call, usually due to a change in the weather.

I've usually done my strateme-gizing the night before, sipping scotch at the thoughtful spot. Usually I balance two things in my head: 1) where will the birds be 2) How often have I been busted in a given spot. It is really easy, even on 200 acres, to get the birds wise to you. If I've been someplace the day before, I'll try another place and rotate my favorite spots. If I've managed to slip in and out without a turkey seeing me, I may or may not hit it again the next day. After all this time on the same plot of ground, it's hard to be surprised. The terrain and the buildings haven't changed in a hundred years. These turkeys have been in somewhat the same place for generations.

There are a bunch of things at play here:

1) The turkeys may or may not be utilizing a given spot. Even some of my favorite honey holes have off weeks or even off years.
2) The weather may or may not be conducive for the turkeys to show themselves. Example: I have one pasture that is a sure fire place for turkeys to go sun themselves on ultra-cold mornings.
3) The season itself may be advanced or retarded from what I'd be expecting. One year we had 90F+ days during opening week, and the turkeys were as fired up as I've ever seen them. Another year we had snow and 26F for the Opener, and I did not see a receptive gobbler until the last week.
4) Some days I just feel like going somewhere and being in the woods. We talk about taking the turkey's temperature. There's also taking my temperature: do I feel like being intense about my hunting or do I want to go out and yelp a little every 15 minutes and see what happens? I've been known to be successful either way.

My routine is usually to go somewhere I know turkeys roost and try to arrive where I'm going well before they start sounding off. I don't play the flydown all that hard. I try and hang back and just witness it. I try not to be the first to call; I don't try and be the first or last to fly down. I'm also not the first to crank up the energy. As I've matured as a hunter, I've become more of a "me too" caller. That's not to say I don't get aggressive, and I'm more than happy to crank it up, but I'm never the type that a hunter standing on the edge of the property would say: "Hmmmmph! That's a hunter for sure."

Once in a while, I get a gobbler hooked on the roost, and he lets me know I'm going to be his. I had one this year that did that-- first time in 8 seasons I've closed the deal at flydown. The vast majority of my birds have been taken mid-morning and a surprising number have now been taken in the afternoon. We've had a lot of cold Aprils over the past decade. The KY season starts off in the Lull anyway, and if you pile on low morning temperatures, it often takes the gobblers until afternoon to really get themselves warmed up enough to be thinking about love.

I generally don't run and gun anymore. , not unless I'm stymied or just looking for a lot of exercise. I'm on my on 200 acres . After almost a decade on the place, I know where they are. I have also stopped using locator calls, but this is only because I've learned to use the what's at hand. Around my farm, there are enough owl, hawk, and other turkey aggravants that I'm usually in no need of doing it myself. One neighbor has roosters and guinea fowl. Another has a pet donkey. All I have to do is be patient and listen.

A last piece of advice: get in and mix it up with the turkeys, and don't worry about how other turkey hunters hunt their birds. The turkeys will teach you more than anything. The more you are with the birds the more these things will become self-evident. I don't claim to be an expert on turkey hunting in general, just my 200 acre plot.

O.D. and Playing the Wind

2010-01-03T08:44:00.003-05:00

I was sitting in one of those old steel lawn chairs, that kind of acts like a rocking chair-- kind of springy and such. Whenever I go to the store, that is the chair I like best. My grandfather used to have a set of them-- paid me $5 one summer to take them back to the bare metal and put a couple coats of enamel on them. There is one just like Gramp's in the corner with its back to the window. It is the farthest away from the stove, and I usually can snag it if I get there early enough. That is, unless O.P. or The Judge get there first. This was my first trip into town since all the kin went home after New Years.

It was a small crew there this morning. Darrel was there. He just comes to smoke and never says anything-- not since he came back from Overseas in '69. The Judge was home sick with what they were calling "the new mown hay." O.P. was late. Just after I got there, O.D. showed up. That's O.P's brother. They'd had a party to go to last night at their folks'. O.P. had broken out their Dad's bottle of Old Grand Dad and they'd drunk themselves sober out on the front porch. O.P. had gotten in trouble, and was going into Cold Springs to get a big bottle of Old Grand Dad to replace the one they'd sucked dry. O.D. gave me a warm-up on my coffee. I'm actually closer to O.P. and their other brother O.T. O.P. is always coming by around time for second breakfast, and O.T. is the guy who does my lawnmowers for me. They're all good company-- sober or not. I put down the paper and we started to talk.

"So ya dint do so well," said O.D. He was still re-hashing rifle season. "That's a shame." Even though it was past New Years, and rifle season had ended over Thanksgiving, he was still kind of stuck there. He would be, until he finally got out in March and started turkey scouting with his brothers. We'd been going over deer season for weeks. O.D. fills his freezer every year, and fills a lot of other freezers as well. Among other things, he is, or at least was an owner of an original legitimate Kentucky semi-automatic muzzleloader. In his day, he could get five well-aimed shots a minute out of it. However, as he's gotten older, "Ol Dick." a full-stock caplock that came from his mother's Grand-Daddy has been seen less and less at the shoots. We think he's switched to his Browning BAR, but no one wants to come out and say anything.

"I don't know." I said. "I got two big doe. They were the biggest I've ever taken. And I'd have had a buck several times if I hadn't blown the shots."

"You're not playing the wind." he said. "Take it from the Old Deer Hunter himself. You're not playing the wind."

"O.D., " I replied, "I was out in all kinds of wind, I was out in all kinds of weather this season. You know as me that all I have is ridges. Ridge-tops, ridge-sides . . . a little bit of creek bottom, sure, but I'm scared the neighbors will shoot me if I go down there. If the deer aren't up on the ridges, I can just stay home."

"It's all the wind." said O.D. "You got to play the wind."

"Okay," I said. "Tell me how to play the wind."

"Now you're talking." said O.D. "They don't call me the Old Deer Hunter for nothing. You got yourself with the Master."

"Teach me, O' Great One." I said.

"Well, first thing is that you got to look at the map." said O.D. "and you got to look at history. This is Dan'l Boone Country, right? "

"Right."

"They all came down here to hunt, because the game was so rich, right?"

"Right."

"Well the reason it's so rich is because you got two natural boundaries here. You got the Ohio River, and you got the Mountains. You got Mountains in the East and Mountains in the South, and we're here in this little pocket.

"So far I'm following you."

"Now you got to remember that deer always walk with their noses into the wind."

"I've heard that," I said. "But growing up in Ohio, I could never understand how that worked. If it worked that way, a south wind would drive all the deer from Michigan down into Ohio. I asked the guy who was explained it that way, and he said Toledo and the Indiana border stopped 'em."

"It doesn't work that way, " said O.D. "This is where you take a little bit of knowledge and make it dangerous. See, you're not thinking. Lookin' at it that way, all you got is an old wise tale. You got to use your head. What do we have just north of us? "

"The River."

"Exacta-mundo."

"I don't get your point. What's the Ohio River being ten mile away have to do with it."

"What Boone and his buddies figured out from the Indians was that the KAIN-tuck was like a big natural deer trap. The winds are just right to get all the deer from this side of the Mississippi blown into this little pocket between the river and the mountains.They go North when fall comes and you get northern winds, then they get blocked by the Ohio River and have to spread East until the mountains so they don't get all bunched up at Paducah."

"Is that what it is?" I asked.

"Sure thing. " said O.D. "That's why the Indians liked this area to do all their hunting. It just naturally blew the elk, the buffalo, the deer into Kentucky, and then they'd all get piled up going into the mountains. We're like. . . what? 25 miles from Blue Licks, another 30 from Big Bone Lick. This is where all the game would go after the wind died down.

"So are you saying I should put out a salt block and wait for a calm day?"

"No. That's silly. What I'm sayin' is that you want. . . let's get scientifical: how far can a deer travel in a day."

"I don't know. Twenty miles?"

"Okay. That's good. How far is it to the mountains?"

"Real mountains or just the first hills? "

"Whatever."

"I'd say five counties or so. Maybe a hundred miles."

"Twenny gozinda a hunnred?"

"Five times." I'm still amazed at the difference between growing up in Ohio and growing up just a few miles south of the river does, on even such mundane matters as mathematics. On the north side of the Ohio, we learned The New Math. Down here, they were learning their Gozinda Tables.

"So five days of North East wind?"

". . . sucks?"

"Blows all the deer from five counties over into us, and backs all the others further up against the river and the mountains. Then we get a shift and get a few days of south wind?"

"The. . . the deer all start moving back towards us?"

"You got it. All you got to do let a north wind or and east wind blow the deer into the trap, and then go out when the wind shifts and catch them on their way back out."

"I never thought of it that way."

About this time, O.P. showed up. You could feel the cold coming off his coat as he came past and sat down. He bummed a smoke off Darrell and then complained about traffic on the Double-A. O.D. put another oak split into the stove and we got to discussing UK basketball and the Bengals. We mostly talk about the Bengals when Darrel's there, because even though he never talks, you can tell he's really interested and looks at us instead of staring at the stove.

Deer and Wind

2010-01-03T07:06:00.002-05:00

From Deer and Deer Hunting SHKYBoonie writes:

I have been doing a little study of my own through the past 4 years. I have been keeping a very detailed journal of deer sightings on my farms in West KY. Now this is just observation from me and the couple of buddy's that hunt with me. The way my farms lay and the food plots we have out are best with any variance of a North wind. We have stands set to hunt just about any wind we get although some winds make it hard to get in and out of stands without getting busted. We seem to have more deer activity with Northern winds than with Southern winds.

When I was young and learning to hunt I remember some of the old timers saying,"deer always travel with their nose to the wind". As I grew and became better in my own rights I figured out that must have been an "old wise tale", but after really paying attention, I think they may have been on to something.

To elaborate on the question a little, if you had a place to hunt and you knew the deer bedded in a certain place and there was a food source to the South of their bedding area. You know that the deer use this food on a regular basis at this time of year. The wind is blowing out of the North so the deer will have to travel with the wind to get to this food source. Do you think the deer would use this food source even though they couldn't use the wind in their favor or do you think they would go somewhere else that lets them use the wind to detect any danger?

I've read alot about using the wind in your favor when hunting but never heard anyone talk much about how wind direction alters the deer movement in any given direction. My journals show that we have way more deer sightings when we have Northern winds and Southern winds pretty much shut the deer down. This year we had Southern winds all season long except for a few days. On the days when the wind changed to the North, deer where seen and taken. There were no deer killed on days when the wind was coming from the South and very few seen.

I would just like to get everyone else's opinion on this and see if any of y'all have noticed the same where you hunt.

Dear SHKYBoonie

There IS a small shred of truth to the idea that deer always travel upwind. During the seek phase of the rut, bucks will roam around looking for doe with their noses in the air, and they generally travel upwind if they don't have ground scent to follow. Outside of that the idea is groundless. I always scratched my head at this "Old Wise Tale" (I like that!), and I heard it a lot when I started hunting. With a 3-day east wind, you could have all the deer in Ohio getting blown to and piling up on the Indiana border.

My Doe seem quite immune to wind influences when it comes to moving to feed. I have food plots that will get deer coming into them from all quarters regardless of wind. However, I do see a preference regarding bedding. There are some bedding areas that get used in certain wind conditions and not in others. They seem to like to bed on the lee side of ridge tops. If it's really windy, they're at the bottom of the ridge. If it's calm, they stay more to the top.

It's taken me a few years now to conclude that there are some stands that just are not going to work in some wind conditions. I have one really good stand in an oak grove that has never and probably will never produce a deer with a northerly wind. I have another that works well only in east winds.

The Shamanic Law of Conservation of Venison
Deer don't disappear. Weather neither creates nor destroys deer. Deer just move elsewhere. The trick is to find out where. It may not be on your property. It may not be someplace you care to hunt them, but they have not vanished.

My best example of this is this story:

http://blackholecoffeehouse.blogspot.com/2006/11/shaman-gets-doe.html

The first part of the story tells about Opening Day 2006, one of the worst pieces of weather I'd ever been in. It's the only time I've decided the weather was too bad to chance trying to climb down from a tree stand. The point is that I weathered a massive toad strangler up in the stand followed by a 180 degree shift in wind and a 20 F drop in temperature. The deer I'd expected to see all morning were holed up about 100 yards away from my stand in a small thicket of cedars. I found them as I was still-hunting my way back from the stand.

Just as a BTW: That little cedar thicket is right next to my best food plot now. When the wind is really bad, I know some deer will be holed up there, and will try and make a beeline for the plot as the wind dies down a little at sunset.

To answer your question succinctly, my guess is that the food source will be used no matter what wind conditions, and from all directions (upwind, downwind, crosswind) . The problem will be that the deer will bed in different places depending on the direction and severity of the wind. Not every wind will be the best for where you have placed your stand. In my example of the oak grove stand that never produces in a north wind, The problem is that the oaks are in a penninsula surrounded by pasture, and the most likely access is from the south by way of the woods. In a north wind, my scent cone is focused directly down the trail, and it is also from the south the deer get the best view of the stand as they approach-- the result is Bust City.

The Shamanic Anti-Telepathy Hat

2009-12-22T09:19:00.002-05:00

It was in the early post- season that the shaman emerged from his laboratory at deer camp with a proud “Eureka!”

“Scooter,” said the shaman, “ I've been trading e-mails with my old buddy Nosmo, and we think we've got an idea on how to get the anti-telepathy hat idea off the ground.”

Scooter looked up from his homework. “How's that Uncle Shaman?”

“The problem that I've always had with the shamanic anti-telepathy hat idea was that there was no way to prove that it worked. Nosmo thinks we can sell millions of them just because no one can really prove that they don't work.”

“But what about the science behind it?” asked Scooter.

“Nosmo has that figured out too.” replied the shaman. “ All we have to do is say 'Scentifically Proven' in our literature, and nobody will seriously question it. Here look at this!” The shaman leaned over and twiddled Scooter's laptop a bit and brought up a Youtube video. It showed two clips. One showed a gorilla in a cage and the cage was hooked up to a device that monitored the movement of the cage as it was suspended in the air. As the gorilla moved about, a graph line went up and down in the bottom of the frame. The video then cut away to the same thing, only now the video showed a completely inactive gorilla wearing a foil-covered baseball cap with a fancy “SHAMANIC ANTI-TELEPATHY” logo and the graph line at the bottom was smooth and flat.

“That's amazing!” said Scooter. “It really works.”

“Isn't Nosmo amazing?” replied the shaman. “He went to the zoo and found out they were going to give this gorilla a root canal, and they had him caged up. All he had to do was slip in and shoot the video. He's got a buddy that works as a veterinary assistant at the zoo.”

“Is that graph really showing the results of the hat?” asked Scooter.

“Well, sort of.” replied the shaman. “We can't really measure telepathic energy yet, so we are using physical energy as an analog of sorts. All we're really doing is measuring the movement of the cage. On the other hand, you have to admit that when you're agitated, you have a tendency to fidget and move around a lot on the stand.

“So the hat makes him quiet down?” asked Scooter.

“No, actually the first video was shot while the gorilla was being brought into the facility.” said the shaman. “The second part of the video was shot as the gorilla was being watched after the procedure.”

“So what's up with the gorilla?” asked Scooter. “He looks like he was sleeping.”

“Oh, I don't know if he's sleeping, but he's been calmed down quite a bit. Nosmo said they had to dart that sucker three times before he'd go out.”

“So the gorilla is drugged?”

“Of course, you can't get a gorilla to sit still for a root canal!” exclaimed the shaman. The vet would have his arm ripped off.

“So I don't see what this has to do with the anti-telepathy hat.”

“Everything.” replied the shaman. “See, you have to assume that a wild gorilla with an abscessed molar is pumping out some serious waves, right? I mean, I personally get a little freaky just watching that first part of the video.”

“Yeah, so?”

“So you can assume there's a lot of whatever being generated, right?”

“Yeah.”

“So in the second video, we've got a calm monkey and a flat line on the graph. We can assume that the gorilla is not pumping out that vibe he was doing before and sure enough the graph shows it.”

“But where does the telepathy fit in?”

“Look Scooter!” said the shaman. “Tense people make tense vibes, right? Calm people make calm vibes. If you go to the petting zoo and jump up and down, the little baby goat ain't coming over to you, right?”

“Yeah.”

“But if you do like you're supposed to and calm down and stick out your hand, the baby goat comes over and eats out of your hand, right?”

“Yeah.”

“So?”

“So?”

“I still don't get it.”

“What I'm saying is this makes the anti-telepathy hat a sure thing. Nosmo says this is scientific proof that it works, and we can leverage that into all sorts of things. The UV-Radioactive hunting suit, the Shamanic Scented Gum. He thinks we can market a line of logowear. We are even going to have our own camo pattern.”

“What's that like?”

“Look.” The shaman brought up a web page, built in WordPress. There were instructions for re-activating the telepathic hat by running it through the diswasher, and links to several press releases.

“I don't see anything.”

“See? “ said the shaman, pointing.

“Wait, you mean that little thumbnail of you and Nosmo hiding in the bushes?”

“Yeah.”

“But you guys were just wearing street clothes.”

“Exactly. Nosmo is getting that picture blown up and printed on shirts and stuff. If you can't see us, it must be good camo. No one can steal it either. It's got our faces in it.”

“If you say so. What I still don't get is this anti-telepathy thing. If you can't prove the hat works, how are you going to sell it.”

“Marketing.” replied the shaman. “First off, I've written a set of instructions that will go on every piece of Shamanic AntiTelepathyWear. It's a basic course in meditation reduced to the size of a 3X5 card. It has lots of stuff about deep breathing and imagining you're floating on a cloud and that sort of thing. “

“And?”

“And. . . If you follow those instructions, it'll make you calmer. It will lower your telepathic signature, and it will keep the deer from seeing you fidget on the stand. We also include a mailer so that you can send in for a bottle of special anti-telepathy vitamins.”

“What are those?”

“Every successful product needs to have a consumable associated with it anymore. The hat is just an entree into the whole consumable Shamanic world. Once you register your hat for the lifetime warranty, we send you a bottle of Shamanic AntiTelepathy Vitamins. It's really just a weak multi-vitamin for kids with an extra shot of melatonin. It's a kiddie vitamin, so it's chewable, and you can eat a handful of them and they're still safe.. The melatonin is in there to calm you down a little. I tried them—I was on my second pot of coffee, but they chilled me right out and I laid down and took a nap.

“Isn't that a problem?” asked Scooter. “Falling asleep in a treestand?”

“NAW!” said the shaman. “I used to do it all the time. You fall forward, the safety harness grabs you, you wake up. Besides, we also have a caffeine pill that Nosmo is calling the 'Shamanic Super-Energizer. We send out both in the Hunters Super Season Package along with a selection of Shamanic Cover Scent Gum, a male enhancement gel and a free lockback knife. If you're a deer hunter that wants the ultimate edge. . . well, here it is.” The shaman brought out a lockback knife and said. “Here, read this.”

“Made in Pakistan.” read Scooter.

“No, the other thing. Read under the logo.”

“'For the Hunter that needs to be sure.' “I still don't get it.” said Scooter.

“Oh,” said the shaman. “You will. Nosmo has bought time on every hunting show there is for next season. We have one husband and wife duo that has agreed to wear nothing but ShamanicWear. We even hired Vince Schlongomo-whatsit to promote Shaman-WOW! On TV and at all the trade shows. He'll be slapping whores in camo all over the country on our dime, but it'll be worth it. Shamanic Enterprises is dedicating itself to helping create the need for products designed for the hunter that needs to be sure.“

“I mean the anti-telepathy thing.” said Scooter. “Nobody has actually tested it on deer. All you've done so far is shot a video of a drugged gorilla with an aluminum foil baseball hat on his head. The rest is . . . is just . . .” Scooter was at a loss for words. “

“Let me just correct you right there, Scooter.” replied the shaman. “This is not an aluminum foil hat. It's made of Space Age Mylar bonded to a sturdy woven polyester substrate.”

“You're a cheat!”shouted Scooter. “Frankly, Uncle Shaman I'm a little surprised you'd stoop this low.”

“Frankly,” said a voice coming from behind. “I'm surprised the shaman there could keep a straight face this long.”

“Whh.. . Whhh?” Scooter sputtered. With that, the ghost of Alan Funt appeared and floated into the scene. He pointed our way and then put his arms on the surprised little boy's shoulders.

“It's okay,” said Alan Funt. “Look out there and wave. You've been on Candid Camera. When my old buddy the shaman called me on the Discorpora-phone I didn't think this was going to work at all, but I that look on your face-- it was worth coming back from the dead.”

“Thanks Alan!” said the shaman. He shook hands with the ghost.The spirit of Alan Funt then faded into nothing and was gone.

“So this is all a fake?” asked Scooter.

“Every bit of it.” replied the shaman.

“Whew! I couldn't believe. . . I mean I couldn't . . .” the boy was speechless.

The shaman then turned back to the rest of us. “Guys, don't get caught up in these too-good-to-be-true hunting gimmicks. Run away. Run away as fast as you can.”Do it for yourself. Do it for those you love. Do it for the kids. The action froze.

Alan Funt's voice returned. “This message has been brought to you as a public service by the Shamanic Hunters of America.” A short animation then ran showing a mob of hunters chasing a guy with a funny headress and rattle, before the video faded to black and was gone.

Back from Hiatus

2009-12-21T09:36:00.004-05:00

Here it is getting on towards Christmas, and I haven't written much in a month. I didn't mean to go on hiatus. It just turned out that way. I started to write this last weekend while I was at Deer Camp cleaning up and getting the place shut down for the Winter. It just never got posted.

This was a disappointing season for a lot of reasons. Angus never got one. Moose did not make it out at all. I flubbed two good shots at bucks and got iced on a third. However, I managed to get the freezer filled.

The big story this year was SuperCore. SuperCore got his two on Sunday of the Opener, and then went dry for the rest of the season. Part of this was that the deer were on to him-- they were on to all of us after the Opener. Part of it was that he had hardware that was not going to feel comfortable reaching out past 100 yards. Part of it was an interest in finding a decent buck. The good news is that SuperCore quickly found deer hunting and deer camp to be a end unto itself. It doesn't get much better than this, does it Pardner?

From Deer Hunt 2009

If I had set out this year to hunt nothing but doe, I would have been overwhelmed. I don't think I went a day without seeing several doe. The most I had in sight at a time was eight. It was warm. It was sort of an off year for the rut. The acorns were mostly gone before the Opener. As a result, most of the hunting from the Opener on consisted of a short window at mid-morning and an even shorter one before last light. If there were bucks out there, they were holding back until after dark.

I did have two really good opportunities at bucks that I flubbed. The first I have already reported. I finally figured out that the front Weaver Swivel Mounts on the Savage 99 were knocked up a bit. It's the first time in 28 seasons and half a dozen rifles that I've had a problem. Still, it got me to thinking that my days with the iron sights are probably over. It may make sense to ditch the Weavers and move on.

The second flub was the second weekend. I had stayed out later than usual on Sunday morning and a nice buck-- never really got a chance to count points-- walked up the ravine behind Campground. The problem was that he was perfectly up-sun from my position, and I could not see him through the glare coming through the scope. I've had this happen once before back in 2005-- same stand, same time, same problem-- nothing but pale yellow muck.

With Mooseboy out of the picture for the season, I did not want to venture too far off the top of the ridge. Schlepping carcasses out of the ravines alone is a feat I'm no longer going to attempt-- a birthday present I gave myself when I turned 50. I was also limited by the lack of acorns. Putting SuperCore over at Faulty Towers gave him a commanding view of quite a bit of territory; it also meant there were a few spots I couldn't go for fear of one of us getting shot. The answer ended up that I spent a lot of mornings at Campground and a lot of afternoons at Midway. I'm sure the deer figured this out pretty well. However it did not seem to faze them.

Which brings me to one of my lessons for the year. I was raised to believe that deer quickly pattern a deer hunter and learn to avoid him. This was not the case this year. You have to figure that between the various hunts and the pre-season scouting, I spent a lot of time at Campground and Midway. I NEVER went out that I didn't see deer. Oh sure, the deer saw me. They knew I was there, but it took a LOT of encouragement to get them to avoid me-- like pulling my rifle off its peg and aiming it at them. After this season, I am no longer as certain as I was about this whole thing about stealth.

Yes, I was caught once taking a leak off the stand. However I was in the process of shaking it off and sitting down when I got busted. The rest of the time I usually had deer come by immediately after. I theorize that they think it's a load of acorns falling. One thing is for sure: for all my whizzing, I did not see a decline in the number of deer sightings from the start of season to the end.

Scent Control? Camo? Here were other taboos shaken at the roots. As the season progressed, I was amazed at how little the deer seemed to mind me. I'm not saying I'd go out in a Hawaiian shirt with a 3 day stink on. However, I was out several times in my plain brown Carhart bibs and a barn coat and the deer made no notice of me. Also, due to the number of days I was away from home and the washing machine, I had to comprimise on my scent control regimen a lot. Basically, as long as I got a shower with sodium bicarb once a day and I made sure my outermost layer was either a) left hanging outside or b) put away in a bag the deer didn't notice. They also didn't seem to notice the Carharts and work boots if I stayed in the confines of Midway.

Here are some other bites of information from this year's hunt:

I found a deer bedded in the tall grass as I was walking in after legal hunting. I had my flashlight on. She waited until I was 10 feet away to bust.

In close to the same spot, I got busted before first light on my way in to hunt. I'd pass by this one stand of cedars and the thicket would erupt with deer. What I find odd is that they never seemed to learn. Hmmmm.

I watched a doe with a goiter come by. It was this large thing the size of a football hanging off her breast. She didn't seem to mind it. I let her go.

My Yute: Angus had his second year as a participating deer hunter. He went scoreless. Yute Hunt Weekend, he passed on a trio of deer, because he saw the smaller two walk over and suckle. For the rest of the season he just never got around to pulling the trigger. Early on, he was interested in holding out for a buck. However, it was always one thing or another. I don't know if that makes him Sportsman, or he was just being lazy, or he was being like his old man and letting the doe walk by and just not feeling much like shooting anything. The other problem, and this is something I have to accept responsibility for, Angus has been shooting off a rest for so long that he could not figure out what to do when presented with a shot that could not be taken from the shooting rail of the treestand. I realized this too late. However, by next year, he'll have grown and we'll be using a different rifle-- maybe the M1 Garand.

Which brings me to my two. I ended up with back-to-back bookend doe, shot with the same rifle at the same distance from the same blind exactly a week apart at the same time-- just after sundown. The first went 178 lbs live weight. The second was 170. The only difference between them amounted to 6 chubs of grind. I gave Angus dibs on the second one. He declined, saying he didn't think she was close enough for his 30-30. He was right. She was about 170 yards when I shot.

I had a lot of stuff rolling around in my head as I shot these two. On the one hand, I did not want to give up on the season. Shooting that last doe was an admission that I probably was not going to see another shootable buck. However, I'd already learned to live with that one. It is always somewhat of a bittersweet thing to take the life of something so big and beautiful as a consolation prize, or just to have meat in the freezer, but I'm now getting used to that idea. Even getting used to the idea makes me a little uncomfortable. But then. . .

It'll give me something to think about on the stand next year. Speaking about things to think about on the stand, I finally broke down and bought my first pair of bi-focals. (there's a non-sequitor!) The problem has been that I have previously chosen to have two pair of glasses-- distance glasses and reading glasses, and as my eyes got worse over the years I had a hard time reading on the stand. I finally gave it up last year. This year, I was out with my new bifocals and I had lot of time to kill on the stand, so I brought out some different sorts of books to read. I picked Military History as a subject. I went through two of the three Shaara books on the Civil War and The Battle of Britain by Hough and Richards. It all made a good match for where my head was at.

For all the gunfire we heard on Opening Day and throughout the season, it was amazing that the numbers were off. The state's harvest for November was at a 7 year low. Bracken County was off its stride as well, but not as bad. Neighboring Pendleton County's harvest matched last year's. On the other hand. Meyer's in Lennoxburg was swamped with deer. It wasn't a record, but it was heavy. I had to wait an extra week to get both of mine processed. There were a lot higher percentage of bucks taken this year; that's bucking the recent trend. For a zone that has unlimited antlerless harvest, that's kind of odd too. Lord knows I had plenty of opportunity to take a buck this year.

This brings me back to the littany of disappointments. Not having Moose along was a bummer, but I'm sure this is not a permanent condition. He had some things to work out in his life. Not closing the deal on a buck was a bit of bummer, but I know that is not going to happen every year. Angus not harvesting a deer was a bummer, but a lot of that was his choice. The other bummers?

The Guns:

The Savage 99 let me down for the first time. Maybe I let the Savage 99 down. I don't know. It's been powerful mojo for me since 2003. I'm going to have to rethink this one.

The Whelenizer had to be taken out of service mid-season as well. I found out that two out of the three magazines I have for it are clicking in all right, but the bolt is closing over the top of the round instead of feeding it in. It's a perennial problem with this family of Remingtons. Mine is a 7600 in 35 Whelen. Sometimes a little tweak here and there fixes it, sometimes not.

The crossbow was a major bummer. I'm just not all that comfortable with it. Maybe a lot of practice will get me where I want to go, but I think I've become spoiled by firearms and I'm still looking back with nostalgia to my compound bow days. The crossbow is neither. It seems like the worst of both those worlds. We'll see. I may try and take it out for turkey in the Spring.

The Winchester 670 in 30-06 was the go-to deer gun this year. I got both doe with it. I'm probably going to have to take the shoulder pad off it. When I was a long-lean bean pole having a 1" pad probably made sense. I have to remember that this also used to be my groundhog rifle and I was shooting it mostly on hot summer days with nothing on but a T-Shirt. At Fifty Plus, I'm finding that the pad plus all my natural padding plus a few layers of clothing makes for quite a stretch.

My Stands:

Campground and Virginia are still good stands without acorns. However, you can forget Garbage Pit, Newstand and Glenway. Overall, the stands did not measure up to Midway, but I'm sure that with a decent acorn crop, things would have been different. I am convinced there is another opportunity for a stand near the entrance to Virginia, but getting there without honking off the deer may be a problem. The treestand skirts are a ragged mess. What Hurricane Ike didn't do in last Fall, some nameless thunderstorm did in just before season started. All the die-cut material needs to be replaced.

My gear:
If I could find a Hunter Orange Coat that was a tad warmer than the Quad Parka I've got, it would probably be a good idea. Mine is a Walmart special, and it's been great since 2003. however, its insulating ability just wasn't up to the weather of the last week of season. I probably need a dedicated hunter orange coat. The rest of the gear worked great.

I'm still trying to condense this down into a simple message for myself for next year. If I had to put down what was in my heart right now it would be this: Deer hunting is going to be a long spiral path that really leads no where in particular. To paraphrase Scripture: Like a dog to its own vomit, you'll keep running back over the same stuff with deer hunting over and over. Some days are not so pretty. Some shots are not so pretty. Some whole seasons are not so pretty. Some days get dowright grim and grimy.

The other thing I'd tell myself from the heart is that all the years I hunted alone I truly repent. I missed Moose terribly, and I really enjoyed SuperCore's company. I'm glad to have shared The Farm with somebody else. I'm down here cleaning up from season and it is particularly spooky being alone without the dogs, cooped up inside with time on my hands. I looked out the window on the last morning and for a brief moment saw a huge buck out around the Jagende Hutte. Just at that moment, he turned and ran back into the woods, but even with the distance and my bad eyes I could tell he was a monster.

As I was putting the last padlock on the sheds, I had this bizarre sound hit me. It sounded like geese and turkeys fighting. It sounded like somebody turned on a big box fan. I couldn't tell if it was an animal or the belts on the neighbor's truck slipping it was. . .

. . . it was a flight of over a hundred cranes flying overhead. DANG! Even for as high as they were and for as much noise as they were making, I could hear their wingbeats. That sight right there made the season.

At Last! Some meat for the freezer

2009-11-20T11:51:00.002-05:00

When I look back on this season, I've had a several opportunities at bucks and countless opportunities on doe. The main reason I haven't had anything on the meat pole is that I was hoping to see a big rack come in. Last night, I finally decided enough was enough. At sundown +15 min or so some doe came out into the south plot at Midway. The big one turned broadside at 174 yards. I had the Win Mod 70 in 30-06. It took a couple of minutes for the other deer to clear away . Here's the result:

What's special about this doe is the weight:

I remember last year getting ribbed for suggesting that I'd taken 170 lb doe on this property. This one went 176 live weight. It ended up being a hard night, By the time I got her hoisted in into the freezer, I was spent. The dang viscera weighed over 60 lbs. After schlepping that mother out, both SuperCore and I took the day off.

30-06 with 165 grain Hornady Interlock did the trick-- knocked her over and the legs went up in the air and she didn't so much as twitch. It was a double lung shot and took off the top of the heart as well. This old girl had a lot of miles on her.

Report from Deer Camp III

2009-11-16T05:01:00.000-05:00

Angus and I went out to Midway-- the new mega-blind for the evening. At last light a buck and a herd of doe came out, but it was too dark and too far away to chance a shot. The rack on this boy was pretty small. I think I saw them all earlier in the day. SuperCore walked in with a zilch.

While we were all sitting round the fire out back, we saw a flashlight dancing around one of the pastures. I went to investigate. A nice husband/wife couple had gotten lost on one of the neighboring leases-- like about 5 miles lost. They'd been wandering in the dark for about 90 minutes and saw our light. We all sat around and chatted for a while, and then we took them to their car over on the next ridge. We then hit Roosters for dinner-- want to throw out a big howdy to y'all that stopped by the D&DH table.

The general talk: so far nothing but small 8 pointers and less. A lot of people have gotten tired of waiting and taken a doe. The big guys are still being elusive. We're seeing a lot of chasing going on, but it feels like the rut still hasn't peaked around these parts.

Report from Deer Camp II

2009-11-14T14:00:00.002-05:00

Well, that was a ride!

I had near constant deer activity from legal hunting +30 minutes to quitting at 1100. It was mostly all doe, with a couple of small bucks scattered here and there. One was a forker, the other an immature 8 pointer. If I had been looking for doe, I'd have filled a tag many times over. One even came and stood broadside to me and ate weeds at 10 yards.

Along about 1000, it was getting hot. I undid my bibs and jacket and tried to cool off. Just then a lone buck, out on the prowl came through, following the track left by a pair of feeding doe earlier in the morning. I got my Savage 99 ready and decided that this might be the best one I'd see all day. Frankly, I could have left him grow another year, but something inside of me decided to commit.

That is when things began to go wrong. I couldn't get the Savage situated on my shoulder. As I'd unzipped everything, all that fabric and Thinsulate had balled up on either side of my chest. He was going behind me. I grunted. He stopped about 30 yards behind the buddy stand. I thumbed the safety off, and was still trying to get a proper sight picture.

BLAM!

As best as I can tell, the shot went low. The buck stood there for a bit, and I got another racked in. Now I was all twisted around. The buck moved.

BLAM!

. . . The buck trotted off, got behind some cedars and tried to figure out what was going on. I kept angling for another shot. By this time, I'd had to come around the other side of the tree. Two years ago, with the stand situated 90 degrees counter clockwise around the tree, this would have been an easy shot, but now I was doing everything I could to get my eye on the scope. Eventually the buck decided enough was enough and cranked himself up and left the property.

I got my gear down and took off down the hill to investigate. I found tracks, but no blood. About 20 minutes later, as I was checking where he had crossed the neighbor's fence, I heard a shot from the direction the buck had gone. I hope the bloke had better luck than I did.

On the way to the pick-up point, I had two more encounters. A doe busted me and ran off, and then a whole herd of deer, spooked by my buddy's truck, came barreling down the valley 50 yards inside the treeline on the other side of the pasture.

My buddy? SuperCore made it to 0930 and came out. He'd had a couple of gear malfunctions that left him with freezing feet and hands. He didn't have as much as a hint of deer the whole time. He said he was going to drop home and refit. The boots he was wearing leaked and the HotHands he had were a couple of years old and useless. He's also brought some ski bibs that he hadn't checked before leaving home-- either they'd shrunk or he'd grown. Oh well, now that he's got an idea of what he's up against, he says he can grab some new gear and be back in 4 hours.

This was easily the most active Opener I've ever encountered-- over 2 shots/minute in the first hour and better than 1/minute in the second hour. However, all but a handful were distant. The word from the scanner is everyone is complaining they didn't see a thing. For all the shooting, the Orange Army was overall quite well behaved. I didn't hear any shots before legal hunting started. Nobody emptied any 20 round magazines. There were a lot fewer ATV's out this year too.

I'm switching rigs for the afternoon. I'm bringing out the Win Mod 70 in 30-06 that is better suited for working the food plots. Angus and I are going to Midway to see what comes out.

Report from Deer Camp I

2009-11-14T13:55:00.002-05:00

The past few years, I've been putting out a sort-of diary from turkey camp and deer camp on this forum or that. I figured this would be as good a place as any.

I arrived yesterday afternoon and filled the fridge and freezer out in the shed. That's a donation from Cousin Tim, he was moving back home and didn't have room for the fridge in the new place. I then took on a bunch of last minute projects like re-mounting the mail box and putting out the jagende gewehrständer

Mooseboy made it in shop for my Christmas present a couple of years ago.

At 1700 I retired to the Thoughtful Spot overlooking Pooh Corner and glassed the ridges, looking for deer. Just after sundown a nice young buck came out at 200 yards and started grazing. The dogs barked, but he didn't pay us any mind. Later, a herd came up through Skunk Hollow. I saw one set of antlers-- I think he was chasing some doe, but it was all just at the edge of what I could see. For those of you following the thread about getting a new guy started in deer hunting, the ground blind I pictured, the one at Faulty Towers overlooks Skunk Hollow.

Dinner was ribs from Corky's in Memphis . Krogers is now carrying frozen slabs.

This morning, I was back out at the Thoughtful Spot. It was colder than I expected-- about 31F. I went in to find another hat and when I got back, there were 3 doe out in the field. One was about 150 yards from where I was sitting. The dogs finally saw her and after some preliminary barking sent her and her buddies scurrying towards Skunk Hollow. I'm thawing some venison round steak. I'm going to grind it up this morning and then set to cooking some chili-- it'll be awesome by tomorrow Noon.

Maysville Walmart

2009-11-09T07:17:00.000-05:00

I just want to put out a big howdy to all you guys that are planning on hitting the Walmart in Maysville Kentucky at 2130 EST this next Friday night. From what I understand from my correspondents, there are a bunch of you that are making this pilgrimage, to the point where there are now some dedicated deer hunting locals that are turning this into a spectator event.

The lines for licenses are supposedly long, despite being able to buy them online for years. The various gizmos are flying off the pegs-- Cough Silencer and the Butt-Out were big sellers last year. There is even a bustling demand for firearms. This latter item is now causing jeering by the spectators, because they can't figure out how y'all could be sighting in a deer rifle with less than 12 hours to go before the opening of season. Please, one of you guys needs to set them straight. There is a way, right?

I'm bringing this all up, because I didn't know if you all knew you were now being watched, and that they are now spreading stories about you on the Internet. I was tempted to come watch myself, but Maysville is a sizable drive and I'm usually already at camp and had dinner and in the rack by 2130 LIMA. In fact, I'm not really sure why anyone, having a choice in the matter, would want to be at Walmart at 2130 LIMA on the Eve of the Opener-- even if there were shimmy-shimmy girls and elephants and free candy for the kids.

But to each his own, right?

Crossbow Update-

2009-11-08T12:50:00.002-05:00

I promised myself that I'd not shoot anything with the crossbow unless it was special. I've been watching does and such go buy since early October. Last weekend I nearly pushed the safety off when a nice little 8-pointer came by. I held up . Today was much different.

I had serious action from first light on. Deer were moving through while I was still trying to get my gear hoisted up. At 15 minutes before legal hunting I had a buck grunting in the dark. I had deer coming from every possible angle. Still, the safety staid on.

Right at 0800, a big set of hooves came crashing up on my 3 O'Clock. He got to about 1 O'Clock before I realized this was a shooter-- not the absolute biggest I'd seen, but it was a wickedly nice rack of probably 10 points or better-- would have at least made B&C. He was now coming into a shooting lane at 11 O'Clock.

I grunted. He stopped. I had a clear shot on his chest. The safety came off and THWANG! I vaguely remember some sprinkles or something falling through the sight picture of the scope. The deer walked off, stood for a bit and then slowly made his way all the way around to the 8 O'Clock position and stood there watching his back trail. After several minutes he wandered off. I did not see him favoring a leg. I saw no wound on his side. It must have been a miss.

I had a heck of a time finding out what happened-- no arrow, no blood, a few hoof prints. The one problem I had was figuring out exactly where I'd shot. An old dead limb about 10 yards out kept keeping me from seeing the shooting rail of the stand. . . Hey! Wait a minute! Sure enough, there was a fresh hunk of rot blasted out from the bottom of the branch.

Sigh!

Oh well. I may hang this crossbow up for the year. I was originally thinking that I would take a few days next week and hunt with it, but . . .
1) The weather is warm-- It'll hit 70 today.
2) Something has kept the bucks from moving on with the rut. Somebody forgot to tell them that they should be chasing by now. Bucks are still just ambling about-- not even seriously seeking.
3) I got what I needed-- some time up in the stand before the Rifle Opener. By next year, I'll have this crossbow figured out a lot better.

My guess is that the rifle season will be prime next weekend. There are certainly enough deer around for sure. There were a dozen out in the field last night. KYHillChick stayed back at the house and heard bucks fighting just a couple of hundred yards off.

Update on Midway-- the new shooting house.

Last night I decided to stay out of the stand, because we were still catching 35 MPH gusts when I was set to leave at 1500. Instead, I went out to Midway, the new shooting house and stayed there until dark. It was quite pleasant. Sundown was at 1730, and the temperature was still about 70F when the deer started pouring into the adjoining food plot.

First it was 3-- the same trio Angus had for Yute Season-- a mother and twins. It was getting dark enough that I thought I might be able to slip out on them when a large dominant doe showed up and chased the three over to the other side of the plot. Then a pair, then a single, then. . .
. . . Holy cow! The plot was filling up now and the deer were all moving towards me. There I was, with the big Meade astronomical binos in the window with deer less than 20 yards away. So much for camo-- I was in a white T-Shirt, with red suspenders on my jeans. So much for scent control-- I was 12 hours gone from a shower, and even I could tell. Plus, I was hunting on carpet that had recently come out of my folk's family room. These deer just didn't care. I could have had any of about 3-4 doe, but the crossbow staid propped in the corner.

Now I was facing a situation: How do I get out? I checked out the back: nothing. I still had to close up shop. I finally decided that bringing down the shutter would probably not honk the deer off that much. I went for it-- I heard a few deer run a few yards, but when I finally got everything buttoned up, they were all still in the field a few yards further out. I walked out quietly and lit the flashlight when I was about 100 yards away.

One last piece of data for the flashlight/no flashlight argument: I was heading back . It was now 45 minutes after sundown. I had my cheap little 2AA cell flashlight pointed out ahead of my feet. I was walking down the 2-track, headed for the pasture that leads to the house and-

Mrrrrrrt! Trundle trundle! Gallumph Gallumph!

A doe had broken cover just ten feet from me as I was walking in. She'd been trying to cross the fence line to my right and must have had a clear shot of me and the flashlight.

To All You Hunters. . .

2009-11-04T12:12:00.002-05:00

I don't think I need to explain this one. Let me know if there are any questions.

I'm still trying to find out out the source. Somebody sent this to me. If you are the author, I'd love to hear from you.

Donate your deer carcass to Wolfrun.org!

2009-11-04T11:43:00.001-05:00

Here's a plea from Wolf Run Wildlife Refuge in Nicholasville, KY:

Donate your deer carcass to Wolfrun.org!

Hey guys I think since we are all conservationist in a sense I though you all might be interested. Feed something other than your local coyote's.

We cannot use the organs but all the rest! Thanks so much. You wouldn't believe how this helps us. Not only financially but the deer is so good for the big cats and the wolves love to play and chew on the bones! Its a win, win situation for everyone out here! Let me know if you need me to answer anything other questions. We are open from 12-5 each Saturday if the weather permits. Blessings, Mare

Wolf Run Wildlife Refuge
Mary Kindred CEO

Call a day ahead to meet with Mary to donate your deer.859-881-3449 or email wrwrhope@gmail.com

Happy Saint Hubert's Day

2009-11-03T09:03:00.000-05:00

Over on 24hourcampfire.com we all got together back in 2005 and decide that Christmas on Dec 25 was just not cutting it for us hunters and that we'd all move our serious gift giving to The Feast of Saint Hubert on 11/3. It really bites if you're getting a rifle or a shotgun and you have to wait almost a whole year to use it. Moving the gift giving to November 3 cleans that all up nicely.

I just got back from the pagent. KYHillChick, Angus, and I just finished parading up and down the driveway. I was in my lederhosen, 'HillChick was in her peasant dress, and Lil Angus played the Duddlesack (German bagpipe). I had my boar spear decorated with a garland of flowers.

All the other hunters and I are now going to swill beer until we can't stand, and then go out to have a traditional Black Forest Schutzenfest-- on second thought. . .

Since I'm out of work, we kept the gift giving to a minimum this year. I loaded twenty rounds of 30-06 for all the people on my list. KYHillChick gave me a fresh pile of hunting socks all washed and ready for hunting. KYHillChick says she'll buy me a new deer rifle if I land a job that pays more than the last one.

Happy Saint Hubert's Day Y'all.

EVEN MORE!!! -on the DST and DEER

2009-11-03T07:58:00.001-05:00

Check this out on 24hourcampfire.com

Daylight Saving and the effect on White tail!!

swoosh23
New Member

This weekend I was informed by a fellow hunt club member that we would be at a real big advantage on todays (sunday) hunt because the deer would be off thier normal pattern by a hour due to day light savings change. He also stated that it would take them a few days to get use to it. I about fell out of my chair with laughter, but held it together. Out of respect I just sat quietly and laughed inside, and could not wait to get on here and post. I guess deer around here must wear watches and have a set schedule to go to the food plots... that dang day light savings time!!

More on DST and Deer

2009-11-03T07:15:00.002-05:00

Woods Walker said:

What....no scent-loc version???

And that green camo.....now THAT'S a joke! By the time the clock change occurs, most of the green is out of the woods in most areas. You need to have one in Realbush "Last Week Of October" pattern, so that it "blends" with the woods.

Our scientific studies showed that deer did not mind the Woodland pattern. The whole point here is that the deer are comforted by showing them the old time. It wouldn't help if they couldn't see the clock at all, right?

As to the Scent-lok feature: we'd thought about that, but then you'd have a conflict between the built-in scent-dripper and the Scent-lok. Of course, if you want your clock to be scent-invisible to the deer, I suppose you could fill the reservoir of the scent dripper with Sport Wash and spray everything liberally with UV-Killer. We used the Wooland camo, because it contains no UV-brightened pigments, but. . . well, you can't be too sure.

As you can see from this picture taken at our secret testing facility, the woodland camo clock is there, you can make it out, but it does not stand out.

BTW: That's Angus, one of our shamanic pro-staff. He was doing some last-minute calibrations of the framulator prior to our full-up test that we conducted over last weekend-- very complicated stuff. Very scientific you know.

Dang! That was sweet!

2009-11-03T07:11:00.001-05:00

It's kind of goofy and strange that here I go all the way to KY every weekend to hunt, and yet I take a turn out to the local shopping mall to get the best look at a buck in situ all season.

Tonight KYHillChick went out looking for a new washing machine-- the old one died tonight at the ripe old age of 13 years, 6 months, filling the basement with water as it went. We drove out to Tri-County Mall on the north side of Cincy to go shopping and what should we see but a sweet 10 pointer chasing doe less than a 1/4 mile from the mall, in a fallow part of the cemetery on RT 747. I pulled off and watched him. He was a magnificent specimen. He was taking turns chasing 4 doe in the last rays of sunlight. He probably went about 130 -140, and he was in full rut. He was lip curling, and chasing , but mostly he was just turning broadside to the doe and displaying his rack for the ladies-- and me. He was only 40 yards from the road.

Wow! What a sight he was! Across the street was a TGI Fridays and a strip mall with Kinkos. Most people were just driving on, and couldn't understand what I was doing. Traffic started backing up, and somebody started honking, and I had to finally break off and keep going.

MMmmmmmMMMmmmm! Some nights the Good Lord gives you a peak at what it is all about. This was one of them.

The Shaman Presents the Anti-DST Clock for Deer

2009-11-02T06:43:00.002-05:00

NOW!
The shaman presents!

The Shamanic Camo Clock! Just $48.95

Place this revolutionary clock in front of your stand and set it to daylight savings time to reassure the deer that nothing is wrong. Scientific studies show that this clock, when used in conjunction with a proven scent control plan ( included absolutely free), will dramatically improve your deer hunting success.

Read what they're saying:
[quote]
Shaman noted D&DH Stumpsitter says:
People just don't understand the stress it puts on these animals. The deer get confused and start getting up in the middle of the night and it throws off the rut and the bucks keel over out of all the frustration, 'cause the doe is staying in her bed and they're always late getting out into the field in the evening and it makes them get thin, missing meals and all.

[/quote]

[quote]Howhill, another noted D&DH expert:
I've always felt that the shortening days i.e. photoperiod have an effect on deer activity.thas pretty much known to be fact. that the amount of light recieved into the pituatary gland of a doe is what triggers estrous. . . ..as far as the time factor itself id say the day we set our clocks back . . . [and] . . the deer cant set theirs back cause they have no thumbs. [/quote]

Place at 20 yards for bowhunting. Place at 50 yards for shotgun and rifle. Fill the handy reservoir with your favorite scent. Scent drips out after sunrise and sunset, further enhancing the effect.

Go to our website and look for valuable accessories now on sale:

1) Shamanic UV-Radioactive Hunting Suit -- The future of deer hunting
2) Shamanic Scented Gum -- Now!!! Update -- important new info
3) Shamanic ant-telepathy hat. $14.99 -- Coming Fall 2009 -- Pre-orders accepted

From the mind of the shaman direct to your stand!
Free samples of the Shamanic Gum with every order.
Free shipping on orders over $500.

Visit our booth at DEERORAMA 2010 -- Test the telepathy hat on live deer!

Watch for our products on Deer City, USA!

Soaking the Non-Residents in Kentucky

2009-10-31T11:02:00.002-04:00

This is in response to:

Higher Priced Non-Resident License, a thread over on KentuckyHunting.net

I am a resident of Ohio, and hunt exclusively in Zone 1. Kentucky affords me a much better opportunity to hunt deer and turkey. My family owns 200 acres in Bracken County. I've written several times here about how much I appreciate the opportunity to come across the river to hunt.

I've been watching this thread develop, and I cannot figure out why there is such animosity here to non-resident hunters. Yes, I am from out of state. Yes, we own property here. No, I am not one of the last-minute Johnnies at the Walmart. Yes, since my shoulder went bad, I've been gun-only, but I had 25 years in as a bow hunter before I gave up. I have a medical waiver to hunt with a crossbow. I am somewhat of an outdoor writer, and I frequently write to promote NKY and the Ohio Valley as a hunting destination. My family puts a large amount of money into the local economy in the way of taxes, gas, food, and license fees, but we think it's worth it.

The reality of it is, that in Zone 1 there are simply not enough hunters to hunt all the deer. I've seen huge increases in our herd since 2001. EHD was just a blip for us. The deer and turkey both are thriving. More hunters are needed in this zone, and yet nobody seems to like the idea of us carpetbaggers shooting your deer.

When there is unlimited taking of antlerless deer available in a zone, you know there is a problem. The problem is NOT that the non-residents aren't being soaked enough. The problem is NOT that the non-residents aren't being kept out. The problem is NOT crossbows. The problem is NOT rifle season during the rut. The problem is that you have too few hunters taking too few deer. Here in Bracken County, the deer probably outnumber the permanent residents.

I will be blunt. I was fairly willing when we first moved out here to give written permission to hunt. However, each and every time I gave out that permission, I ended up getting screwed. I caught one neighbor on his deck in his underwear, shooting at deer on my property. He didn't hit anything, but he was shooting at 300 yards with his 30-30 and just emptying the magazine at them. He'd go back in the trailer, reload and come back out. The deer didn't seem to mind, but I thought that was an awful amount of lead going into the woods indiscriminately.

I gave permission for a fellow to ride his ATV through the property to the land-locked parcel that adjoins me and later I found him and his buddies hunting everywhere on my property--and giving me grief to boot. I caught another fellow in the chain over the driveway-- he'd gotten his ATV's handlebars stuck sneeking in. His answer "I didn't think you were home."

I've been in contact with the CO every year to help take care of the poachers, but they keep coming. My neighbors came and tore down my posted signs. I have to patrol constantly for new tree stands and ground blinds on my property-- people from as far away as the TN line. If y'all had just been nice, I would have been nice. Nobody likes to have what's theirs to give taken without permission.

I am down to 2 active letters this year: 1 for a 79 year old local grouse hunter that is a true gentleman and one for my retired bosses, a KY resident, who wants to come fill his freezer with doe. Between us, my sons and my old boss we should be able to knock over enough deer to do what's needed on this plot.

Let me give you all some suggestions:

1) Keep KY a good non-resident bargain. You might want to make some WMA's resident only, but I would not go screwing with much else.

2) Encourage non-residents into Zone 1. You already give them a great chance to come across the river and shoot rifles during the rut. However, you should incentivize antlerless deer. Maybe offer a special $75 non-resident antlerless license/tag for the December rut or something. Let crossbows in on private land in Zone 1 regardless of medical condition. Leverage the out-of-staters to help handle the herd.

3) Put reefer trucks out on the major roads and set up stations for donating whole deer carcasses, and feed the hungry. Anyone can drop off a deer on their way home from the field.

4) Police your own, and be nice. Buckeyes are notorious in SE Indiana and N KY for coming over the state line and being slobs. However, my problem has been with my own neighbors. It does not take much to get private land posted and the landowner permanently peeved. You don't want more WMA's, do you? Really? You don't want more chances to hunt in a crowd. You want to be left alone when you hunt. Taxing non-residents and buying WMA land is not the way to that; honoring your own laws and being nice to landowners is.

5) Encourage local business to make the Rifle Opener a celebration. Roll out the red carpet. Have a Fall Festival. Sell soup, chili, spaghetti, fried chicken in the main square. Bake sales, car shows, craft shows, folk art-- get the out of staters in here and soak 'em. You personally won't see any benefit to additional non-resident fees, but you can walk home with cash in your pockets if you roll out the welcome. Give the wives something to do while the hunters are hunting, and the hunters won't be as quick to roll back across the line when they're done hunting. Telecheck probably put a damper on this, but you all can make up for it. Make the Opener your best money-making weekend of the year. If you don't believe it can happen, go look at what they do in MacArthur OH, for their Turkey Festival in the Spring.

6) Non-resident ownership of KY land is a great thing, not a bad one. Here are all these fallow farms throughout the state. The per-acre price is depressed due to the supply. The more you encourage non-residents, the more that price goes up. All of a sudden what was unused acreage is some out-of-stater's dream come true. Later, when you want to buy it back, you can let the property values fall back down. This is what Americans did to the Japanese and the Germans back in the 80's-- sold them real estate at inflated prices and then let the bottom fall out of the market.

That's just my ideas-- one old fart Buckeye who loves coming over the bridge every weekend. YMMV

How is the change from DST going to affect the deer?

2009-10-31T09:23:00.004-04:00

Dang! I'm missing all those threads about "How is the change from DST going to affect the deer?" I always howl when I find one of them.

Occasionally I get the devil in me and start posting stuff about how the deer get confused and start getting up in the middle of the night and it throws off the rut and the bucks keel over out of all the frustration, 'cause the doe is staying in her bed and they're always late getting out into the field in the evening and it makes them get thin, missing meals and all-- you'd be surprised how many guys bite.

. . . but then I've got folks riled up over "Disney on Ice." I think it's terrible that they cart Walt's frozen carcass around to cities and then make people pay to see it. Folks tell me it's an ice pagent-- like Holiday on Ice, but that makes it even worse-- something so gruesome mixed in with what's supposed to be such wholesome family entertainment.

Marketing to Hunters

2009-10-28T07:34:00.002-04:00

It all depends on the product, and the price, and the claims.

Mathews: seems like a good bow, but there are bows out there that will kill a deer for a lot less.

Scent-lok: I've always been leery of this technology, the price is prohibitive, and a liberal dose of sodium bicarb works more reliably for me. I have a mismatched set of bibs and quad parka, both from Remington, both purchased in 2003, both from Walmart that have never seen a washing machine, and I can still have a doe 5 yards downwind and I'm invisible to her. They cost me less than $100, they are water repellent. They are insulated. There is no scent-reduction technology involved, just baking soda.

You're right that it's all right for these things to exist in the market, and it's our choice not to buy it, but when somebody goes and buys gobs of time and saturates the channel and you can't listen to a show without the host claiming that his whole hunting career hinges on the performance of this wonderful product. . . yeah, right. That's where the derision sets in. That's when I stop listening. The next time I hear some couch potato wannabe tell me that when he finally gets out off his butt and hunts one of these years he's going to own it, I'm sorry. Something inside me, my evil side, takes over. After the room clears, whoever I'm with has to make excuses for me and say something happened to me in the Jungle back in 67 and they carry me off. Nevermind the fact that I was 8 in 1967, they buy it.

One you did not mention is Thompson Center. It's a good product, but way too many TV hunters hunt with it, and you know it has nothing to do with it being a superior system. The Encore is just a @#$@# single shot rifle, and a sort of homely one at that. I don't appreciate it being rammed down my throat. TC is WAAAAY over-saturated to my liking. KYHillChick has started giving me my drinks in plastic cups, because they don't break the picture tube.

I've been home with the DVR a lot this Fall, and I have recorded a bunch of shows. The FF key is great, but what is surprising is how utterly empty some of these shows are. In one case, I had FF'd all the way to the :18 minute mark before anything remotely resembling content showed up. It ended up with :30 of show all wrapped around 0:00:20 of kill footage and the rest was either commerical or intro/outro.

. . . but this isn't any different than any other product category. P&G hit paydirt 50 years ago by putting blue inclusions in their laundry detergent. Product testing found that housewives were dead sure the wash was cleaner even though the little bits of blue were just harmless food coloring. The product came out as Oxydol. On the other hand.The last company I worked for had a flux-coated welding wire that women welder's loved, and the only difference between it and our cheaper brand was we kept a closer tolerance on the blue dye on the coating. It made the new batch the same color as the old batch. If they got hold of a mismatched stick, they'd think it had gone "stale." If you can capture the hearts and minds of the consumer by finding a need (or creating a need) and then filling it successfully, you've got a market.

I would like to think I'm well beyond that, but then I probably buy Hornady bullets, because I like the little red boxes. The world thinks I'm well beyond this too. I've recently fallen out of the prime demographic for marketing, and now I'm in the old fuds demo, 51 to . . . to. . . well let's call it "DEAD" It's funny, but a whole bunch of things stopped appealing to me. There's nothing in the shopping malls, nothing on TV, and nothing in the catalogs that even remotely attracts me. All of a sudden, I'm immune to marketing and it's sort of a relief. Then again, I kind of feel lonely now, because when the telemarketers call and they find out I'm 51, they always hang up quickly. And here I sit on my mountain of . . .stuff trying to figure out what to do with an unused bottle of Tinks 69, the String Tracker, and the Super Sling that I found stashed behind all those little red boxes I've been saving all these years.

Progress Report on the Crossbow

2009-10-26T07:20:00.001-04:00

I've finally done some serious hunting with the crossbow. I had it out a few times over the weekend in between hunting for turkey with Angus. Nothing really went wrong with any of it. It just wasn't as much fun as my bow and certainly not like a rifle.

For the most part a bow is flat. It can have a stabilizer or a cable guard sticking out, but the everything is fairly flat and easy to carry. Rifles are fairly stick-like. There's not a whole-lot going on there either. Crossbows stick out in all three dimensions in one way or the other, and it's just a lot harder to do everything with them. Wearing them on a sling is a problem, getting in and out of trees is more of a problem. It just wasn't as much fun.

There is no polite way to load, reload or unload a crossbow. Loading is best done on the ground. Reloading is not going to happen any time soon, so you'd best forget about taking a second shot. Unloading? It's a bit like muzzleloading. At some point, you're going to have to fire the weapon to get it unloaded.

The one NICE thing I can say about a crossbow is that it is great to prop over a shooting rail. Vertical bows have to be held or put on an overhead hook or something. Rifles are always a bit of a problem in the blind. They always want to fall over or slip or roll, so you just have to hold on to them constantly. I had the crossbow up in the buddy stand with me, and this is the one place it shown. I propped it up on the corner of the shooting rail and it remained at the ready the whole time. It acted like it wanted to hunt.

There is one other really nice thing about a crossbow. I unloaded it by putting a field point on and firing into the ground before I got down from the stand. At 20 yards there was absolutely no doubt where that bolt is going. I picked out a nice oak leaf out in front of the stand and the bolt went right where I aimed. JPH or somebody will gnash their teeth and tell me that this is unfair. Frankly I'm done with being fair. I've been 3 years off my compound bow now, and I've gotten to like hunting at compound bow distances with a 30-06. Same idea-- it takes the worry out of it.

I've been watching D&DH a lot on the DVR, and they always go and pick apart some guy's shot on a deer. It's always a guy with a bow they're critiquing isn't it? Hmmmm. I wonder if I sent in video of nailing a nice buck at 15 yards with an M1 Garand if they'd spend the time on it? Why is that? Oh well.

I had one deer come in Sunday morning, and it was moving fast and it was too far out. I've still not had anything to shoot at, but we'll see.

More on (MORON) UV Suppression

2009-10-24T14:57:00.003-04:00

Last year I did a bunch of posts on my testing of UV-suppression in relation to deer hunting. You're welcome to go look. Use the search function and look for on keywords like "UV-Killer" "elephant repellent" "useless" and so on. I had several posts last Fall , all the way into December. Let me know if the links to the pictures are not working-- I took a lot during the tests. I'm posting this, because I've had a bunch of questions regarding the issue again, and I don't want to re-hash the whole mess.

As to the whole idea of this being a washing ritual, my answer is yes. Sure, go ahead. Have a ball! As the guy who runs around with an antler headdress and a rattle, who am I to poke fun? I just think you can get the practical side of it done with baking soda and some common sense. UV-suppression on its face is goofy.

. . .

ooops. Gotta go. OT just came up the road and wants to chat.
. . .

OT showed up to chat. I thought we were going to lose OT over the summer. His lungs are going, and he's just not getting around like he used to. He turned 79 a few weeks ago. I hadn't seen him in a while. He missed turkey season this year-- most of the time he was in the hospital. However, I'm glad to see him doing as well as he's ever been.

If you're around reading my stuff, you'll know I write a lot about OT, the old turkey hunter that runs the mower shop as well as OD, the old deer hunter that lives up the road. They're all part of the same clan somehow, and I know they're all vaguely related to my wife, KYHillChick, but then most of Kentucky is in one way or another.

OT was showing up for his letter of permission to hunt grouse.

What was I saying? Oh yeah, this UV-suppression hooey. Look, I've been walking around during deer season for decades in an alleged UV-Radioactive poncho and hat. Out of all those tests that Atsko had me do, one thing is sure: if you put my hunter orange poncho under a black light, it's bright enough to read a book off of. On the other hand, I've had big bucks come in that were completely oblivious to me. If they can't see a 4X6 piece of eye-sore bright hunter orange they're not going to worry about a little bit of alleged glow or a little streak of zinc-oxide in your Mossy Oak pattern. As to the general glow induced by detergents, all I can say is that at the normal times we see deer, dusk and dawn there is no UV bouncing around to reflect. When UV IS around, midday and thereabouts, the deer are normally holed up. Furthermore, let's say you're down on the ground and wearing your alleged UV- infested camo and you're stalking deer-- the worse case scenario. What makes your glow any different from a bit of dappled sunlight if these deer can see UV so much better?

Let's just say we take some of y'all's idea that it it's just safe to go ahead and do it. What if I started buying booths at outdoor shows and started telling you that deer could sense your telepathic thoughts and that you needed an aluminum foil coated baseball cap to shield your thoughts from scaring the deer. Would you pay $14.99 just to be safe? What if I paid for advertising and endorsements on TV? At what point would you buy the hat? This isn't something you can necessarily prove. All anyone has shown is that deer might have sensitivity to the UV range-- not that it particularly affects hunting. Remember too that the dyes and all that are fluorescing in the VISIBLE range, not the UV range, otherwise you wouldn't be seeing the dang glow. Some things are like that: you hit them with one wavelength and they fluoresce in another. This right there might be a hint that something is up. All the pictures, all the tests all the marketing is supposed to show glowing, but it's glowing YOU can see.

When somebody comes back with REAL experimental data that shows that UV-inhibition actually improves hunting success, I'll be the first to repent. So far it's all been supposition, and extrapolation, and . . . and . . . elephant repellent. In the meanwhile, I'll be in my day-glo orange clown suit . You'll know where to find me: look for the orange glow on the horizon.

Yute Season Eve

2009-10-09T19:35:00.001-04:00

I held Angus out of school this morning. He was all worked up over the LCROSS Mission, and frankly so was I. We got up early to watch on the Nasa stream. It turned out to be a major boregasm (sigh!) They don't make moon shots the way they used to. I'd never thought I hear myself saying I missed Walter Cronkite. Frankly, the guys they had for commentators seemed a little fey.

We headed down to camp. I had a couple phone interviews (I'm still out of work), but after that was over, we went scouting a bit. It was raining, but nothing serious. Angus likes walking in the rain. We went out to Midway ( the new shooting house) and on the way we bumped a deer. When we got there, there was a nice fat buck standing in the field. He sauntered off. I dropped off a can of spray paint and put camo covers on the pair of sand bags we'd left last weekend. As we were locking up, Angus heard doe bleats in the woods nearby. I came out and heard them too. I bleated a couple times myself, and got an answer.

On the way back to camp, a head-hunter called. We spent the last 10 minutes of the trip with me explaining my resume from 1992 to 1998. Even I get confused a little with those years. We concluded the call with a promise to have something for me by Tuesday. Yeah, I've been hearing that for over a year.

After a change into dry clothes, I caught a weather report-- rain until 6 AM and a low of 45F. I can dig that. We got the gear ready and then I retired to the front porch to watch the rain. Along about 1900 EDT, a couple of doe came out. I brought Angus out on the porch and we watched them together with binos. They eventually left, and I went around back to watch a spot where I thought I might catch them on the other side of Hootin Holler.

Not only did the pair of doe show up, but also a nice doe/buck combination. They all seemed intent of getting as much of something-- some long-stemmed forb-- crammed in their mouths before it got dark. Dang! Whatever it was, it was manna to these deer. The buck was only a 4-pointer, but the rack was dark and rich. I told Angus that would make an ideal first buck.

Back on the front porch, the rain let up just a little and all of a sudden we started hearing shots from every quarter. Every father had every young son out trying to get the last practice shot in before it got dark. It was quite a fusillade there until darkness finally got the better of them. It's now settled down again. The rain has come back. We're inside for the night. From the number of shots, it is quite clear that a large number of young men and their fathers will go to bed praying for an end of the rain over night and a flash of antler in the morning.

And that's the way it is, Friday, October Ninth. Goodnight from South West Bracken County Kentucky.

More On the Crossbow Experiment

2009-10-07T13:58:00.000-04:00

(Or is that Moron ?) I got to keep saying to myself "CFAB!" "CFAB!"

You'd think, starting way back in July, I'd be all ready for my first season with the crossbow. I am, but just barely. Honestly I missed my target of hunting with it last weekend for the first time, but I got things working Sunday morning, and I'm ready to hunt now. Of course this weekend I'm taking Angus out for Yute Season and then there's Early Muzzleloader and I probably won't actually hunt with it until the end of the month.

My ultimate goal is to have something ready for those two weeks before rifle season, which is the also the peak of the rut. However, I do not want to waste a tag on just any old deer to say I 'd waxed one with a crossbow. It is going to be something very special before I flick off that safety.

Kentucky's seasons are such that it's hard to be a bowhunter. The season starts early enough, but it's way to hot. You have the whole month of September and one week in October and then there's two firearms-related weekends back -to-back. Then there's 2-3 weekends (one of which is Fall Turkey Season) and then then there's 3 weeks of rifle season.

Just to fill you in, I decided to break down and buy a used crossbow over the summer. I had been nursing a bad shoulder for a few years , and decided to go to the doc and get my medical waiver. If a doc writes you one, you can hunt all of Kentucky's archery seasons with a crossbow. Otherwise a lot of the choice dates, especially just before the rut, are closed to crossbow. The one I found was a Horton Yukon with a 4X scope. I got a good deal on it through Craig's List. For a 25 year compound bow hunter, this looked like a cakewalk. It wasn't. Here's what I found out.

It did not actually take 3 months to get the system working. Yes, I started in July, but frankly I lost heart after my first experiments with the crossbow. Every few shots I was sending one over the top of the target and losing bolts. I tried a bunch of things that didn't work. Bolts are $35/6-- not something you want to waste willy-nilly. It took a few tries to figure out what was wrong.

This crossbow, and I will assume all of them, are extremely finicky when it comes to bolt weight, head weight, etc. I finally got some new bolts, mounted 100 grain field points and started getting consistent groups. The bad groups and 3foot high fliers were the result of a minor variation in bolts that came with the used crossbow in the deal. I don't fault anyone. The guy I bought it from-- it was his father's-- hadn't a clue. Some of the bolts were old and were losing vanes on the way to the target-- that didn't help anything either. I think some of the field points that came with it weren't the same weight, and my original choice of 145 grain were just not suited for the system at all. Once I redid everything with new Horton aluminum bolts, 100 grain heads, etc. it all fell into place. The problem stems from the draw weight. When you think about it, things aren't all THAT bad with a compound bow. A 15 grain difference throws off your aim a little. If you broadhead planes a little you're going to have to adjust your point of aim a little. With crossbows, everything is magnified. If there's a slight difference, your bolt is going into the next county or going to try and find its way to China. Be ready for some embarrassment if you try to repeat what I did at a public archery range.

I tried to get the guys at Bass-Pro to give me some help. The said it was going to take a complete recable and re-string job to get the crossbow shooting properly. I took a chance they were wrong, and I'm glad I was right. I ordered Horton arrows, 100 grain field points and used some Bass-Pro 100 grain broadheads I had laying around, and I was within 6 inches at 20 yards switching between the field points and the broadheads. Both are shooting really good groups. Yes, it's tighter than a beginner with a compound, but once you get past keeping them all on a pie plate at 20 yards, there's really no arguing any more. It will take a deer. By the time I declared Victory on Sunday my bolts were holding to the same hole at 20 yards. At $35/dozen, I'm not going to try a Robin Hood trick.

It is hard to get the old habits to die. I feel like taking a marker and writing on my boot: CFAB-- "Cock First (then) Apply Bolt." If you're used to a regular bow, you always want to grab for the next arrow after you shoot. No. That's not the way it goes. Besides, if you did manage to do it that way, think where you boot is going to be when you pull back the string. No shaman. Put the bolt down, shaman. Cock it first, shaman.

The cocking is all done with a cocking aid. The total exertion is minimal, even though it's a 150 lb bow. The cocking aid was an extra 25 bucks, but it was worth the money. Forget follow-up shots. Fumbling your cocking aid out of your pocket will leave the deer laughing at you.

I am hear to dispel several evil rumors about crossbows:

1) They shoot like a rifle. Absolute bunk. Mine shoots about like a compound bow as far as range. To pull one back without the cocking aid is worse than trying to pull a recurve that's too stiff. Mine is ungainly to handle. They are a chore to load-- as bad as a muzzle loader. Crossbows are probably the worst of all possible worlds instead of the best. I would put them on a par or slightly below a single-shot shotgun --smooth bore and punkin balls. 20 yards? No problem. Past 40? You're praying. I'm not talking Foster Slugs, I'm talking the old stuff that used to corkscrew to the target, and was so slow you could watch it going.
2) They offer no challenge. No. I gotta say, that if I shoot a deer with this Horton Yukon, I will have accomplished something. I'm sorry. I'm not buying the purists' lines any more. My limit is going to be about 30 yards. If I can get a nice buck in that close that is challenge enough. 0-30 yards works off the same crosshair on the scope.
3) They offer an unfair advantage. I'm the first to agree that this is not an elegant hunting method. Ugly? Yes, but "unfair advantage???" Yow! Once the bolt is off the rail, it's just like any other bow shot. The smallest leaf is going to deflect it. You take a deer with this system and you can hold your head up as high as anyone.
4) Only a couch potato or black-hat wannabe would want to shoot one. My shoulder is bad. My eyes are bad. I'm 51. I'm neither a couch potato or a black-hat wannabe. I tried crossbow. I'm going to keep it. I will hunt with it. I will probably kill with it. The idea that this system is going to get folks to put down the remote and fill all the WMA's is bunk. Most people can't stand the cold, the privation, and being away from the refrigerator that long. You can be a real deer hunter with a crossbow-- make no mistake.
5) They are inherently unsafe. Once I got the concept of CFAB down, things got safe in a hurry. You need to be vigilant. I would not want to go stalking with one of these puppies, but out of a treestand or ground blind, they are as safe as any bow or firearm system I would chose to hunt with. Just remember to keep a bolt with a field point handy. There is no elegant way to uncock a crossbow. You need to be able to fire a bolt into the ground to make them ready to carry.

One last word: If you follow my stuff regarding firearms, I'm the kind of guy who likes to find a $150 deer rifle and make it shoot as well as a $1000 deer rifle. This ended up being different. I got a working system for total expenditure of under $300, using a used bow to start with. I'm out of work and on a very tight budget, but I also wanted to see how low you could go and still have something that functioned. My recommendation is to spend more money on your first crossbow if you can. One guy on here said he was shooting good groups the first time out. I'm sure I could have too with a $600 system put together for me by a guy who knew something about what he was selling. It took some fumbling, but I got there trying to go the cheap route. There is value in a better bow and paying for someone to do the original set-up for you. This is a technology that seems to lend itself to "you get what you pay for."

Why I Keep Deer Hunting

2009-10-01T08:12:00.001-04:00

I was thinking again yesterday about what keeps me in deer hunting. Part of it is certainly just habit, but then you would have to have a serious habit to go through all the trouble I go through every year. Part of it is now probably that worship us old farts have for ourselves as we were in our youthful prime. However, I don't think either would get me off the couch.

I think I got a peek into what really keeps me going in this thing last weekend. Angus and I were going out to Newstand to place the camo skirt around the shooting rail. The way to Newstand is a somewhat convoluted march down the side of the ridge. It overlooks a grove of white and pin oaks that sit on a shelf just above Willow Creek. From Newstand, you can just barely make out the creek bottom. As we made our way over the barbed wire, I became genuinely irked and I had a hard time figuring out why. I found myself grousing over the sameness of it all. Here we were taking the same trek down the same hill we'd been making for years. Here I was with yet another son, getting a stand ready for season. Why had deer hunting become such a stinking rut?

I then realized I had become at the same time become irked over everything being changed from last year and the year before. Hurricane Ike had brought down a bunch of cedars, and it was now harder to get to the stand. In fact it was hardly recognizeable from last year . It was. . .

Hey, wait a minute shaman! What the. . . How can you be irked about it all being the same and all being different at the same time? How can. . . oh, drat! Now it's starting to rain.

All this was rolling around in my head. All this was making me thoroughly miserable. I was also hot and sweaty from the humidity, but I was starting to get chilled from the rain. I was stuck in all this turmoil and frankly I don't remember climbing the ladder or belting in. What I do remember was the single deer snort that woke me up as I was taking electrical ties and fixing the camo skirt over the foam pipe insulation over the shooting rail of the buddy stand. All of a sudden I got yanked back to reality. All of a sudden, I knew exactly why I was there and what I was doing.

I think that is what deer hunting is all about for me. I often say that a day in the field leaves me knowing myself better than a month of doing any other thing. I sat back and took a little bit of time to find the neighboring tree where Moose and I had first left my climbing stand 8 seasons ago, the week before the Rifle Opener. It was hard to find the tree, but it was still there, now grown too big to be to be suitable for the API Grand Slam Super Magnum. My eye then traced the path I had followed over from Heartbreak Ridge, looking for a new stand location after my first stand at Heartbreak had gone stale from overuse. I then looked down and saw a kid not unlike Moose had been, staring up at me, wondering when his inscruitable Dad was going to come down.

So much the same, so much different. I unbelted and came down the ladder. Eight seasons ago, a doe had busted us on the way out. Now we just had drizzle. We started our march back up the hill.

What is a "Rain Gun?"

2009-09-28T11:55:00.001-04:00

I've been talking about a rain gun here. I've been getting email from folks wanting to know what I mean, and asking if this gun or that qualifies as a rain gun. Let me explain.

For a lot of people, there is no such thing. They take a rifle, take it out in whatever, and when they're done, they clean it up and take it home. Rain, snow, whatever.

My situation is a little different. I have several nice pieces that have wood stocks. If they get out in rain the wood is probably going to warp enough to change the point of aim. When I see rain in the forecast, they are probably going to stay home. I have others with synthetic stocks or stocks with detached forearms that don't have this problem. I finally decided to designate my Rem 7600 in 35 Whelen as my "rain gun."

What makes the 7600 so special? For me, it was changing out the leather sling for a nylon one, and putting a coat of Turtle wax on it before season. That's all. Why did I pick the 7600?

1) Being a pump, the forearm is detached. I don't have to worry about warpage.
2) I find that getting into the working of the rifle and getting them clean and dry is easy, and I don't have to worry about changing the point of aim while I'm doing it.
3) It a rifle in my deer battery that really did not have a good reason for being there. I have a rifle set up for close-in treestand work, and another for longer ranges. I realized it wasn't going to be my #1 pick for anything during deer season.
4) I had previously hunted with this rifle in some of the most extreme weather of my career-- snow, cold, rain, you name it.
5) It has a wood stock but the previous owner boogered it a little. If anything DID happen to it, I'd probably spring for a Tupperware replacement. No big deal.

That's my reason for picking a rifle and calling it my "rain gun."
The thing with this "rain gun" idea is it's probably not going to work for everyone. More and more guys are shooting all-weather deer rifles with synthetic stocks. However, I hate the idea of taking my Savage 99 or my Winchester Mod 70 out in the elements. The Rem 7600 doesn't seem to mind, and neither do I.

I think it's the last issue that's most important. Part of this is practical-- you don't want a wet leather sling going back into the case with your rifle. You don't want a wood stock warping or an old oil finish ruined. A stainless action and barrel ? A synthetic stock? Yes, this all works toward making a good rain gun However, most of all you ask yourself: Is this really a rifle I want out in the rain?

I used to think my M1 Garand made the ideal rain gun. Heck! Mine had been through WWII, one more trip in the rain wasn't going to hurt it. Then I spent a winter going over the stock and turned it into a show piece. All of a sudden I didn't want it out in the rain again. It also is probably the most expensive piece in my collection now, so that right there is a good reason to only bring it out when the sun is shining.

My Mosin Nagant M44 will eventually be a good rain gun. I lopped off an inch of stock so Angus could shoot it. I have another stock to put on it, so I could bring it back to as-issued condition. On the other hand, I can glue that stump back on and then spray bedliner on the wood and make an ultimate who-care's banging-around rain gun.

The other part of this is pure laziness. Over the course of the season, I probably hunt with 4-5 rifles, and the kids account for another 3-4 between them. If I've got to keep going over every rifle with the Works, it's a lot of work. On the other hand, if all I have to do is worry about 1 rifle that's going to get the brunt of the weather and all the others get babied, it makes it a LOT easier. If I have a lever action or a semi-auto that I know is going to cost me a half-hour to an hour to tear down every time it sees a little weather, that is the rifle I'm probably leaving home.

What do you prefer: Bow, Muzzleloader, or Rifle

2009-09-24T13:54:00.000-04:00

If I had to go based on my preference of season, I would say bow. I love being afield in October and watch the woods getting ready for Winter.

If I had to base my response on what weapon feels the best in my hands, it would be my 54 Hawken. I just love that rifle. Eventually I hope to find a full-stock flinter that gives me that kind of joy.

I answered modern gun. My reasons are these:;

1) I finally figured out I could go easy early in the year and finally get around to filling my freezer in mid-November. To me, it's gotten so the harvest is sort of an anti-climax. Deer hunting and turkey hunting have become year-round pursuits for me. Once I stopped being so dead-set on getting as much bow hunting in as possible, it opened up a bunch of other possibilities. I can now squirrel hunt, dove hunt, turkey hunt and just be out in the woods in the early fall and leave the serious business of killing deer until mid November.
2) When I do go out, I like the idea that I've got a freaking death ray in my hands. Finesse has nothing to do with it. The deck is completely stacked in my favor. I'm well past the point in my hunting career where I need a method-based challenge to feel happy. The only vestige that remains is that I love reloading and I have not taken a deer with a store-bought rifle load in over a decade.
3) Over the years of doing it all, I figured out that having a rifle in my hands doesn't mean I HAVE to take a deer at extreme range. I like taking deer with a 30-06ish rifle at what is normally considered archery ranges. To me this is the best of all worlds.
4) I was an avid bow hunter until a few years ago and my shoulder started to tell me it was time to hang it up. My eyes were also starting to go to the point where I could not see both the pins and the deer anymore. That's okay. I'm cool with that. I got 25 years in, a few trophies, a bunch of good stories, and I can say I survived the first generation of store-bought treestands. What more is there?
5) Bow hunting is a very solitary pursuit and requires a lot of commitment. The past 8 years, I've been bringing two sons into the sport of deer hunting. Switching my emphasis bought me more time with them in the field.

That's my story and I'm sticking with it.

A new stand

2009-09-20T10:04:00.000-04:00

So yesterday Moose, Angus, and I went squirrel hunting. Moose ran into the bionic squirrel: took 5 rounds of #6-- kept getting back up and trying to climb the tree.

Angus and I went out onto a finger ridge we seldom travel, and found a good spot for the ladder stand. While we were sizing up the tree, a doe busted us. We took that as an omen, and brought down the stand and transported it over.

Later Moose and I came back from lunch to clear a few cedar trees out. One in particular would give us 100 yards of shooting lane. When we got there, there was fresh deer scat at the base of the ladder.

Later still, KYHillChick and I drove out to retrieve some gear I'd left and get a GPS reading on the new location. Sure enough, the doe was back standing at the base of the stand.

Go figure.

Midway Phoenix-- A Deer Shack is Born

2009-09-17T07:36:00.002-04:00

It all started back in 2008 when I realized there was an ideal spot for a treestand that would cover the length of two food plots I put up a buddy stand; and pulled two deer out of the plots that year. I'd been spoiling for years to put up a serious all-weather shooting house, and my trips out with Angus had convinced me that it would not be long before the two of us would not fit into buddy stand.

Over the winter I came up with a design that would comfortably handle two hunters, and take advantage of all the scraps I had left over from rehabbing the farm house.

The original design was set to be put up on 8 foot treated fence posts. However, there was a problem with that. The Elevator brand brackets were just not built to withstand all the weight. We found out the easy way. As we were erecting the second wall one leg let go, and I quickly found out that fat men don't fly too well. It could have been a lot worse if the it had all held together until the roof was on. Yikes.

After a month hiatus, we all went back to work. From the 8 foot fence posts, we cut stubby little legs and got the height of the floor nor more than 2 feet of the ground. One floor joist was shattered and needed to be replaced. I have to say that working at 2 feet was considerably easier than 10.

The Shamanic Deer Battery

2009-09-11T11:16:00.003-04:00

I brought the Shamanic Deer Battery back from its secret offsite underground storage facility the other day, and it occurred to me that it might be a good idea to take pictures to share with y'all. I'm always talking about this deer rifle or that one. You can tell that I'm rather attached to them.

I have to warn you. This is not my end-all list of must-have rifles. It is just the ones that I own, and ones that have a lot of history for me. I'll try and post stories about each one as I go on the website as well

Link to stories, better pics, etc.

Which table predicts deer movement the best?

2009-09-11T06:41:00.001-04:00

I thought about this long and hard for years.

The Magic Watch

There are two conclusions in that piece:

1) I see more deer when I'm outside than when I'm inside.
2) I see more deer when I'm not looking at the watch.

Since that piece I've done some additional research on the subject. I tried the magic watch and several other sets of tables. For these experiments I used my "sanity run," It was a 5 mile circuit of back roads that I used to drive when I worked up near Mason, Ohio. The nearby woods and fields are filled with deer and turkey. This is what I used to go and drive over lunchtime when I just had to get out of the office and stretch my mind. I frequently saw all kinds of game.

Every watch, every table, should be able to tell you that you see more game around sunrise and sunset. However, which table was better at predicting when I would see game on one of these midday drives? The answer was none. I saw deer. I saw turkey. I just never saw them with anything approaching the regularity and precision of the tables. What's more, I found that none of the sources were predictive. 4 hoofprints on my watch did not mean I was going to see any more deer than one or none. No peak on any sine wave curve meant there would be turkeys in the middle of the road.

The bottom line: Any excuse will work if you are dead set on staying on the couch. Get out there and stay out there. You will see game.

Resident Doe?

2009-09-09T08:22:00.004-04:00

From "Resident Does" on the D&DH Forum

DoeEyed
Super Member
From: Door County, WI.

How many does do you think would reside on 57 acres? Our land is a mix of open field, cedar swamp and thick bedding area on the west; open field in the middle behind our house and white pine/white spruce and nine bark plantings on the edge of a swamp on the east. Last year I regularly saw 1 doe with her fawns on the east side of our property. On the west side I would see another doe with fawns come out of the bedding area into the field.

_____________________________

Holly

Go and look on QDMA.org and find their density map and figure out what the overall density of deer is for your area. That'll give you a number of deer per square mile. Let's just assume 25 deer/sq mi for grins.

There are 640 acres to the square mile. 57 acres/640 X 25 = 2.23. That means there are roughly 2-3 deer resident on your property. Of them half are probably doe. The remainder are bucks and half of them are under 1.5 years of age.

That's just a rough guesstimate. If your 57 acres is a Walmart parking lot, there will be less. If you've got a food plot, and some great bedding areas and you largely leave it alone and don't ride ATV's through it, you might have. . .

. . . well look at it this way, I figure I've got about 40 deer/sq mi on my 200 acres. However, I have one food plot that regularly has a herd of 6 deer feeding on less than a quarter acre of clover. I got to figgering one day and I realized I was looking at a deer density of over 15,000/sq mi. on that food plot.

. . . but these figures are all a pile of hooey. Resident doe? Let's assume you have a good place for deer. You have probably 1 herd of 3-6 doe that regularly visit your property on a regular basis. They're not there all the time, but they drop by several times a week. They're there more often than not when there is something good to eat, and less if there isn't. Depending on terrain, amount of food and cover, and how the deer draw up their territories, you may have 2 such groups.

In comparison, I have 200 acres, everything in the world going for me, and I figure I have less than 15 deer on the property on a regular basis, that's 3-5 doe groups in any given year and they roam on and off the property at will. In the space of a weekend during season, I am nearly 100% sure of seeing at least one crew. I know where they like to go. I go to 4 different stands over a weekend (Saturday/Sunday -- Morning/Afternoon). In your case, you've got a quarter of the acreage. Assuming you had the same deer density I have, and the same luck i do, you will be nearly 100% certain of connecting with one doe group every (4X4=) 16 half-day outings. On the other hand, I can tell you that I'm about 80% sure of seeing a herd of doe come by one of my stands on Saturday (just 2 sittings) . Given that success you would be 80% sure of seeing a doe group in 8 half-day outings or about 50-50 luck in 5 outings. Somebody check my math, but I think that's right.

_____________________________

DoeEyed
Super Member
From: Door County, WI.
.
Status: offline Based on what I've seen in the past and shaman's post I would say that I have 2 doe groups that frequent the property on a regular basis and probably one buck. And of course deer that spend most of their time on the neighboring properties that pass thru.

_____________________________

Holly

I was thinking about this conversation as I was waking up this morning, and all those numbers I was throwing out were rolling around in my head. I was running over the last part of my guesstimating and trying to decide if I believe it. Pardon me if I ramble a bit.

Question: If I have 100% success in seeing deer over the weekend will someone with a quarter of the acreage actually have to wait 4 times as long to have the same success?

After considerable mulling, I came back to a weak YES. It has to do with how I qualified the answer. I assumed there was the same deer density and the same amount of hunting luck. I've got a few dozen hunting venues to chose from on that 200 acres. Some are just theoretical spots that would make sense to hunt if I had a mind to. Some are trees where I've put a stand in the past. Only a third are permanent stands or blinds that I am hunting actively. I scout. I make choices. The deer make choices as well, and in the case of this exercise, the choices are sort of boiled down to where they end up in the first and last couple of hours of sunlight during the day.

By limiting the acreage available to the hunter and not limiting the acreage available to the deer, you put a severe handicap on the hunter. So yes, the success of the hunter is going to be attenuated on a smaller plot. Unless. . .

There are a lot of things that can affect the outcome.

1) Higher deer density. You can increase the local deer density by increasing the amount of food and cover available. This is the approach offered by QDM.
2) Better luck. You can call it skill, luck, woodsmanship, whatever. The point is that I stumble through the hunting season making choices and leaving scent as I go. If you can get it done better than I do, you may see more deer. I am of the school of thought that we make our own luck to a large extent.
3) More time in the field. I'm basing this on hunting Saturday and Sunday, morning and afternoon. The more you get out, the better your chances of being successful.
4) Better choices of venue. That article in D&DH on stand burn-out talks about part of it. My feeling is that a hunter has to balance spreading out his individual stand use with getting to know his stands in depth. Over time you get to see the bigger picture of deer movement on your property.

Sorry if I've spun off into the Twilight Zone here. However, this is a theme I have been stuck on all Summer, starting with the Playing with Numbers thread. I am slowly working my way to 30 years in the field. I'm trying to figure out what part of my success is quantifiable, and I think part of it is time in the field and the size of the plot I hunted. Granted, I was as green as green could be back when I started, but I look at the big picture it comes down to pretty much the same overall success rate per hours hunted when you include the limiting factors of where I could hunt and the overall deer density.

Let me see if I can bring this back into a sensible orbit. From the beginning, it did not take very long for me to figure out where the deer were-- you see scat, you see tracks, you see deer. I always had a limit on how much I could hunt, or where I could hunt. I was always an 8-5 working stiff. If I was stuck with two half-days per week, or just 1 (while the kids were babies) it spread my number of successful trips out so that it was very hard to be successful in the space of a season. If I was on the same 40 acre plot all Fall, I was not able to make as many choices as having 2 or 3 places to hunt. Then add in the overall deer density. When I started, seeing a deer was still a novelty. Yesterday I had 4 in my front yard when I went to take in the garbage cans.

The bottom line in all this is probably some big equation of deer hunting success based on deer density and acreage modified by time in the field and some very binary sort of factor for overall deer hunting savvy. The latter would include how often you bathe, how little you watch outdoor television, and being able to correctly identify the business end of a rifle or an arrow.

What Constitutes Hunting Before/After Legal Daylight?

2009-09-04T09:19:00.002-04:00

This is a condensation of my comments regarding a thread on D&DH regarding the following question:

I'm wondering about legal shooting times for bow hunting, specifically last light... If the law reads you have to quit at 5:00 p.m for example, do I have to be

out of the woods

at that time, or not have an arrow knocked at that time, or the bow in a case at that time..........or what ?? Is there some sort of a grace period to get out of the woods, say half of an hour, just to get back to your vehicle ???? Anybody know the right answer for this question ? I don't get much out of that little rule book they give you when you buy your license.....

It is a seemingly fine point of procedure that seems to differ a lot from state to state. You should probably take this up with your local game warden and ask him to interpret it for you. He would be the fellow writing you up. I have had to ask mine for a couple of interpretations. I also ask these kind of questions on a forum site that is specific to my state and has a couple of CO's regularly monitoring the posts. This is, by the way, the perfect sort of question to break the ice getting to know your game warden, and I would recommend doing so.

My middle-aged eyes give out about 15-20 minutes before the end of legal hunting, so I'm usually picking up and on my way out when the legal end comes. I would figure that all arrows in the quiver and the bow being carried in a non-threatening way would be sufficient. With firearms, I assume unloaded and slung is enough.

In the mornings, I figure that it is wrong to have one nocked before legal shooting or have the firearm loaded. I usually get to the stand 30-60 minutes ahead of time, so I leave my bow or rifle up on a hook until it is time to hunt. It always boils my bunny to be out in the gloom and hear some Zeke on the neighboring ridge firing off his rifle half-an-hour early.

I had not thought this out all that far until the second time through Kentucky Hunter Ed, accompanying my youngest son through. It was only then that the instructor explained what KY has in mind with their statute. You can't be loaded, you can't be nocked. It changed my whole view of what I was doing up in the treestand before legal hunting time. This wasn't the only thing that opened my eyes at Hunter Ed, even though I was grandfathered and didn't really have to take it either time. One of the best tips I got from the first one was this: don't walk to and from your stand with an arrow nocked. Never mind the legality of hunting before or after legal hunting time. Far too many hunters trip and fall on their arrows, and it's a poorly reported statistic. That was both a revelation and a Godsend for me, because I'd been trying for over 2 decades to stalk deer on the way and A) never seen a thing, and B) wasted a heck of a lot of time trying to pussyfoot around with a big honking climbing stand on my back.

My guess is that enforcement on this is not going to be all that stringent. I have heard of some absurd prosecutions from game wardens splitting hairs. However, I would not be walking out to the truck cocked and locked, either. To me, this really becomes an issue of Fair Chase, which by definition includes following all pertinent game rules. This isn't like Football where if the ref doesn't see it, it's not a penalty. This is more like Golf; you have a very few rules, and part of the game is doing your utmost to observe them fastidiously. This is like a toe over the line in Bowling. Functionally it provides absolutely no great advantage to the bowler. However, the line has to be drawn somewhere. Part of the challenge is following the rules.

I'm a guy who started out deer hunting in Ohio and Kentucky with a Remington 1100 slug gun, and a Remington 742 semi. I can vouch that there is nothing quite as vexing as spending all that time and effort silently slipping into your stand and then having to hit that bolt release-- CHING! It takes a bit more discipline to wait until a half hour before sunrise to load up, but it's the law. Nowadays, part of my choice of battery comes from this very issue. A pump or a lever loads quieter than a semi. A bolt is quieter than all of them. In the afternoons it doesn't make any difference. Truth be known, it doesn't make all that much difference in the morning either. 4 seasons of taking Mooseboy out with his M1 Garand convinced me of that. #2 son never failed to get a deer on the morning of the Opener, despite the noise it makes on loading; it sounds like rattling nuts and bolts in a coffee can followed by that loud throaty Cha-CLUMP with a hint of "ding!" at the end. Either the deer are deaf or they just don't care.

Do bucks taste different than doe?

2009-08-27T07:46:00.001-04:00

I certainly can tell the difference between deer -- buck vs. doe, young vs. old. In fact, I can tell you that over time you can learn to discern between individual deer. The reason I say this is based on two things that came together in my family.

First off, I have been marking all my venison with a code for about 8 seasons. It used to be we took in so little venison that it was easy to keep track of what was what. However, about 8 years ago we started taking more than 1-2 deer a season, and things got confusing in the freezer. I settled on an easy coding system: 2 digits of year + 1 character of Alphabet so we know the first , second, etc. deer of the season.
06B is therefore the second deer taken in 2006. I mark each package as they go in the freezer.

Secondly, I started serving a dish about 4 years ago that quickly caught on with the kids. It's real easy: take a lb of venison sausage and a can of roast beef hash put them together in a skillet with a little Creole seasoning and bake for 1 hour at 400F. The dish became known as Who-Hash, because the family quickly took to guessing which deer the sausage had come from.

"07A?" asks Moose.

"07B." replies Angus.

"Well, I'm just glad it's not 05B." snorts KYHillChick. " I was getting pretty tired of that old boy."

"Sorry," I reply. "This one was 06C. I found a little in the back. She's still pretty good, ain't she?"

I can tell you that among our panel of 4 judges, it is easy to figure out mature doe vs mature buck . It is hard or nearly impossible to tell the difference between young doe and button buck. Young tastes different than old. When you're a family of 4 putting down nothing but venison every weekend all winter you get a lot of practice.

As to the whole gland thing, I am fairly certain it is a myth. I started out taking out the leg glands many years ago, more for freezing them and using them next year than anything else. It always seemed stupid to be trying to take out the glands to keep the stink from getting on the meat, but at the same time, I was stinking up my knife doing it. The fact of the matter is that the majority of the stink comes from the urine the buck pees on himself, and it collects on these oily glands. That's really the last thing I want to put on my knife.

Field Dressing

2009-08-21T08:52:00.000-04:00

Once, way way back, I shot a buck and had to drive it back to town before I could gut it. Never again. It was a strange set of circumstances, that kept me from cleaning the deer. The buck had laid out for about an hour before I found him, and then he turned out to be too big to put in the truck. The farmer drove out the back hoe and we rolled it into the bucket and then into the bed of my truck. I had a two-hour ride back to town. By the time I got to the back of the processor, the buck had started to gas and the belly was distended. Blech! As I said, never again.

As to how I clean my deer, I have a rather odd way of doing it, but it works out really well. Most of our deer succumb in a spot where they can be easily reached by truck. As soon as the carcass is located, we call back to camp and the truck comes out. Often it can drive right up to the deer. We load it onto the truck and drive it back to camp, usually less than a half mile. We back up to the meat pole. A block and tackle is attached and the other end of the rope is put on the trailer hitch. As the truck pulls away, the deer is hoisted up. We clean them, and then pull the truck back in and lower the deer onto the bed and drive off to the processor. This can mean that the deer arrives at the processor within an hour or two of being shot. There is a slight delay in getting the abdomen open, but it is offset by how easy and how quickly we can get the job done once it's started. It's just really handy to be working standing up.

The big advantage is that our cleaning station has all the tools right there, as well as lights and a garden hose. Perhaps the only downside is that the guts n' all that are near the house, but everything goes into a big wash tub and we drive them out to the middle of the pasture and dump them after we're done. In an hour or so they're gone. I used to think that gutpiles and cleaning deer in the woods would scare off other deer and queer a good stand. I have since discovered that deer could largely care less. I'm sure a gut pile attracts coyotes, so there probably is a down side, but I haven't seen it.

The alternative method we have is when the deer is too far down the ravine to allow for easy retrieval with the truck. In those cases, the truck comes as close as possible and then we take the block and tackle down to the deer and hoist them up on the nearest tree. After gutting, we haul to the truck and drive out.

We hang our deer head-up. That is different from most folks. However, I found that gravity seems to work with you rather than against you. I learned this from a guy from Alabama. It's a bid odd, but it works really well.

I've done it both ways head-up, head-down as well as on the ground, on a tree, and every other which way you can think of. Last year, I shot a nice 8 pointer at sundown. He ran a little, and was part way down a ravine when I found him. I was hunting alone, and there was no calling for the truck to come. It had been years since I'd had to dress a deer on the ground. Let me tell you that there was a significant difference. I used what light I had left to get the deer cleaned, and then dragged the carcass out before getting the truck. The whole experience made me appreciate what I normally am able to do all the more.

I know there is a lot of personal preference here, and there is a lot of custom and tradition to this whole thing. However, I am a member of the head-up camp, and a member of the hang-em to gut'em camp.

We return you now to our regularly scheduled program. . .

2009-08-15T19:59:00.003-04:00

Dang!

If you've been seen the "This site's been hacked!" warning for the past few days, you're probably wondering what the shaman did to deserve it. The answer is absolutely nothing.

I had a link to bloglinker.com. It's one of the digests that catalogs and recommends blogs. Somehow it got hacked, and that in turn got Google all in a swizzle. Anyone who had a link to that site was somehow classed as having "badware." That's a new term for me.

So I cleaned off the link, and submitted my site to badware.org (no kidding) for re-examination. It passed with flying colors. The rest of the interruption was Google deciding to stop the stupid warning. Of course, there's no one to talk to. No one is out there to call. It's all automated. Cheese and Rice!!!

Oh well. I'm back, and it feels good. We're down at deer camp, sweltering in the heat and may go back early tonight just to get back into air conditioning.

Midway is coming along well. I got one half of the roof done and the other side should be a breeze. Pictures will soon follow.

OOooo! The guy's here to rake hay!!! Out in the country, this is the closest thing to a floor show you're going to get. Gotta run.