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Going through some pictures, I forgot to post this beautiful sunset I saw on my walk home from the deer stand last week. I forgot this happens here pretty often. I didn't have a wide angle lens with me or I would have got some better shots that weren't so cramped. I'll bring it next time for sure. Pretty sweet sight to see! I was tripping over my own two feet because my eyes were glued to the sky walking home in the dark!

Some afterthoughts on Belo not believing I would pass on a big deer: Has anyone else ever let a good deer walk by because he/she just didn't feel like shooting a deer at that particular moment? Has anyone else found themselves sad after killing a beautiful animal? I have. I know this statement puts me in an exposed position. The macho guys can call me names. It doesn't matter. I'll never be the alpha male again. I have nothing left to prove. Those who know me well, know who I am, what I have done, where I have been and what matters. I have at times been saddened by the death. It doesn't stop me from hunting. I think the connection to the animal makes me more human. I said in a post some time ago that I do not take photos of myself with dead deer. I don't criticize those who do. Personally, these things are not a point of pride with me. There are lots of deer skulls and racks in the barn, none in the house. The point of hunting is not the killing.

A round or two doesn't warrant gun cleaning unless you are shooting black powder or old military ammo with corrosive primers.Rimfires can be fired many hundreds of rounds without cleaning with no ill effect. Even high velocity centerfires can be fired dozens of rounds without need for cleaning. in many cases, wear from the cleaning rod is worse than leaving the bore dirty, within reason.. Take your .22 or your shotgun or your .243 and blow hell out of that cheeky rodent...<<grin>>...

When do we say enough is enough? I'm sitting here thinking about this past week. 5 military dead on our own soil by a distraught Muslim. 4 beautiful girls killed by a drunk driver, they were doing the right thing cruising in the limo and fate comes knocking at their door. These things have happened in the past and once again they happen this weekend and nothing gets done about it. Is this the norm??? I hope not….Where are we going to end up if we just watch this happen around us and nothing is done. I don't like the attitudes of the younger generation. I feel they are complacent and will let the world crumble around them. It's happening all around us little by little and if we don't start acting the game will be over before we know it. MHO just venting but I feel a lot of merit here.

Due to the way that huntingNY allows small business to mention themselves in its forums, without treating them like spammers, and the generosity of adding a link on the links page, I am going to give away one free turkey pot call to a member on here. (I do this often). All you have to do is guess a number between 1 and 100. If for some reason 2 people guess the same number, the person that said it first gets that number as their guess. I will close the guessing with a reply to the thread at 0800est on Wednesday. If the correct number isnt picked, the closest person to the number without going over...wins. The winner gets a slate or glass surface pot call in any wood listed on my pot calls page, unless I don't believe that wood matches the surface for the best sound. You can see the examples here. http://www.chainreactiongamecalls.com/pot-calls.html Good luck!

yea because most of us can't hold a beer, text on the phone, and drive. not sure why more don't just stick to the last one and let it be. I mean how important is it that you need to respond with "k" or a damn emoticon while you driving?! ....don't mean to go off on a tangent.

The place I hunt has more horn hunters that pass up every single doe to shoot a small 6 point to say they got their buck... My cameras show 8-10 does per buck at least.... So I try to shoot 2-3 does for every buck I shoot if not more...

Animals have a built-in mechanism to survive. Its just hardwired into them.. I've killed alot of deer in my time hunting. Clean kills are exponentially favorable because it quickly removes the ability for the deer to fight to survive. Contrary to belief, including my desire to want to believe it, animals are not resigned to their fate. Even when fate is slow and inevitable, they will fight to survive. When those situations come, I just do what I need to do to end it. I am appreciative of the chase, the process, and the results, and the benefit the process/result has on me, my friends, my family, and the environment. I once caught a coon in a coilspring dirthole set. I was using a 1.5cs and it was a solid front foot catch, and it was on the money, so to speak. I was checking after work and it was dark. Once I realized I had caught a real nice boar coon and he had managed to get tangled into some vines/multiflora, I had to go back to retrieve my .22 to dispatch him rather than my usual method. He was simply too tangled otherwise. I left and returned to an animal who had decided life was worth living and had made it halfway through his leg just below the joint. Chewing away. It was a pretty vicious site and the sound of that animal gnawing through its own attached bone is something I can still hear to this day. I immediately dispatched the animal and went on my way, and sold him green for $10 or so. Would have earned more money but he wrecked his hide up a bit. Graphic story, yes. Probably not an encounter for everyone. But, the following year, distemper broke out because the coon population was still too high, and mother nature took her much uglier, more graphic course, complete with neighbors and me all having run-ins with coons midday in garages, houses, barns, etc. At the end of the day there is a chain, if the chain is broken, those effects are often much worse, as I interpret them. We are stewards - we take, but we also give when taking appropriately. As a result, it lessens my issues with death in those situations. Still sad, but at the same time, its a part of the cycle. I also love deer jerky and coon hats.

That could leave you in the dark

Yes and perhaps as Doc pointed out as a coping mechanism...I think back to when our kids were Oh so little ...we were actually "Behind the times" when we got our Tandy. Mr B said computers will be the down fall of the US and world...I think often on that. You young guys may not understand his meaning behind this... Some old ones will. I have watched over the years as technology has increased and perfected,taking over our jobs,our time, our families,our minds. We can contact anyone, anywhere, anytime but have managed to isolate our selves in the process. At what point when we lose the daily human physical contact people were use to "Back in the day",do we diminish our own humanity.

I don't think we are a complacent society, more like a "powerless" society. We've watched our manufacturing jobs be sent to Mexico and China, and we sit by watching millions of illegal aliens steal our unskilled labor jobs, and allow millions more foreign contractors with H-1B visas take our clerical and highly skilled jobs. Meanwhile, the cost of living outpaces wage increases. Most of us now realize that voting doesn't help, Republican or Democrat, since the career politicians we are presented with have no loyalty to the people, but to the lobbyists and corporations that put them in power. Todays kids actually work HARDER than we did. More homework in grade school, and you now need a college degree to be a line cook or file clerk. The 20 and 30-somethings I work with are on call 24-7, and often work nights & weekends to keep up; they're also smarter about computers and technology than the folks my age at the job. The saddest thing I see with this generation is the use of hard drugs, mostly with the under-achieving or academically challenged crowd.It seems every day I'm reading or hearing about another overdose death, and I know quite a few families who've lost kids to drug addiction; these are not inner-city ghetto kids, but middle-upper class families.

Are we a complacent society? Maybe. But the world has changed over the course of history and has become a very complex place with a bombardment of complicated problems that defy solution. Simply managing our own lives is a full-time job. The newspapers, radio, TV, and internet flood us with a deluge of horrible and mind-exploding evil and unhappiness, and if we were to react to every scrap of this, we would eventually become completely mad. And so we perform a kind of triage and process only those things that we can influence and still keep our own affairs under control at the same time. Do not expect the world to get simpler and more manageable or to become kinder and gentler. It is not going to happen. And don't assign complacency to our efforts to simply conduct and concern ourselves with our own personal lives. That task alone has become a full time effort and gets more complex with each generation.

Motor vehicles has been the number one cause of unnatural deaths for a very long time and when was the last time something was done about it? Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

A lot of bad things of happened in the past. It just wasn't as in our face before, like now with the massive efficient media infrastructure we have . People have always killed. The red flag is when the people start to ask questions and those in control, don't like it. We are in trouble with that.

Never , ever poke the bear !

Some may be familiar with my shed dog, Fleur. I bred her to an 8 year-old chocolate male who was bred by Luck's Labs that has been waterfowl and upland hunted his whole life. The result was 8 puppies; 2 black males, 1 black female, 1 chocolate female, 1 yellow male, and 3 yellow females. $500 with a nonrefundable $100 deposit. Ready the weekend of 8/8 (7.5 weeks). These are bred to be really high drive/ high energy dogs, so if you are looking for just a pet you might be a little overwhelmed. The puppies cannot be registered due to a DNA discrepancy 4 generations back in Fleur's pedigree. This is why I am not asking 3x as much for the puppies. Fleur with her 1st ever unassisted find @ 7 months old: Same trip. Did I mention Fleur has a lot of energy? The puppies:

LOL What about shot #? A few have been mentioned, but what are everyone's though on that? Me personally, I doubt I would go smaller then #7's, or larger then #4's. I forget, what were you hunting primarily? I know it'll ruffle some feathers (LOL) but there ain't much you can't kill with a high brass 7 1/2 shot but I know others will squeak so I'll say turkey 4,5 and 6. Pheasant 4, 5 and 6. Crow anything left over. Bunny and squirrel 6 and 7 1/2.

Congrats to you .......rob. Only married 23 years but been together for 26 with my significant other.

SAY WHAT? LOL............

LOL wooly and thank you ( and yes, I did catch the pun ). Actually that was a zucchini from our garden.

Congrats..... I'll bet she was just mad you ate her favorite cucumber,lol

I pass many deer every year and really don't care if I ever shoot one again, but then I have someone that wants meat, or guys aren't having much luck and want a deer, I live on the property I hunt and see many bug buck in my yard, I could take them any time I want, my closest neighbor is 1/2 mile or more away, but there are rules and I follow them, contrary to most. Believing that horns are it , I could care less, and when you care less about the size of horns you will have more fun watching younger and new members killing good deer.. besides why would I want to get full of blood gutting one, just to say look what I got, better letting someone who wants one get it..

I make chuck pot pie. Roast are to small, LOL.

Always heard the width of the front foot in inches was what the bear would square in feet... 6" wide pad, 6' bear...

Yep urea - that's just what I was thinking. Almost comical. I have no idea what Phade is doing with our food plots, but trust he has it under control. If they work out well, he gets all the credit. If not, it must have been the bad weather or soil. lol

Lots of good comments . As for kids today .... I guess it's whatever ones are in your life that we base things on. For me the vast majority are working way harder than my friends and I had to. Our oldest has two bachelor degrees and works as an RN . She worked may jobs while in high school and college and studied way more than I ever thought of doing . Most of her friends work in medical fields , PT, OT, pharmacy and so on. Trust me they work hard and are held accountable. Our youngest just got her Masters , with a gpa of 3.94, while being a TA teaching 3 undergrad classes ,correcting all the papers and tests and also studied for and passed 2 parts of the CPA exam at the same time. Her senior year of college she worked 20 hours a week at an accounting firm while going to school full time. Over the summers she worked 3 jobs, 20 hours at parks and rec, 20 accounting and week ends at Sea Breeze.... Most of their friends got jobs right away, the future CPA got hired by one of the big four a year before graduating . There are plenty of kids that work hard and are good citizens just like always. Is it harder for some ? Sure gone are the days one could walk out of HS and get a good factory job , but we know this prepair yourself . My wife's company was bought and 350 decent factory jobs are going to Mexico next year . She has gotten job offers with out even looking..... But she has a skilled office job, if your only skill is driving a tow motor (what I did there many moons ago) it's going to be hard.

The drunk who killed those four women was not a kid, 55 I believe......so that type of behavior cannot be blamed on the new generation, for the most part, I think the younger generation is actually smarter about drinking and driving then the older people.........as far as everything else that I think is wrong with today's society, I wouldn't even know where to begin.

Our parents and grandparents said that our generation, the baby boomers, were a bunch of long haired, dope smoking, lazy, dumb, kids and would not amount to anything. But I think, for the most part we turned out ok. So will the kids of today. Times are a changing, move forward or be left behind. If anything I think it's much tougher to be a kid today, than it was for us.

Besides beagle puppies ,labs have got to be the cutest pups.

Some pretty good guesses so far, is the winner in there? Maybe, maybe not

Someone sent me this link in an email. I would have had to leave my underwear in the woods after this one. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8jRTrRxamxQ

I wonder if the bear sits in the stand when it's not occupied? lol Sent from my SM-G920V using Tapatalk

Absolutely. Look at the media spin being put on the recent Planned Parenthood scandal with the illegal selling of human body parts from post abortive babies. Listen to the lady in the leaked video and marvel at her lack of empathy or compassion. There is an obvious increase of incivility in society. The 'system' is creating a generation of low level sociopaths.

This is an irresponsible society. No one is ever really held responsible for their actions in this society. This society makes excuses for the most horrible crimes, committed by the most despicable people. We are being conditioned to tolerate the intolerable. Compassion should be reserved for victims, but irresponsible people should not be declared victims. Consequently, we are breeding more and more irresponsible people everyday.

"progress" has made life much more complicated, which in turn makes it harder to focus on much beyond one's immediate concerns. That said, I certainly blame all of the world's problems on dbHunter's and Phade's generation. The x-gen is still trying to wrestle power from the boomers who don't want to let it go. Thus, my generation is a bit busy at the moment.

Politics is also costing you your freedom, but it takes effort to stop it. Too many people have no desire to stop it. They, like water, take the path of least resistance. But like water, they are going to end up in the sewer.

I'm almost 32 years old so i'll use the word "we". each generation is expected to be better than the next; perform better, come up with better ideas or tangible things to make it all work, etc. we start steps in life later like kids, marriage, and a career, due to the greater requirement for additional education. so now we're scrambling to catch up back up and more is expected to be accomplished by a certain age. with technology invented to speed things up even more life is not as slow. now with photo shop and media things are easy spread like wild fire as if true and easily contorted to be believed. we're some how supposed to have super natural insite and bull*** detector skills to decipher what is truth and what it not. so you could say things are a bit more complex and potentially problematic. along this path to survive and function while still enjoying life it's easy for us to get numb to some things or be over sensitive to others. doesn't make it right but whenever it's a big deal it's because of those that "can't deal" more than the rest of us. the world will never be a perfect place and sometimes change is a trial and error process. there's always going to be bad apples that make the bigger picture seem doomed. don't compare us. use honest encouragement and maybe the numbness will lift, and we'll weed out the bad apples or probably at least keep them from screwing anything up but themselves at most.

Not bad until you see it climb higher than the stand...that could have been on one of those "gone bad shows". At the very least there would have been a hey! hey! hey ! being heard on that video. But seriously the look on that bears face was priceless.

Maybe the bear smelled the guy's oats and honey granola bars that he had in his backpack .

To answer your question……..YES………"As long as it doesn't affect me right now…..Who cares". The younger generation is clueless and doomed.

Low brass are usually cheaper, less powerful loads that are used for small game like squirrel, rabbit, dove etc. BUT, the biggest use (I'd bet) is for claybird shooting of all types and most guys don't want to spend a ton of money and certainly don't need the heavy load of powder or shot that comes with most high brass loads.

So when are you going to invite us all over for a "chuck roast"..?

When you reach my age and diminished condition, you can reconsider that response. Sorry to disappoint but I'm not your average curmudgeon.

I would have poked him several times with the business end of an arrow before he got that close. Crazy risky.

Here's a pic of the ammo & a pic of both guns. Sorry about the bad pic of the ammo, the camera in my phone is touchy.

A gun cleaning might be worth knocking one or two of those chucks out of your clover field. Don't waste an arrow.

Never owned or shot a semi auto large cal rifle other than in the Marine Corps . Too risky to shoot in flat country . I prefer my single shot 25-06 . What is a follow up shot ?

In fairness to whomever made the decision they really are not censoring anyone. It's just a matter of where the thread is displayed and how a reply moves it to a place of prominence for increased viewing. The issue I have is that the page/site was fine the way it was. The site had settings that would accommodate anyone's preferences. However instead of being responsible for themselves, and using the tools already afforded to them to make their own experiences here satisfactory they would rather whine and complain like children.