Doc

Almost an infinite number of variables where storms can form out of nothing. Lake Ontario and Lake Erie have their own little twists and turns that they throw in there. Pop-up showers and storms can never be specifically predicted. Actually, they do pretty darn good for the kinds of terrain and weather features that this state has. My big beef with these guys is the constant bragging about how perfect and flawless their science is. They are their own worst enemies when they keep trying to make everyone believe that their forecasts are flawless. They sound a lot like the DEC.....lol.

Ah yes comrade. You think it would be a good deal if someone bought hunting land for you to use. Let them work hard, save their money and then spend it all for your benefit. Good deal for you, but where are you going to find all these suckers that will work for the opportunity to turn over their assets for you to use? Pretty good deal ....eh? Let them spend their accumulated wealth buying hunting land for you. Let them continue paying taxes year after year so you will have a place to hunt. Would you like us to put in some nice parking lots for you or roads so you can drive to your stand? How about some nice free lodging? Maybe you would like to have rights of occupation. For crying out loud people, no wonder Bernie Sanders made such a great showing in the primaries. People are still longing for the Marxist concepts to be implemented here in this country. Here's a new concept for you. You want it, you earn it! What an amazing concept......try it.

Anybody writing up any kinds of privacy laws regarding these things? Sure would spoil the mood to all of a sudden have one hovering outside my bedroom window. That sort of thing probably is not restricted by any laws yet. I sure can see abuses occurring as the price starts coming down and every neighborhood kid begins to have one ..... lol.

What really brings all of this stuff home is when you have been around long enough in the same area to have experienced better times in terms of hunting access. When I was a kid, I could walk the ridges all day long and never see a posted sign. There was no such thing as begging for access. The land in our valley was in huge wooded parcels owned by farmers who actually welcomed hunters. They had no money, need, or time for buying and maintaining posted signs for keeping people out. Who ever thought that hunting access would ever be a problem. Having been raised in those times makes the current situation of posted signs and leases and high fences even more traumatic to a hunter that has known times where that problem was simply unimaginable. Not all change is good.

Just curious, but what do you do with them?

This turned out amazingly consistent with most of the replies coming back with "westerly winds, or "north-westerly". I was surprised by the north-westerly answers, but now that I think of it, we never do seem to get pure west winds.

Call the DEC. Something is wrong.

It does seem a shame that there is now a demand for making something that used to be free into a question of affordability. It's just another factor involved in the demise of hunting. As soon as hunting land costs get put on a priority list of affordability, the results for hunting are quite predictable, aren't they? But I am a believer in the sanctity of "landowner's rights" so I can whine all I want about it, but thankfully, there is no way to force any of that to change. It's just the natural evolution of things.

So, just out of curiosity, what do you consider the usual prevailing wind direction on your hunting property. Of course we get the hodge-podge of wind directions, but here in the Bristol Hills area, the wind predominantly is coming from the west to east. I have always wondered if the usual prevailing wind direction is the same all over the state.

We all have a right to hunt for our own unique reasons. What we don't have a right to do is to dictate to others what their reasons for hunting has to be.

I really have never had any interest in a deer's age. I generally go by, "Is he big enough or not?" Once he is in packages, I could care less about how old he is ....... lol. One thing that I will say with certainty is that that deer is old enough for me to shoot.

I use a rangefinder for certain trees around my stands. Unless there are some strange features of the trees I will use blaze marks on the trees along my shooting lanes to identify them. I go out to 25 or 30 yards (my maximum hunting shot distance). I have a lot of confidence in my sight-pins, and adding the confidence of a rangefinder takes a lot of guess-work out of the success or failure of the shot.

Good point! I had a deer hanging in my basement where the ticks were bailing out. At least 8 that I saw. ....... Yick! I was doing a lot of tick-stomping. Sure, if you put that deer in the car, they're going to be coming for you ..... lol.

Well plink, you have a real mystery there. Anything done by officials would not be left discarded in the woods. Check with the DEC. Since no one has a reasonable guess, maybe you have stumbled into some weird illegal activity of some kind. I really have no explanation of any sort that makes any sense. Let us know what you find out.

Hunt the high country or side hill areas so you are always dragging down hill. That is, assuming you are in hill and valley country. Do not ever reverse that!!! Another option is to pick up a younger hunting partner or two and some electronic communication. There might be a third option. If you can legally run an ATV on your hunting area, perhaps this is the time to consider getting one. There are two things we know for absolutely certain. One: the price of these machines will not be going down as time goes on. Two: you will never be younger than you are right now. Time marches on. Don't be stubborn, or someday there will be people trying to figure out the best way to drag you out.

Every time I even think about going to the state fair the temperature flashes up into the 90's and I start remembering that there is absolutely no shade there. It's like heading to the Sahara to have a good time. Not likely to happen.

I always thought a gift certificate was the perfect gift, but when it comes to things that are worth up to $50, I've already got everything. If I want it, I've already bought it. I checked with the wife last night and she is telling me the same as a lot of the replies on here, "get something else". I'm not a big fan of jerky, and the thing would probably find its way down into the basement where we keep all the other cooking implements that we never use. I guess the search goes on. These days $50 doesn't go very far. You should have seen me trying to spend a $25 card at Walmarts. I finally went over to the grocery side of the store and bought a pile of junk-food ..... Just what I needed.....lol.

All of my stands are at whatever height the ground is at .... lol. I don't do heights anymore. I have not figured out how to shoot a bow with both arms wrapped in a death-grip around the tree trunk. Back in the olden days before I finally evolved into a ground dweller, My stands were probably averaging between 15 and 20 feet high.

I stepped into one of those ground-nesting yellow jackets once. I knocked a couple of them to the ground with a swat, and I be darned if they didn't get back up and come right back on me, just humping away for all they're worth trying to get that stinger through my pants. That's when I decided the mean little guys really meant business and it was tie to leave ....... quickly. Normally I don't do "run" (haven't actually "ran" since junior high school), but I made an exception that day. By the way, thank heaven for engineer boots with the pant-legs over top.

I have a gift certificate for Bass-pro shops for $50 and wound up today snooping around for something at BPS to spend it on. I ran across a basic food dehydrator for approximately $50 and kind of thought that might be an interesting preservation method for fruit and vegies and such. Then I started wondering what you do with all thee little strips of dried up fruits and veggies. How do you cook with the stuff? Is it any good? is there any flavor left in these little dried up hunks of sh.. stuff. Anybody know anything about cooking using dried food? Do you have to re-hydrate it? What happens to the texture? What happens to the flavor? Any tricks or required tricks? Maybe a food dehydrator will be a waste of the gift certificate and I should be looking at bullets or something instead.

This is the answer! Eve some of the professional, well established, commercial orchardists have been warning that prices this year will be higher and yields will be impacted because of that flukey blossom forcing followed by hard frosts .... repeatedly this year. If you live in a valley bottom, be prepared to have this become a regular occurrence even when winter/spring is normal. That's not to say that you cannot grow fruit in valleys, but be ready for mire than your share of harvests being ruined frosts at bloom time. As Growalot said frosts settle into valleys.

I only target the very old bucks. You know, the toothless ones with the sway back, and bowed legs, where you can count every rib. A bit of blindness and deafness helps too. No buck is harvested before its time. If I can chew the meat, it was probably too young. Yeah .... right .... You believe all that, I've got this bridge that I will sell you. Actually, any deer that comes along, without any spots, is the one that I will try to take.....lol.

Hi-Tor is such a huge and diversified area that there is nothing definite that can be said about the massive swamp at the south end of Canandaigua Lake all the way up the steep hills, to the flat mixtures of abandoned ancient farmlands and large and small blocks of hardwoods and brushlots. And yes in years past, I have seen state parking lots that were over-run with cars and trucks. But I have also seen cars pulled over along the edge of some of the roads tat looked like they has a whole lot of elbow room. I often thought it would be a good idea to take two cars (one parked at the bottom on 245 and the other parked somewhere up on top), and still hunt super-slowly down the hill. I suspect that you might encounter very few other hunters, and anything you get would be a downhill drag. Of course there is the West River Swamp which I think holds tons of great deer, but are more of a challenge to hunt than most people are willing to undertake. I have seen the massive trails going into the swamp, but it isn't too far before you get to boot-sucking mud and pockets of deep water.

It's been about 13 years since I retired, and a big part of the decision to bail was that same kind of feeling. I was being choked with less and less self-directed time. As the cutbacks and downsizing increased, so did the unpaid mandatory overtime to make up for the missing bodies. And then they tried to make me carry a company phone so that essentially I was on limitless call around the clock. And as a reward for all this abuse, there became the repeated statement that I was topped out in my profession unless I went back to college for even more education, which was not going to happen at that stage of my life. so the compensation stagnated. That did it, I was out the door. But I remember thinking, where is all this going to end? What is in store for future generations? Well maybe this and other similar threads are now providing the answer. Yes I see that you have an even more time-consuming burden than I ever had with your Mother-in-law, but you did mention work demands as well. It seems to me that there has to be some way of living besides becoming a corporate slave. Somewhere through the years, we replaced working to live with living to work. Damn, you only get one crack at this thing called life. It seems that we owe it to ourselves to do it right. I was fortunate because all this stuff was beginning as I came into retirement age. So I knew exactly what to do. But I still wonder where it will all end with each successive generation.