Doc

I think a lot of you look at fences as simply being a giant "keep out" sign. Actually out where I live where the properties are rather large and wooded and line-of-sight doesn't hack it for keeping track of where you really are, fences keep people from honestly getting turned around and mis-oriented and putting food plots on someone else's land, or cutting firewood that doesn't belong to them, or pasturing animals on your property. When you get up on top of our hill, one property looks just like the next and without a surveyed and marked property line, all kinds of weird things could be showing up on our property. It all could happen quite innocently if there is nothing there to tell you when you have crossed onto someone else's property. Today most surveys of this kind of property amount to an iron stake in each corner and nothing in between. So this idea that anyone would put up miles of fence as a barrier to trespassers is really not the case at all. That's what posted signs are for. Fencing is used to clarify boundaries and since the question was asked, I'm telling you that it is a hell of a good idea if you can afford it and have the strength and time to do the work.

So of course the question that needs to be asked is: "How do you prove to yourself that the scent removal sprays work"? You buy this stuff and spray it all over yourself, but what evidence is there that you really are doing anything at all other than wasting money and time. I mean, I could put plain old water in a spray bottle and sell it to you at some inflated price with a claim that it is a scent removal spray, and you would never know it. So like so many of the products sold to hunters, there is no way of verifying that it is what they say it is, or that it works, or any way of judging how well it is working or which one is better. I really hate those kinds of products, and for the most part do not buy them.

In rural America, fence-lines are expected to define property boundaries. There is nothing unfriendly about a good fence, in fact neighbors will thank you for putting a well defined property marker as it serves them as well. I have found them along my entire perimeter from decades ago where farmers who got along perfectly well erected fences through the woods and over the hills and even across swamps. In fact in a lot of cases, neighbors would get together and share costs and labor just to define boundaries and put (almost) permanent markers on the land to avoid property disputes. Today a lot of these fences are becoming part of the dirt as they rust and come down, but if you look close enough, you can find remnants of them. If I had the cash resources, my property would have had these markers replaced. Unfortunately, fencing is very expensive, and getting heavy rolls of fencing up our "killer" hill is not a project that one person is going to undertake by themselves. But anyone who takes offence at a property marking fence being erected is probably someone who has devious reasons for boundaries to not be known. People in the cities and suburbs take it for granted that fences are going to be erected but for some reason they think it is some signal of unfriendliness when it happens in the country even though it has been a time tested tradition for decades.

I describe my version of still hunting as "mobile standing". I generally move quickly to get to preferred areas, and then on come the brakes. Putting the wind in my favor, the real hunting starts. I find a tree or something to break my outline, and just stand there looking at every stump, log, hump in the ground, and any place where a deer could be bedded or feeding. A lot of this scanning is done with binoculars. After about 10 or 15 minutes of studying everything in front of me and off to the sides, I will move super slow about 30 or 40 yards and start the scanning thing all over again, looking for a tail, antler tip, ear, or if I am lucky I might even spot that horizontal line through the trees of a deer's back. Another 10 or 15 minutes and it's time to move again. It takes forever to cover any distance, but the technique is only used in places I am pretty confident hold deer, and distance is not the object. I have watched bucks do a version of this, and it works pretty good for them. Many times they do a whole lot more looking than walking, and that is where I developed my technique. I don't do a whole lot of still-hunting in bow season, but when gun seasons comes, I'll stay on stand when hunters are active (opening day, thanksgiving, and some parts of weekend days), but later when hunters start getting scarce, still hunting is all I do.

I seldom do anything "all the time", but often I'll stay on stand until ten-ish or maybe 11:00 and then stash some of my gear and start a real careful still-hunt/scouting walk to check some of the other areas to stay aware of how the season is progressing, and where things are happening. So many things begin to change as bowhunting season progresses. Food sources maturing and becoming prime, changes happening as rut starts coming into play. It's just my way of staying updated.

When traps are manufactured and shipped to stores and warehouses, they apply a thin oily protective coating so they don't rust before they are sold. So the first boiling is to clean and remove that. Then there is the color of untreated steel. It's can attract attention when you don't want it to. In some of the water sets, the traps are set under the surface of the water and not covered. So, shiny steel would be obvious to some of the critters. They need a stain to make them un-reflective. Eventually the traps will take on a thin layer of rust, and will only need dyeing to give them a darker color that blends in with the set better. The body-grip traps are set, fully exposed, so bright shiny traps would prevent animals from walking through them and setting them off. And then there is the scent of steel and the human odors of handling and storage that has to be removed and covered with the scent of more natural elements. Waxing is the technique used to create a thin scent barrier and serve as a good preventative against rust. Wax also serves as a bit of a lubricant to keeps the traps freely moving.

I am always looking at the remaining daylight and picturing what it would be like to find an arrow, or locate the first blood. Both can be very helpful in trying to begin blood-trailing a shot deer. There have been a few times on gray, dismal, drizzly days back in the darker areas of the woods where I have actually left before the legal quitting hours because I had determined that finding that first blood would be a problem. With a bow, it is generally recommended that you do not immediately bail out of your stand right after shooting. That even compounds the problem of lost tracking light.

It is interesting sometimes to set free a few milkweed seed from your stand. I always have a small baggie full of them with me. It is very instructive to watch how those things will go out and meander around and circle and do all kinds of things that you would think it is impossible for the wind to do. So when you judge that a deer is downwind of you, that frequently is not the case. There are so many land features that baffle wind around. I used to get a hint back when I smoked by watching the smoke curl out and take right hand turns and left hand turns and sometimes turn around and come right back at me. When I started using the milkweed seeds and got to see the entire path of a breeze, I was shocked. I have sworn that I had killed deer that were downwind, but from what I have since learned from the milkweed seeds, maybe they really weren't. Scent can take a mighty devious and winding way as it travels away from us.

We have a deer anatomy thread that has a pretty good picture of what possibly is the "No Man's Land" that people talk about. I am referring specifically to the very first photograph in the thread at http://huntingny.com/forums/topic/6770-deer-anatomy/page-1 Or am I misinterpreting what I am seeing there. Aren't those vertical things above the lungs the upper parts of the ribs? Or are they the top vertical parts of the vertebrae? What do you all think?

I'm still trying to figure out how short a person has to be to sneak up on deer in a bean field. How do you do that? Maybe dress up in a tree costume and move very, very, slowly?

Good fences make good neighbors. Boundaries are then permanently marked. However, you talked about 200-300 acres. That's a lot of fencing. Fencing is not cheap, so check your budget. If cost is not an issue, I would definitely fence it

First of all, I think the whole plan is motivated by an anti-bowhunter bias. Why do I say that? well, first of all if it was only about increasing the annual doe take, this doe-only activity would be placed in the season where it is most likely to actually work. That would be gun season. So their stated motives are certainly suspect. Secondly, about a decade ago the DEC was championing an early muzzleloader season. That "want" has not gone away, but what has gone away is the honesty of how they intend to force it to happen. Today they are pushing it under the guise of doe harvest management. When you put it all together, the whole deal is about as underhanded a deal as I have seen since Cuomo's midnight raid on the 2nd Amendment. And then from a practical standpoint, a buck spooked off a stand because the hunter can't legally harvest him, is not likely to be coming back for a second try in a couple of weeks. Pretty much, the better buck stands have a good chance of being wrecked for the entire season by bucks going by the stand and getting downwind and learning where not to go. I really don't want to do that. So I intend to stay out of my stands until I can have an opportunity to take that buck instead of simply watching him pass by until he is downwind. At that point I will take buck or doe depending on what comes along. I'll take does as the opportunity presents itself, and if a buck comes along that I want, I'll take that too.

Land that is not lived on will be trespassed on. I think that is a pretty universally true statement. And it might change your thinking around just a bit. Years ago, I bought property that was within commuting distance of work. Granted I had no problem driving a ways. Today, 40 years later, I have had the use of the land (hunting and otherwise), have my house and outbuildings all established, have been able to hunt after work, and everyone knows that they could run into me at any time of the day or night, and anywhere on the hill or down here in the valley. So potential trespassers have figured out that this is not land that is deserted for 5 of the 7 days of the week. It's also worth mentioning that when it came time to retire, there was no sudden need for a financial drain on my retirement funds for all the needed features for living here. It has been all paid for over the 40 years without maintaining two properties. I just thought I would mention all this as perhaps another alternative plan.

And of course the DEC fully understands that. That is why it was implemented in the bow season rather than a gun season where they could actually accomplish their professed goals.

At first, that was my take on it all. It stands to reason that the more years you are around to be exposed to a disease, the higher rate of incidence you are going to see. But one does have to wonder why the positive cases in mature bucks is 18%, but the positive cases in mature does is only 7%. That seems to be a very significant difference based only on gender. So maybe it really isn't all about age.

My season starts on the 16th. I have had a ball hunting squirrels. and probably actually got more meat doing it than if I had been deer hunting.....lol. Yes, it may very well be cutting off my nose to spite my face, but I will not go along with this DEC attack on bow hunting. And yes it may very well lead to an early muzzleloader season, but I suspect that is really what is at the root of all this nonsense anyway, and regardless of what the doe take winds up being, since it is not their real motive, I'm sure the doe take by bowhunters would never have been enough anyway. Anyway, I have re-discovered the fun of squirrel hunting, and have had a chance to take care of fall winterizing of lawns, grounds and some household maintenance. I must say that I have not seen (or heard) any sign of the youth gun season so far, and I have not seen a large crowd of bowhunters. That of course does not mean a thing, and is simply one person's observations in one tiny part of the state.

Don't you just love it when the wind is finally just right for that afternoon stand for almost all of the day and then right at the end of the day when the deer really get moving, the afternoon thermals kick in and start blowing your scent right to the trail you're watching. That's where it is nice to have a lot of experience with some of these stands so that you don't get blind-sided by the thermals. Another thing is that I have certain stands around a huge ravine on the hill where the wind always channels up and out of the ravine, and while it may be a steady predicted westerly wind everywhere else in the world, along that ravine there will be a consistent easterly wind right out to the trail. Eventually I learned about that and rebuilt my stands to compensate. There sure was a lot of frustration before I figured that little peculiarity out. Sometimes forecasted wind direction at certain spots will never agree with wind directions at your stand. And yes there are some spots where the terrain shunts the wind all over the place in ever-changing directions. Again, a bit of experience on the same parcel of hunting land tips you off to these areas and you finally figure it out that there is no way of hunting those areas. It's all the beauty of hunting hill country ..... lol.

I have seen a lot of guys that spend their hard earned cash on anything and everything that has a good marketing ploy. And if they haven't done the wind direction thing, they still get busted. I have an old pair of camo cover-alls that hang year around down in the basement for the past 25 years (never seen a washing machine), and I have been within touching distance of several deer simply because I paid attention to the basics of wind direction. What I have found is that you can't buy success, and that hunting is more about what you do in the field rather than what some chemist sitting in a lab will do for you. I have no idea what works for other people, but for me there are no purchased shortcuts that I am willing to invest in. One thing is probably true, if buying all the scent-free paraphernalia and scent eradication sprays and mystical processes and rituals and whatever, gives you extra confidence without making you careless about the fundamentals, then maybe it has served some kind of purpose for you. But like ApexerER, I tend to try not getting too crazy about buying every product that people are hawking and just enjoy the hunt. Maybe I am too casual, or maybe I simply am not treating my hunting like my life depends on getting a deer. Also, I enjoy my hunting however it turns out, and try not to be too upset if I don't happen to have the absolute latest in what everyone is trying to sell me. Of course, the fact that I am just plain cheap does form a lot of my attitude .... lol. But I generally enjoy an adequate amount of success.

We're probably over-thinking this way too much ... lol. My take on it is always, if I have an antlerless permit in my pocket, and a mature doe walks by, I'm likely going to shoot it. My shooting that one doe is not really going to mean that all bucks will be vacating the area. It also will not cause any significant amount of increase in buck completion unless I just shot the last doe in the woods. Seriously, those one or two does that I might actually be able to shoot early in the season are not really going to have all that much impact on buck behavior, and that is probably the least thing that I really have to worry about.

Look, you wimps can keep your shots within 30 or 40 or even 100 yards, but I am thinking that I may just get lucky with my new shooting style.

Of course old age is not the only factor in antler development, but so much is made of deer management and yet there are pockets of huge deer in places where the only management tool is the motor vehicle. It appears that the biggest factor is simply to allow deer to reach old age. And urban and suburban environments seem to be the most effective way of seeing bucks reach their full potential. I suspect that that is the most effective factor in "managing" for big racks.

Be careful with .270 Winchester. Here are some out of two boxes that I bought the day I bought my rifle. This is some of the absolute worst quality bullets I have ever purchased from any manufacturer. After several weeks of negotiating and waiting, I finally got credit exactly for the cost of the bullets with no reimbursement for shipping, or grief and aggravation. This wasn't a problem with misfires ..... some of these wouldn't even chamber. So, none of these manufacturers are immune from quality problems. Hand loading is the only way to guarantee quality.

It is interesting how many huge bucks are found around major cities and suburbs where hunting is either nonexistent or severely curtailed. And yet, there is nothing about ground minerals or food plots or habitat that is particularly ideal. They all have just one thing in common, and that is long life. These are probably some of the worse managed deer herds anywhere and yet they thrive on not being managed.

You know, I really love that rule that "ignorance of the law is no excuse" and I love the condescending tone that usually goes along with. One of these days I would like to meet that mythical person who knows everything that's in those volumes and volumes of Environmental Conservation Laws. And that would include judges, J.P.s, and even the DEC law enforcement people (and at least those people all have the law books to refer to when they are looking for a "pinch" or conviction). Yes it is true that ignorance of the law is not a legal defense, but please do not try to come across with this holier-than-thou attitude pretending that you know all the conservation laws. Nobody really is buying it. Yes, you are likely breaking laws every season that you are unaware of, so don't be so damned ready to demand the violator's first born, as though it could never happen to you.

46 years for us in 4 days, but I had to do it twice before I got it right. Congratulations Growie. You're off to a great start .... lol.