Doc

Regarding cameras, I will say that I have gotten very creative at camouflaging them. Most people just strap them to the side of a tree, and the damn things stick out like a sore thumb. I have set-ups that hide the cameras under stones and logs with it just looking up at the trails. I have heard of other guys who go in the other direction and put them way above eye level. I put one in a very thick apple tree that had a big rotted limb hanging down. By the time I got done, you really couldn't see the thing at all. That attachment strap is what really catches your eye. Anything you can do to hide that will help that camera blend into the background.

Sometimes we get involved in a condition where it gets to be too beautiful .... lol. The leaf-peepers are out right now. Tooling along at 35-40 MPH, gawking at the beautiful hills and valleys. Miles and miles of cars such that it is difficult to even get out of the driveway. They are heading to the jillions of fall festivals that are going on now, and grabbing up all those fresh veggies and fruits at the stands, and pigging down those grape pies. And always with their eyes glued to the colorful hillsides ..... lol. My problem is that I live right in the middle of it all and have all my life. I tend to take it all for granted. It's the city people who really appreciate it all to it's fullest. So I really can't whine too much about their getting on the roads and taking in the sights that I simply rush through to get from point "A" to point "B".

For years I have put up with frozen ears for this exact reason. It drives me nuts when I have anything over my ears. Hearing is so important to my hunting. That is one reason why I am getting panicky about my hearing deterioration in recent years. I can't see in all directions at once, but I rely on my hearing to cover the areas that I'm not looking at.

I made my first snowball of the year yesterday and powdered the old lady with it ..... gently. I had to scrape it off the hood of the car. The ground is too warm to support snow just yet.

Actually, I really do like a light covering of snow when hunting. It is good for tracking and for spotting deer. An inch or two is fine. More than that is overkill and absolutely unnecessary. Temperatures ..... well lets just say that I don't like being cold. But when temps do get too high, there is always the concern about meat spoilage if the tracking job gets tough. However as far as deer movement, deer have to do what deer have to do, and that applies whether the temps are warm or cold. On warm years, the rut goes on, animals still eat and drink. Of course this is all irrelevant I suppose. We don't have a bit of control over any of it.....lol.

Well, I learned the hard way that people are people whether that applies in the woods or on city streets. Just because they are hunters does not mean that there isn't a certain percent of them that are scum-bags. When you leave things that are worth a couple hundred dollars in the woods (particularly on un-posted property), you are doing the same thing as leaving money on the hood of your car in the city. It is like bait for the scum of society. I lost a $200+ camera because I had a bit too much faith in our fellow hunters. It was misplaced trust. No more. Now my cameras are relegated to deep inside my posted lines, and I wouldn't be surprised if some day that turns out to be a mistake. It is all too bad, but when you think about it, there is nothing about any of this that should really surprise anyone.

The standard of "properly" marking surveyed property these days is simply pounding in stakes in the corners. When you want line-of-sight flagged definition over hills and across ravines and through the swamps and such, it will be done but will cost you extra. At least that was the experience that I had about a decade or two ago when I purchased an additional strip of land next door.

Here is a trick that I use. Keep your eyes open for milkweed pods, and when you find one put it in a sandwich baggie and put that in your pack. While you are on stand, periodically turn one of those little seeds loose and get set to see exactly where your scent is going (not only where you are sitting, but yards and yards away from your stand). Kind of fun to watch those things start off where you think the wind is blowing and then watch them hook a hard left and spiral off into a direction that you never imagined the wind was heading. It is amazing where the wind goes beyond where the normal wind indicator powders show. One free milkweed pod will supply you for the entire year's hunting seasons. This is how you learn to beat a deer's nose by knowing where the scent is going after it leaves your immediate area.

Heavy winters are great until it comes time to plow that 1000' driveway and there is no more places to put the snow. It's great until you find yourself crosswise in the ditch in a blizzard and no one on the road to help. It's great until the town bashes your mailbox into splinters. It's great until you have to climb that "killer hill" to go hunting, and the snow is up to your waist. It's wonderful until you have to go somewhere, and you look out and the car is buried. It's great until power lines start coming down from snow load, or some car plows into an electric pole, and you are sitting there watching the freezer and refrigerator beginning to defrost. And you start losing heat and worrying about water pipes freezing. It's great until you have to climb up on the roofs of your house and out-buildings to shovel off the snow. And perhaps you will get the pleasure of watching water drip from your living room ceiling because of ice-damming. Oh yeah, and you get to have a substantial percentage of your deer herd croak. These are all wonderful things to celebrate ...... lol. I'll tell you what ...... you snow lovers can take all those feet of snow and shove them up ........ Well you get the idea. I'll take the 40 degrees and higher all winter long and be doing one of those Snoopy "happy dances"...... lol. TWO FEET OF SNOW

It all depends on whether I can get my butt going in the morning. Often the answer is no, so naturally I see more deer in the afternoon .... lol. Actually, I have been doing pretty good so far in my "delayed start" season, and have gotten pretty good use of the morning sit the past two days, and if I get going here pretty soon, I'll make the third morning. To date, the morning sit has come up with the most deer encounters.

By the time they get done massaging those numbers with special calculated factors, and constants, and other associated B.S. statistical magic, any correlation to real doe takes will be strictly coincidental. Don't forget we have to establish and apply a reporting rate too .... lol. About the only thing I am reasonably sure of is that in the end it will be declared that the bowhunters did not take the mysterious secret number of does, and an early muzzleloader season is imperative to have any chance of saving even a shred of the habitat in those WMUs. Oh wait a minute .... the plan is to do two years of this charade before declaring the urgent need for the early muzzleloader season.

When it comes to hunting, I really do understand and appreciate stepping back to add some challenge into an activity that is suppose to be all about challenge. Nothing "crazy" about that.

Here, this will work:

Ha-ha-ha .... When it comes to these sorts of things that people sell without any burden to prove that they actually work, I always get a rather comical vision. I see Tink Nathan who may have started his successful business in a small shed with a beer in one hand and a little brown bottle in the other, answering the call of nature just before he screws the cap on and slaps on the sticker declaring it to be a "can't-fail" deer lure. With enough marketing and good packaging, I believe anyone can sell anything. I guess hunting, right along with fishing, has it's successful entrepreneurs that probably could sell ice to Eskimos..... lol. So why not scent elimination soaps, sprays, and detergents? It's all free enterprise at its finest.....lol.

Yeah, all it takes is to outlaw deer hunting for a bunch of consecutive years ..... lol. There's a neat way to make NYS a trophy destination. That's all that is keeping that from happening. Damn people just keep insisting on hunting.

Okay .... so now the season in my WMU has finally started. Yesterday was great weather .... a bit breezy, but the temp and lack of rain was great. Unfortunately no deer showed up, but at least I didn't have to face the possibility of spooking bucks that I had no legal right to shoot.

I have to say that getting out on the highway is getting to be quite an adventure these days. It seems that I cannot go to town without having at least one incident of somebody doing something stupid, illegal, or both. People ignoring stop lights/signs, diving out of driveways in front of me and then too, my favorite is some vehicle pulled over, almost off the road in the on-coming lane and cars just assuming that I am going to go into the ditch or out in a field as they pull into my lane to get around them. What the hell is wrong with people today? Seriously .... the highways are becoming a death-trap.

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.