Doc

No matter what gun I buy these days, I always make sure that it is not a pain to shoot. All my guns see a lot of practice hours an I don't just go out to shot a 3-shot group like I used to do with that old 12 gauge shoulder mangler. I think that is kind of important to be able to enjoy putting some shots through any rifle that I own. Feeling comfortable with it and enjoying shooting it will bring home more game than going for a caliber that will kill the game many times over.

I haven't peeked outside yet, but I don't believe we were supposed to get all that much accumulation here in Ontario County. I might be surprised though. How do things look over by you Bill?

I thought they would be. They were real popular and did a heck of a job on rabbits and squirrels.

They're almost too pretty to use .... lol. Nice job.

There used to be a small-game head that was a big hard rubber blunt. Do they still sell those?

You cannot force people to buy licenses to hunt. You cannot force them to go out. You cannot force landowners to open their land to other hunters. And, the way that gun rights have come under attack, it may also wind up that you can't force people to buy illegal guns and ammunition to hunt with .... lol. That thought may be what is looming large in the minds of the DEC who seems almost panicky in coming up with new ways to increase deer takes. Perhaps they see what is happening and are trying to make a smaller force take more deer. Back to the original topic, one other direction that I have noticed hunting going is in terms of participation. By that I mean people buying licenses but not putting in the hours that they used to. And this may be strictly a local observation, but I have noticed a little flurry of shooting on opening morning (mostly before legal shooting hours) and then very sporadic activity after that. The same thing on the first Sunday and then we slide into a condition that makes you wonder if there really is a season going on. That's not the way I remember it sounding a bunch of decades ago. My theory (and I always have a theory .... lol), is that advances in clothing warmth have allowed the bulk of hunters to simply sit all day. The deer are driven into hiding by that initial push as hunters enter the woods (bang-bang-bang-bang), and then both the hunters and the deer spend the rest of the day sitting. We used to have a whole woods full of hunters who had frozen fingers and feet by 9:00 am and had to begin walking, keeping deer on their feet too. The days after opening day were used by the big drivers which also got deer up and moving.

This has been one of the best threads that we have had here in a long time. The huge variety of viewpoints in our assessments of the future of hunting seems to cover a whole lot of ground. What is important to one doesn't mean a thing to others. But the thing is that there is a certain line of truth in each of the opinions. At least we don't have a lot of people here that are simply slapping on the blinders and saying all is well in the world of hunting.

I don't think that private high fences are illegal. At least not that I have ever heard or seen that written anywhere. I also don't think that these TV shows are effecting only young new-comers to hunting. I think that a lot of the AR demands are being fueled by the assumption that AR will create hunting conditions similar to what is shown on TV. Of course that is all B.S., but that does not stop a lot of people from fantasizing....lol. Yes, I believe that expectations are unreasonably elevated by these phony-baloney hunting programs and may be influential in driving management policy some day.

One problem is that as the hunting world shrinks (hunting access), individual choices are altered. The other thing is that as the hunter densities concentrate on less and less land, the quality of the hunt begins to deteriorate. We may be able to duck and dodge some of that right now, but there is no doubt that there will come a day when we can no longer escape the inevitable.

And one of the problems with that is that a lot of hunters are adapting by finding other pastimes. And that is an accelerating trend that is not likely to reverse.

It's funny, in my lifetime, I have seen hunting access go from "no problem" to a fierce struggle to get even marginal hunting land. When I was a kid, I would take off in the morning on a hike, and walk miles down the valley and never encounter a single posted sign. Nobody really bothered to get permission because none of the landowners wanted to be bothered with such trivialities. The land parcels were huge, and non agricultural lands were considered excess land open to anyone who could find a use for it. And then the family farms started to disappear with farmers breaking up the land as their version of a retirement fund. That has continued with each parcel being divided and subdivided over and over again. Little vacation homes began to fill the valley. Vacation homes turned to permanent residences as automobiles and road and road maintenance improved and made commuting to the cities more practical. Along with these new landowners came the posted signs. Favored hunting lands disappeared behind the signs. Formerly vacant state lands began to get packed with hunters that formerly were dispersed over the open private lands. Non hunting uses on those state lands have increased to a ridiculous condition. Is this a trend that will ever be reversed? ..... Absolutely not! Even some of the larger hunting parcels will eventually yield to the high demand and will be sub-divided. Even some of the huge leases will eventually be subdivided and sold leaving state land as the only real viable place to hunt for the average guy. And there will become a time when that won't even be adequate to hold the additional new hunters forced off the private lands. Yeah, it's not fun to be Mister doom and gloom, but how the heck can anyone really see it any different. from a strictly selfish standpoint, I can probably say that my days left probably will never see the complete demise of hunting for average people of average income. But the eventual situation is really quite clear and no real trick to predict.

Hunting is moving toward the science of animal husbandry. It is becoming an agricultural enterprise where we do our best to convert a basically wild animal into some kind of hand-raised foolish species that is fed, genetically managed, and trained to make itself more accessible to what we now call hunting. We are constantly striving to eliminate as much challenge as possible from our hunting. Everything now stresses the ability to create, modify, and manipulate the animal to make them easier prey. We are moving "hunting" towards game preserve conditions whether those preserves are someone else's commercial enterprise or something that we individually create for our own use. Motives, goals, methods and mentality involved in hunting has changed dramatically as we continue to evolve the activity into something that has lost the best parts of tradition and personal challenge. It is a shame because the activity that has dominated so much of my life is morphing into something that doesn't even resemble anything that I would have been remotely interested in years ago when I first got involved with hunting. I have always hunted the deer as I found them without any attempts at changing them for the convenience of my success. Personal challenge and self reliance and individual accomplishment used to be the goals. I'm not real sure just what it is all about today. It seems to be a hunter-versus-hunter competition to grow the most and best deer to shoot. I have to wonder what it will all look like 25 or 50 years from now. That's a scary thought.

Aliens. Never leave those kinds of things in high places that are exposed to the sky. And the worst part is that you broke the jar and set them free.

Arrow Flinger- This is a topic that deserves its own thread, if you feel like constructing one. I happen to completely agree with almost all of this.

Citizen surveillance technology is funny? What a strange world this has evolved into.

I will say that I have passed on similar shots, and I don't regret it one bit. I simply have a standing rule that if the deer is running, I do not shoot. That keeps these kinds of decisions real simple. I do not practice running shots. I believe that a target that is moving up and down as well as forward with varying speeds is not something that I can call a high percentage shot selection for single projectile ammo, and that is the criteria that I use in determining whether to pull the trigger or not.

Well, it sure isn't good news, but it also is not the end of the legal battle either. This would be a bad time for everyone to throw their hands up in the air and start withholding support for the next rounds of legal work. I too am a believer in not looking at this thing through rose colored glasses, but understand that this is not the end of the legal activity. And understand that we still need money to continue the fight. However, this will definitely encourage Cuomo and his merry band of gun control legislators. While we are regrouping on the legal front, let's not slack off the political activism that is up ahead of us (not that far ahead either). These creeps are all slapping each other on the back over their supposed conquest and disposal of gun owners rights. I think we have to make sure that they pay the price for their sneaky underhanded methods of shredding the 2nd amendment. We need to make them wish they had never voted for that thing or we can expect more similar and worse acts to be coming at us fast and furious. Emboldened by their successes, they will be coming at us with everything they've got unless we convince them that their careers are at stake. This act is bad enough, but I am looking just a little farther down the road.

We started out with the traditional kind of deer drives. You know the whistling, shouting, making as much noise as possible. Those drives always produced shots at deer flying by and lead flying in every direction and once in a while enough lead would land in a deer that it would finally have to fall down .....lol. After a couple of those, I began to decline the invites on a regular basis. Our drives began to take on a bit of finesse and were designed to convince the deer that they were outsmarting us. They would move along at a much slower sneaky pace, and the running shots were avoided. It was basically some people carefully still hunting very slowly toward some standers. The whole thing was brought down several levels so that a bit more control was achieved. Safety rules were developed and followed. And then I started drifting away from even these kinds of events and began once in a awhile participating in "one still-hunter/one stander" kinds of pushes. Now, with this attitude favoring individual achievement rather than turning my deer hunting into a "team" sport, I rarely get involved in even that anymore. I don't have anything against any of these kinds of drives, they just simply are not my thing anymore. In fact, later in the seasons when the deer go into their invisible mode, I am happy to hear those guys whooping and hollering. It lets me know that someone is out there kicking those critters in the butt and getting them on their feet. It sure beats a woods full of hunters snoozing at the base of a tree while the deer are in their hide-outs snoozing in their beds.

Another great question. One might wonder if that doesn't put it in the political column. Unless they come out with some statement that AR is harmful to deer management, they are basically saying, "I don't care". That would take the issue out of the hands of the DEC and put it into the political arena wouldn't it?

I have seen deer tracks in the snow that followed my exact drag of a harvested buck that spanned a bit more than a mile. In other words this deer had tracked me and my dead deer from over the hill down to my yard. Why did it do that? It would appear that it was scent tracking the blood trail from the drag. Was that something sexual in nature? Related to curiosity? Was the motivation similar to what was going on in the original post? There's still an awful lot that we don't know about these critters isn't there?

Ok, there may be some instances where management decisions are rightfully political. One instance that comes to mind is the decision, county by county, to allow rifles for deer hunting. Regardless of where you personally stand on that issue, I'm thinking that this is an issue that impacts all citizens, landowners in particular, and is an issue that needs in some procedure that allows public input from all concerned citizens. It is not an issue that should be completely in the hands of a biased government agency. Hence, I do believe that this is a hunting issue that is rightfully decided in the legislative process. I'm sure there are others that are truly general population issues and belong in a domain that allows public discussion and input. So, I can almost see some kind of vague guide-line that may define types of rules and regulations that need to have wider control than simply a single bureaucracy. But I'll tell you that it is truly a fuzzy and inconsistent line that is drawn that leaves me wondering just who makes the decisions and with what guidelines. However, getting back to the original post, you have to ask if antler restrictions are really one of these issues that require general public participation in the decision making process. My feeling is that it is strictly a deer management decision that does not impact the general public. That sounds like a DEC decision to me and not a political decision.

There are a few things that involve morals and ethics with hunters that promote a wide disparity and often incendiary situations when these items get involved in discussions. First of all, a lot of our moral and ethical perceptions about hunting are rooted in family, generational and geographic traditions. We tend to simply parrot back the things that were handed down to us personally by parents and other relatives and other authority figures that we have come in contact with throughout our lives. Those things are not always similar or compatible from one hunter to another. Also, we tend to be a bit conflicted because what we do involves the death or potential suffering of critters. That in itself increases the scope and stakes for our ethical positions. most of us do not take that aspect lightly. There is also a wide difference in what hunting means to each of us, and how we each believe is the "proper" ways of conduct. There are elements of fair-chase that we don't all agree on. The levels of required challenge reach both extremes. There are other things that set us up in concrete as far as principles that we refuse to back up on. And then there is the way that we take a smattering of life experiences and conjure up even more iron-clad ethical stances based on a truly insufficient number of data points. So when we see so many of these discussions turn a bit ugly, it generally is the engrained very personal ethical standards that we all have been handed and tend to live by with no compromise. It may not always be pleasant, but I think it is all very understandable and explainable. And none of us are exempt.

Ok, so how would you like to be sitting in the middle of the Canadian wilderness almost 100 miles from the nearest sign of civilization, when all of a sudden an ear-splitting ferocious growling and snarling began from just outside the faint glow of the campfire? Also, suppose no one had a firearm and all of the hunters only had bows for defense? Imagine having no walls to get behind for protection other than the thin, flimsy walls of back-back tents. Well, that's what happened to the 4 of us on our 1988 Canadian moose hunt. The sound and circumstances were absolutely terrifying. The paralyzed feeling of doom, terror, and helplessness took over the camp. Pretty dire situation ....eh? Well, maybe not really .... lol. While we were very strict about limiting excess weight and volume of our cargo, there was one smart-azz member of this hunting party (me) that had a little something extra rolled up in his sleeping bag. You see, I had this vision one night back at home when I engaged in a game of tug-of-war with our dog using an old towel. I was amazed at just how crazy-mad she sounded with her deep growling and snarling. The harder I pulled on the towel, the louder, crazier, meaner and wacked-out she sounded. She sounded like some crazed timberwolf with rabies. That's when it struck me that if I were to record that violent growling rampage and play it back in a camp-type of setting, the reactions might get a bit hilarious. So, back at camp, as soon as it got dark, I pretended to head out into the darkness to relieve myself, and turned on the portable tape player that I had smuggled in. I had put a 15 minute leader of silence at the beginning of the tape so no one would connect my earlier trip out with the vicious sound that would be terrifying the camp later. The results were better than I expected. Within seconds of the pandemonium beginning, everybody was diving for any sharp instrument that they could find to defend themselves. At that point, things got pretty chaotic until the hero of the group (me) volunteered to go out and chase off the unknown beast, armed only with my hunting knife. Ha-ha.... that should have been their first clue that something was not right. Finally at the end of my super dramatized stalk out into the darkness, I made a heroic dive onto the tape player and jumped back up holding the tape player, declaring that I had slain the beast. Why they didn't throw me into the lake, I'm not sure. But eventually we all had a great laugh and a hunt adventure that none of us will ever forget.

Here's the problem. When the weather gets horrible cold, I have to start putting on layer after layer of clothes. Eventually, the thickness and bulk of the clothing will sooner or later effect my shooting ..... and not in a nice way .... lol. If it isn't outright string/clothing interference, it is an effect on my form as the clothing effects my draw. When we have parts of the season where I have to over-dress just to survive the cold, I simply end the season right there. I have no love for bugs and sweat, but there are ways to combat them that do not effect my shooting. Of course the earlier hunting is being done, the farther away from the rut it is. And so you lose all advantages over some of those more cautious bucks. The nocturnal ones stay nocturnal. One other thing that bothers me about "summer hunting" is the possibilities for spoilage if everything doesn't go exactly correct. There is one other thing that bothers me about all this driving of the bow season ever-earlier. Bowhunters have already become the target of envy from all other hunters, and it is probably only a matter of time before we find all kinds of other weapons jumping into that early season time-slot. At that point whatever benefits that bow hunting currently enjoys of hunting a fairly calm and patternable herd will be replaced by a more clogged up circus-like atmosphere. The result will be more leases or locked up land, more posting and less access. That sort of thing is already happening. Well, that's one theory anyway.....lol.

That is a great picture of a great deer. It is more than just the rack, the body shape, the attitude, the power, all of it just shows that this is the "bull of the woods".