Doc

Well, when you start into your 50th year of it, you may have lost a bit of enthusiasm for it........ or not.

Ha-ha ... There, do you feel better now. Maybe now that you have had your shot at hunters, you get through the rest of your day. Hey, whatever it takes.

Ha-ha .... so it's a "manhood" thing with you guys. If that's what feeds your macho self image, butcher away. far be it for me to criticize anyone's quest to verify their gender ..... lol. This simple post of pictures that I thought would be kind of interesting to most hunters seems to have degenerated into the usual flame fodder from the usual sources. But anyway, I hope the rest of you found the pictures of some interest.

I'm thinking that even the truly die-hard "trophy hunters" are concerned with the actual quality of the rack such that they too will find optics useful.

So, I guess we are saying that abiding by laws is conditional on the size of the buck ..... lol. Filling an antlerless permit is done according to law, but if it happens to be a trophy, legality can be ignored. Interesting mindset.

I have heard about these high velocity bullets disintegrating when hitting saplings. That is an argument used when justifying rifles in a lot of the southern zone counties. The claim has been made by a Minnesota study that rifles are actually safer than shotguns because the rifle bullets do not hold together upon ricochet like slugs do. So, how much of a concern is that when the bullet hits some minor obstruction along the way? Is the bullet likely to come apart on contact before it gets to the target animal? Well sure, it sounds like a dumb question, but when some of these statements are made by some people educated in such things, it does make you wonder to what extend those comments are true. My questions about these things come from the fact that I am completely new at the rifle deer hunting thing, and I am concerned with just how paranoid I have to be about picking out a perfectly clear shooting lane.

These deals are really weird. Hunting is all about getting a specific animal in a very specific way. How do you pick a lethal kill spot on a deer if you can't even see enough of it to define it as a deer. I mean even if you completely disregard the safety aspects of that kind of goofy shooting, what kind of mentality thinks that just flinging lead at some unidentified thing will result in a harvested deer? It seems to me that there are a whole lot of things that were taught in the hunter-safety programs are being completely tossed out of the guy's head.

I always look for the areas that all the other hunters skirt around. You know, those thickets with the multiflora rose infestations, and the grape vines and sloppy wet swampy crap. They're in there. It's up to you to figure out how to sneak up on them ..... lol.

I'm thinking binoculars are the answer. Get a good pair and then you can check them out up close and personal.

It's the law isn't it? .... that the tag has to stay with the meat? I mean these guys have a fortune at stake if they were ever caught separating the two. And they are prime destinations for game cops and biologists gathering harvest data so I'm certain they don't take any chances with monkeying around re-distributing meat. And anyways, what benefit would it be for them to mix things up?

We all know that after the opener, hunters disappear .... the deer disappear .... and the woods can become a very lonely place. Now is the time to find out how sneaky you are. Can you find them? Can you get close enough to a bedded deer to get the shot? It is a real challenge now. You have to go into places where other hunters won't. But don't be hating gun season. And by the way, there is no better time to be scouting for next year's bow season. It's amazing how nicely those scrapes and rubs that you were walking by before, now stand out. Now about the original question of when deer will return to normal.... I will guarantee that the very week that all deer seasons end, there will be deer in my front yard pawing through the snow and chonking down on the grass in broad daylight. It's practically guaranteed. I am convinced that somebody has leaked a copy of the game laws to them so the know exactly when we will not be able to shoot them. But as long as there is even one gun-toting deer hunter wandering around out there, they will stick to their survival mode tactics and everyone will be talking about how all the deer have been killed.

This part of my season gets real casual now .... lol. Nice leisurely breakfast wait for things to warm up a bit. and then out I go for a nice "sneaky" stroll, doing my best impression of still-hunting. No more sitting like a frozen lump at the base of a tree waiting for the sun to come up. Actually, in the past still-hunting has been my best and most productive way to hunt. There won't be anybody out there keeping deer on their feet and moving, so I have to do the job all by myself and sneak into their bedrooms. And that can wait a few more hours. Maybe I'll get lucky and add to that pile of deer....ha-ha-ha.

With the wind shaking every tree and branch in the woods this weekend, it's a wonder he didn't run out of ammo right off the bat .... .

I butchered my deer for a good many years, but there is no way that I could ever say it was a process that I looked forward to. In fact the word "dread" comes to mind. I can't say that I really miss that chore. For tackling chores that I really hate, I have to assign an extremely high dollar-per-hour value to the time that it takes. For those that enjoy that activity, all I can say is, "have at it!"

As a matter of fact, when we picked up our meat, it did in fact come out of a refrigerated room, packaged exactly like your average cuts of beef at the supermarket. As far as leaving a deer out in the sun, I'm sure the short amount of time that these deer actually spent there was significantly shorter than conditions in the woods before you actually lay hands on your deer, or get it home to any source of refrigeration.

Well, I have no way of knowing whether there were any "game-hogs" adding to that pile, but I will say that there was a steady stream of vehicles coming and going, and while I was there, I didn't see anyone come in with a truck-load of deer. So what I am saying is that the pile in those pictures only shows that deer hunting is a very popular activity and that there are a significant amount of people that are successful at doing exactly what they intended to do. It is just a graphic representation of the realities of hunting. If we believe in hunting, then we should have no problem with a display that those deer are actually being used.

The tag never leaves the carcass throughout the whole process. That applies whether the carcass is whole, on the conveyor or on the butchering table. Of all the imagined problems with professional butchers, that is probably the most unlikely. And as far as laying in the sun, I watched that pile grow and then disappear, and believe me most of those deer probably laid in the woods a lot longer than they laid there. I've been using these guys for quite a few years now, and I have never gotten any bad venison. Unless the deer has already been laying in the woods and already begun to spoil, these deer didn't stay there long enough to do any harm to the meat. The trick is not to leave the things laying around for half a day before getting them to the processor. I know I have heard all kinds of arguments against processors and really believe that most of the comments are simply the product of over active imaginations .... lol. These guys don't stay in business if they start handing back tainted meat or short-counts on the amounts of venison. I butchered my own deer for a whole lot of years and I know what quantities of venison I should be seeing. I have never gotten back less venison than if I had done the job myself.

The original post talked about steel shot. Does the S.A.F.E. act extend to background checks on shotshell ammo?

It probably is not a good idea to intentionally shoot through brush, but I think the question is still a valid one when asked in a different way. If shooting something like a .270, and the bullet strikes a small (maybe pencil sized) twig, are you likely to be in for a long day of tracking. In other words, what size twig does it take to upset the flight of the bullet to the point of a wound. Looking through a scope, it is always likely that the focus will obliterate the view of some unseen twigs. So naturally one has to wonder if this is a concern with using a rifle. I know when I was sitting there in my blind, I was wondering if I should have gone crazy butchering all the trees in the area to ensure that I didn't hit a single thing.

I watched these guys work, and believe me those deer didn't stay there too long. They had a pile of guys working there and processed them like an assembly line. They were almost running. Once they got them inside the building, the temp in there was pretty darned cold. This isn't an operation like we might do at home. They can skin a deer in an unbelievably short time and onto the conveyor racks they go. It was interesting to watch people doing this stuff that really know what they are doing.

Just tell the deer to stop and pose with a right hand profile, then a left hand profile and then a frontal shot. If the deer passes, shoot it.

Just 5 hours into the season: I tried to rush a few pictures and also stay out of everybody's way so the pictures highlight more the quantity than the quality of the deer that were there. I did see some guys walking out with some caped out trophies, but I didn't get their pictures. Sorry about that ..... maybe I'll do a better job next year. The pictures were kind of a rushed after-thought. But I thought some of you might find the harvest of the venison there kind of interesting. This is a processor located between Bloomfield and Victor in Western NY. By the way, note the stack of deer hides in the background from deer they had already skinned.

It always seems like the DEC is almost panicked at their inability to peddle their DMPs. It looks like way more of them are made available than they ever really expect to be taken. But then if that is the case, I wonder what mental midget came up with the idea of charging for applying for one. I think they may have reached a situation where no matter how many they make available, there just aren't that many interested hunters willing to take them. Also, I have to wonder if all of those permits actually get filled. Well, no need to wonder, we know that they don't.

Here is another observation relative to the OP. After the first hour of opening day. deer are put on full alert and enter survival mode. It used to be that large drives, and still-hunters kept the deer moving (and visible). Not so today. Many hunters are "sit and wait" hunters. So you have all these guys plunked down next to a tree, and all the deer plunked down in some nasty areas where guys won't go. The advent of clothing technology has allowed guys to sit tight. The advent of Saturday morning hunting programs has convinced them to do so. So the thing is that the deer may very well be there and nobody is forcing them to become visible. Now add to that how the state parking lots empty out by noon and a lot of guys figure that is the end of their season, and it turns out that the remainder of the season has very few hunters in the woods to move deer that have gone nocturnal. Just enough to let the deer know that they had better stay nocturnal. There is also the posting and under-hunting of a whole lot of private land. Land bought up and hunted by tiny groups of hunters, again make situations where deer in survival mode are allowed to simply sit tight and make everything appear like there are no deer left in the woods. Yes, this is all just a lot of theorizing based on some observations only in one little area of one little WMU, but I have to wonder if these scenarios don't take place in many areas and WMUs across the state. It definitely would cast a very misleading picture of the deer populations of today compared to the apparent situations of years ago.

If you are interested in how permit targets are set, read about the Citizen Task Forces at the following web address: http://www.dec.ny.gov/animals/7207.html There you will find who the DEC and the Cornell extension service agents consider to be the real movers and shakers in determining who has the say in deer numbers. The list of "stakeholders that they have provided are: "Farmers, hunters, foresters, conservationists, motorists, the tourism industry, landowners, small business, etc, are all considered as potentially distinct stakeholder groups". If I were to assign a "pro-deer" or "anti-deer" attribute to those stakeholders, I think the majority of that pool of stakeholders are anti-deer minded people. I also have to wonder how these results might turn out a bit badly skewed by a few biased strong personalities in the group. Anyway, check it out. Some of the make-up and power of these CTFs may explain what kind of population picture the DEC is trying to get to in your WMU.