Doc

If I can actually remember how to post pictures, here are what the pins look like. As you can see, I am not the world's best craftsman, and I'm sure any of you can probably come up with pins that look a whole lot more professional. But the one thing I will say is that these are fully functional and have been working well for me for quite a few years. Doc

Actually, they were easy to make. I had an old Cobra sight that had the little dinky colored balls on the end. They had all the hardware for independant vertical and horizontal adjustments which I used as-is. I threw the pins themselves into a drawer and got some long screws with the same thread as the original Cobra pins and cut the head off. Then I took a hacksaw and sawed a shallow slot down the center of the stud approximately 1/16 deep. Then I used some thin, stiff wire and wrapped it around and awl until it made a loop and the gave it a few twists so that I had one loop with a twisted pigtail coming out. I snipped off the pigtail about 1/16 from the loop and stuck it in the hacksaw slot. Then I took a heavy pair of pliers and pinched the slot in the stud shut, crimping it onto the loop's pigtail. Then I soldered the whole thing to completely lock the loop into the stud. A little bright paint, and the thing was ready to assemble back onto the original Cobra Mounting bracket. I made up a bunch of them until I got them just the way I wanted them, and have been using them ever since. The things are virtually indestructible. I've had a few occasions where that feature was tested ..... ha-ha. If I can remember it, I will take a few pictures and post them here to help clarify the process. They were kind of fun to make and made a good winter project when I was getting a bit of cabin fever. Doc

Our Southern Ontario County rifle bill suffered the same fate. The budget fiasco supposedly kept them from having time to get these "lower priority" bills passed. They said that these rifle bills "died in committee", but I don't know how dead is dead. Does that mean that at some time SOON, they will begin to continue the process, or does it mean that they will have to start all over again at the County level. Because if the latter is the case, I kind of doubt that the Ontario County bill will make it through the County Board of Supervisors another time. It was only a fluke of procedure (weighted voting) that got it passed this last time. Doc

Actually, I could say the same thing. The only problem is that we don't have AR. Yes indeed, I have seen more larger racked deer in recent years, and it has been a significant difference too. I don't have any AR program to point to, but I do believe that hunter pressure has diminished significantly to the point where an awful lot of bucks are escaping harvest. In our case unlike PA, general deer populations are coming up too primarily because permits have been cut I suppose. Notice that none of this has a thing to do with AR. That's the problem with anecdotal endorsements of any policy. You always have to wonder whether they are attributing the right causes to what they are seeing. Doc

Years ago, I found a folding camp stool that was made out of tubular aluminum and has a canvas type material for a seat. It weighs nearly nothing and fits nicely in my back pack. Since that time, I have seen all kinds of miniature fold-up stools for sale, but never bought one because my aluminum one works fine. Depending on how far you walk to get to your stand, weight and size may be a consideration. I have used the folding camp chairs and there's no question they are super comfortable. But they do tend to be heavy and they don't fit in my pack. That's ok when I am just heading down to a stand by the garden (just a few hundred yards from the house), but when I am heading up the hill, weight and size become things I have to consider. Doc

Bill- I have designed and built what works great for me as regards low-light visibility, and focus requirements for older used-up eyes. Actually they are not pins at all, but brightly colored rings. Each sight is a threaded pin with about a 3/16" ring crimped and soldered on the end. So my sight picture is looking through the peep sight and centering the bulls-eye (or aiming spot on the deer) inside the aperature. I got real tired of my sight pin covering up the spot I was trying to hit, and concentricity of using circular sights is such a natural sighting feature that I decide to experiment with "rings". Now I look through my round peep sight and center these small rings, and center the bulls-eye in those other circles. What I found was that it gave me a completely unimpaired view of the exact spot I was trying to hit and the pin was of a size that I could see it even beyond the end of legal shooting hours, so visibility was enhanced in lo-light conditions. I've been using that sighting system for years now and have not once missed squinting at those tiny little colored balls at the end of my pins, covering up my bullseye. Doc

Midday certainly can be productive. But I generally use that time to carefully move around and check out other spots to see what's going on. You can't beat in-season scouting (when done with the proper caution), for finding out what the latest feed, travel, and rut conditions are instead of finding out later what they were. What I have found is that the mid-day times are slow enough that my time is better spent updating myself on what's happening and where. Doc

Bill- Thanks for the link to that article. Since running into that hop plant the other day, I have been doing a whole lot of reading on the subject, and I am quite amazed at the art and science behind hop growing. It's not exactly like growing corn or planting a food plot ..... ha-ha. We had a history of hop farming on the old homestead (part of which is my land today). The previous owner referred to an old foundation behind the main barn as "the hop house" and apparently it was used for drying hops back in the day when the crop was a boom-style industry here. I'm guessing that the vine that I found is some kind of descendant of that crop. By the way, I have seen that hop plantation display in the Farmers Museum in Cooperstown. That whole museum is just a amazing thing to see and I would recommend it to anybody regardless of your level of interest in farming. Again thanks for the link to the article. Doc

All TV shows are about profit, but for some reason programs other than most hunting and fishing shows recognize that occasionally you have to change up the story line in order to keep your viewers. Most TV programming shows an understanding that unique and different are good qualities to have. I think that one of the reasons that I find Jim Shocky's programs a whole lot more entertaining is that he devotes most of his programs to something other than deer. In fact, it is almost a rare event that his shows contain any deer hunting at all. Some of those up close and personal moose hunting shows are actually pretty awesome. In fact, all those clips that begin his shows are pretty darn exciting even without being part of an individual show. And a shockey black bear hunt is one that gets away from the typical treestand overlooking a garbage pile style of hunting as he conducts mostly spot and stalk bear hunts. These kinds of hunts are way different from the constant diet of standard format deer hunts that I burned out on several years back. I've got to say it ...... most of them are just plain boring. And when I think of all the basically untouched hunting subject matter that could be the focus of 1/2 hour shows or muti-part shows, I almost get a bit angry that these hunting show producers think that we hunters are such simpletons that they don't even have to try to apply a bit of creativity to their programming. Doc

I have 20 and 30 and 40 yard pins on the bow right now. When the season begins the 40 yard pin will come off leaving only two pins (20 & 30 yds) Those are separated enough so there is no problem identifying which pin to use. I am shooting 57# and using aluminum arrows, so we're not talking blazing speed here, and the two pins seem to cover everything out to 30 yards pretty nicely without much of a built-in error of trying to eliminate one of those two pins. Doc

What do you put the rope around? ..... the neck? Won't that destroy the hair? In fact any kind of dragging for any distance would run the risk of rubbing hair off and destroying the pelt, wouldn't it? I've seen that happen with deer. And of course, there is no prior agreement as to exactly where the bear will decide to expire and I would imagine that quite often they make it to areas where mechanized transport can't go (even ATVs). Also, there are a lot of bear hunting areas that do not allow ATVs, or landowners that will not allow ATVs on their land. What do you do then? Doc

Right now there is just the one vine which is covered with hops, but not enough to be used for anything. I have to look into how to propagate these things and then see where I go from there. Doc

That 3" depth is kind of weird. That does sound like they are digging for some kind of mineral or some natural or artificial attractant.

It might make a heck of a hobby ....... brewing beer from some old vintage breed of hops that you harvest yourself. hey, it's something worth looking into anyway. I don't know a thing about it, but my interest has been tweaked a bit.

So when you are out by yourself and get a big old bear, just exactly what do you grab onto to drag him out. My impression is that it would be kind of like trying to wrestle a huge bag of jello out of the woods. Doc

My prediction is that once the chase phase has begun, I will be seeing deer everywhere but on the trails. I will see deer in places I never would expect to see them, and they will be just about impossible to get set up within bow range as they ram around the woods at full tilt pestering every doe they can come in contact with, unless I just happen to get lucky (that would be a good day to go out and buy a lottery ticket. The part of rut that I have the most luck with is when the bucks start spending hours wandering around, tending and creating scrapes. That's when they are the most careless, and on the move and scent-checking deer trails. Once that is over, all bets are off and the next phase of rut should be called the "luck phase". ;D Doc

I have found early scrapes at this time of year. Last year there was one that was complete with a licking branch over head. It's not a super common thing to find this early, but it does occasionally happen. What does it mean? ........ I'm not sure. I don't know whether it is a buck that is a bit ahead of his time or what, but it just shows how little we really know about rut behavior, or scrape behavior. Doc

I came across something kind of interesting that's a living piece of township history. I found a vine of hops (a beer making product) growing wild in a hedge row. Hop farming used to be a big crop in our town about a century ago. But nobody has grown hops commercially in the valley since that time. This one plant has survived all those years. I'm not sure, but this may be some old variety that may not even exist anymore. I'm going to do a bit of investigation. Also, I want to see if I can get some seeds off the thing. It's amazing what interests an old guy ..... ha-ha. Doc

And right there in just a couple of short paragraphs is the entire reason that I am not really warming to AR and the attitudes that go with it. I could care less about all the genetic modification hogwash, because as Sampotter pointed out, it is a ridiculous notion in a wild deer population. My concerns with all this AR stuff is strictly related to what such a law may do to the already diminishing hunter population. And even the attitudes and the condescention that goes along with the AR arguments, may very well be something that is driving more hunters from our ranks than we even know. Doc

I agree that hunters who have been around a while and have had a chance to assess the real power of the deer's sense of smell probably should not be sympathized with if they swallowed the Scent-Lok lies, but I am also aware that every year there is a new crop of hunters, many that don't have a clue as to what is a reasonable claim. I have heard some of them parroting back the marketing claims and they were prepared to part with some pretty hard earned cash based on those claims. That just ain't right. Of course, Scent-Lok is just the tip of the iceberg when it come to misleading statements or downright lies. It's become a regular practice in all of industry and especially in the field of hunting and fishing products. It has gotten to the point where you can't believe anything they have to say. That ain't right either and reflects badly on those manufacturers who really have come up with some worthwhile products and can't achieve credibility because of the perpetual liars hawking their bogus products. I applaud this law suit. Whether it will actually do any good or not, only time will tell. Doc

I really had my heart set on a new gun and scope this year, but maybe having another year to save for it will mean that I can get a better quality rifle and have a little extra time to figure out exactly what I want. Anyway, what the heck, my shoulder cam take one more year with that 12 guage shoulder mangler. ;D Doc

I just recently picked the bow up and began this year's practice. Right now I am shooting about every other day. Things are going pretty darn good right now so I try not to over-do it too much. I'm pretty careful about not getting too fatigued. What I found out in the past was that if I practiced until I got tired, pretty soon I was practicing-in some bad form and on occasion I would develop some target panic which showed up as a massive uncontrollable flinch...... Not a good thing and not very easy to un-do. Right now, for the first time in a few years, I have put a 40 yard pin on my sight. I don't shoot at deer over 30 yards and really prefer shots that are 20 yards and under. But for practice there is some value to shooting the longer distance as a confidence builder for my actual shorter hunting shot distances. It works. 20 yard shots become a "chip-shot" that is very hard to miss. Doc

Now that definitely sounds more like what I would like to see. I mean, I am really getting turned off on these wacky near-fictional portrayals of hunting to the point where I seldom have the Outdoor Channel or Versus on anymore. The deer hunting shows have become only slightly more interesting than the bass tournament shows ... ;D Unfortunately, the couple of episodes of the QDMA show that I did see were strictly about the agricultural aspects of food plotting, and there might have been one episode on prescribed burning which I thought was pretty interesting. The ones I saw were interesting, but still not something that I relate to a whole lot. But apparently I missed the best ones that had content more directly relevant to my interests. Most likely, one of the reasons that I didn't catch more episodes is strictly due to the title of the program. I'm not really in a position to practice QDMA since most of my hunting is done on state land, so I wasn't really trying to catch that particular program. It sounds like I missed some of the better hunting TV programming. :-\ Doc

Absolutely. And a long as we sit there and watch that kind of stuff over and over and over and over, I'm sure it will never change. However some of us are starting to tune out, and if that ever becomes mainstream, it will start to take a bit of ingenuity to get viewers back, and might not be so profitable in the long run. But you're right. Any time you can re-use the same script over and over, and go with mindless cheap repetitive productions, you probably wind up with extra profits in your pocket. And viewers that will sit there and watch repetition, are probably getting what they deserve. So for those lazy hunting show producers, and those that are satisfied with those kinds of time-worn productions, it turns out to be a win-win situation. Personally, there's very few of those programs that I can handle anymore, so here's at least one hunter that the advertiser's money is no longer reaching. If I have the Outdoor Channel or Versus tuned in, I pretty much put something else on if a deer hunting show comes on, because I know exactly what I am going to see before the show even starts. Also, as soon as I see somebody flopping down in a chair inside a box-blind looking out at a herd of semi-domestic corn-fed bucks, that's an immediate signal to switch channels. What I hope is that someday, someone will experiment with some actual instructional and fact based hunting shows that actually try to be of some value to the viewer instead of this constant parade of hunter-heroes who continue to put on these dramatized, near fictional hunts. Maybe something that actually has a wildlife biologist or two as hosts, or somebody that might want to show some actual tips and techniques regarding the science of hunting and the planning, and execution of some of the various peripheral aspects of hunting. As just one simple example, I wouldn't mind a whole lot if one of the guides actually took over the show occasionally and discussed some of the art of tracking, or how they approach scouting, patterning and setting up on game. Wouldn't that be a lot more interesting (and useful) than watching one more guy in a treestand or box-blind taking another deer? Frankly I get a bit tired of watching these actors pretending to be the brains behind a hunt when in reality, it is their guide that has all the skill and is the one totally responsible for the success or failure of the hunt, but is never heard from. I'll bet some of those guys could give out some real useful info on setting up and outfitting hunting camps. For those that might be planning a hunt out west some day, it would be interesting to have someone explain exactly how to organize such a hunt and how to keep from being ripped off by guides and outfitters, or explaining the most common mistakes that hunters make when planning such an event. The bottom line is that the content of hunting shows is only limited by the imagination and creativity of those who produce them. I'm simply saying that I would prefer to see some of the other aspects of hunting presented by some people that really know what they're talking about for a change instead of the paid actors that portray hunters. I don't know, maybe most hunters are happy with just watching an endless parade of deer being taken in the same way week after week, year after year, decade after decade. Maybe I want too much from hunting shows. But the fact is that I am quickly losing complete interest in tuning into these fictional representations of hunting, and I am always looking for something that has a bit more to it. Of course the way hunting TV programming is set up these days, and the way most hunters apparently are so easily satisfied with whatever comes their way, I really don't look for any changes or improvements. So most likely I will simply be watching less and less of it all (which maybe is actually a good thing). Doc