Doc

My response was a correction to an incorrect statement of statistics. I never said that it was anything more than that. As far as the illegality of the acts surrounding the shooting, is irelevant to the the statement that I was correcting. Doc

Scary thought, isn't it? I don't think NYS would be enjoying the excellent safety record that we now have. It is good that nearly all hunters have a fair level of common sense.

Ok Sits, carry on with your bitter disagreeable style of "conversation". I just hope your personality disorder doesn't wind up costing us members.

Sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn't. Those video games are quite the attraction. I think in most cases it's a losing battle. If the electronic gadgets don't get them, it's only a matter of time before the girls do.

Nope, that's not true. I know of at least one case where there was no mis-identifying the target and there are probably more. In 2008, in Swan Lake there was a 16 month old baby girl shot to death in her grandparents living room. That same year, there was a near miss with a rifle bullet passing through a crib mattress that an infant had just been taken out of. That one was in the Town of Marshall. So it appears that the stats are a bit flawed. I don't think anyone is trying to say that blaze orange is like a suit if armor and will guarantee that slugs and bullets can't touch you. It is just a case of putting odds in your favor. Which to me sounds like a pretty good idea when we're talking about my life. Doc

Ha-ha ..... maybe the wife is right ...... maybe. By the way, you don't have to be climbing trees to get in trouble. I remember one time when I had a small tree wedged across my ATV trail. So I decided to try to snap the thing in two and drag the two halves off the trail. I guess I got a little too intent on what I was trying to do and got into a position where I was pulling on the thing like a bow limb with all my weight and leg power at work. Well, naturally the thing broke all at once and sent me back into another tree so hard it knocked the wind out of me. It was a lot like your fall, and I had to lay there for a while just to get my breathing back to normal. Same deal, I was in the middle of the hill with absolutely no one around and no one even knowing where I was (I didn't have the ATV with me that time). I guess I was quite fortunate that nothing in my back broke because I did hit right on my spine. Now that WAS dumb! But I didn't climb any trees to almost do the same thing. :-[

Mike- It's hard to look at a bad fall like that as something lucky, but at least you got a warning and decided to take heed. Good for you. It could have been a whole lot worse.

I just finished up another couple of ground stands this past Friday and Saturday. The weather was finally pretty decent so I took a trip up the hill. Things are starting to look pretty good. Doc

No, the real simple fact is that you have a personality problem. You simply don't know how to express yourself in a civil manner. I mean, that is without a single exception. There's no excuse for that reply that you posted and you know it.

Since he is a relatively new member, I was just trying to make it clear to Archer that if he has an opinion, he should feel free to express it and not expect that kind of abusive reply from anyone else in this forum and that he should not take Sits' unfriendly remarks too seriously. I do believe that he has a right to his opinion too without that kind of ridiculous and uncalled for attack. Doc

When a bunch of guys get together and buy hunting property, what happens when one of them has to move away and the rest don't have enough money to buy them out. Also, how do you handle disputes, or people who want to invite a gang of outsiders, or those that want to do deer drives when the others don't want that kind of thing going on. Or any improvements that you might want to make ..... how do you make other members pay their fair share. In other words how do you legally control what goes on on that land or what rules you all intend to engage in and enforce. (maybe AR or EAB or any of some other special hunting restrictions)? Can't be a real trick since guys have been doing it for years, but I was just curious how they handle any personal difficulties and special events as they arise. Doc

Whenever anyone talks about lowering hunting ages, they always leave out the discussion of whether they are talking about dropping the age while including an adult accompanyment requirement, or not. To me that makes a huge difference between whether I support such moves or not. I am not in favor of turning 12 year olds loose without close parental, or specifically designated adult, supervision. So, does anyone know whether the people behind the bills talked about in this article are proposing these changes with or without adult supervision? Also, he talks about pushing a lowering of ages in bowhunting without going for the whole thing ...... bow and gun. Frankly I do think that the two different weapons should have different critera for youth safety and minimum ages. Doc

Don't take Sits too seriously. He is our resident flamer who joined only to see how many people he can irritate. That's simply his way of getting attention. He's just a little bit of static in the background of an otherwise fairly friendly forum. After a while, you will see that all his posts have the same miserable tone of a disagreeable personality. Anymore, I simply ignore him. I just hope his mal-formed personality doesn't lose any members here or cause anyone not to post. If we had an "ignore" button, he would be a good candidate for its use. Doc

Way back in the olden days when my wife and I were into camping, we spend a few years just using our pick-up truck with a small cap on the back. We slid two folding camp-cots in there and put a full size mattress on top, and it turned out to be the most comfortable sleeping quarters for two that you could imagine. Under the cots, we stored all our food, fishing gear, supplies, clothing, and cooking equipment, and had room to spare. It worked out pretty good because we had nothing to tow along behind us. I never used it as a hunting base, but it would seem as though it would probably have worked as well as a tow-behind "pod". Doc

Can't argue with any of that. I too regret that I am seeing all the hunting land that I grew up hunting being subdivided and locked up. It's just a sign of the times. Doc

I noticed that too. Makes me a bit curious as to how that could be. It must be that last year the odds were super - super - dsuper high ... lol. And yet you got turned down for the second one. I'll tell you, if anyone can make any sense out of that wacky "permit draw", I wish they would explain it to me. Everytime I think about it I keep coming up with questions as to how they handle all the variations in landowner preferences, preferance points, and the ever changing pool of names that they are drawing from as the sales period advances. Whatever it is that caused them to come up with this knee-jerk reaction in 8N of cutting the permits in half does tells me that they are trying to make up for some perceived screw-up or shortcoming in their statistical management schemes. You know .... the ones that have been audited by some statistical gurus and found to be perfect.....lol. Oh there I go again. By the way, judging only from what I have seen in my few hundred acres of 8N hunting land, I think they had it right last year. I don't see any sign of a diminished herd size here. Doc

I'm going to have to spend some time looking through all that stuff. There is a pile of interesting stats. I do wish that there was a newer version to compare this against for changes and trends. Doc

I have the same problem only my fear of heights is such that I don't even use treestands at all ..... lol. So yes, I wish all treestanders would use the proper equipment for safety, but for me personally it is non-issue. Doc

It's very difficult and even impossible to get inside the heads of some of these people who get so hyped up that they would think a human looks like a deer. However, it happens. I don't know how but it does. Another type of hunting mishaps is the deal where a deer runs between two hunters. That one is a scenario that I have often heard reported. That is just a case of using raw reaction and not even considering the consequenses. Both of these shooting circumstances would undoubtedly be helped with a blaze orange law. However, we will never be able to eliminate the hunters who seem to just completely lose their minds when they think there is a deer to be shot. Those people will continue to be a deadly problem. The only thing we can do in defense is to throw up a "red flag" or more exactly a "blaze orange flag" at the end of their barrel and hope it works in time to keep them from finishing off the trigger pull. It's about the only defense we've got against those out-of-control people, and it should be a legally mandated defense. Doc

Looking at the permit allocations for Region 8, it looks like a bunch of the WMUs are going to see a cut. In fact 8N will be about half of the permits that we had last year. 8A, 8H, 8J, 8M, 8N, 8P, 8T, 8W, 8X, 8Y are all having cuts from last year's numbers. I'm assuming that the DEC is in affect saying that there are deer shortages (under target or getting that way) in those WMUs. I know it's kind of hard to really say, but do you guys who hunt there agree with that assessment? Doc

I am one happy camper by golly. The shooting is shaping up pretty darn good this year. I spent a bunch of time tuning up the bow and have it flying perfectly. My practice sessions have been pretty short. When everything is going well, I generally keep the practice session fairly short so that I don't start getting fatigued and begin to engrain some crappy form concessions. Anybody else do that? Or do you continue to keep shooting even though your groups are already good? Doc

Why is that?? Doc

It's getting pretty close to it being too late for this year for me already. I won't buy a rifle until I know the law is in effect. After all, this is the third go at it ..... lol. The longer it goes without a rifle purchase, the less time I will have to make the final decision of what caliber, what make and model, what scope, etc. etc. I also need some time to get the thing sighted in and to shoot it enough to feel real comfortable with it. I'm thinking that maybe the bill got buried under a whole pile of other bills of higher priority while they were messing around all those months trying to pass the budget. Doc

They never explained what the new constraints were. It's hard to imagine what could cause them to dump such a popular and apparently lucrative activity. Sounds like demand is not a problem since they were turning away individuals and bus companies from participating. Oh well. Doc

Cynical? ..... you bet. But in my more quiet moments, I have to give them credit just as you mentioned, for among other things, exercising caution in the face of fanatical armchair game managers who latch onto an idea like a bunch of pitbulls and whip themselves up into a rabid frenzy, thinking they have the next best idea since sliced bread. By the way, I do come across as super critical of the DEC, but in reality, I do have to give them a lot of credit for doing one heck of a job given the resource limitations, and the political atmosphere that they have to function in. Also, I have said many times that inspite of my constant jabs at them, I have absolutely no idea of how to do their job better, and as much as we all think we know more than they do, the fact is that I don't think that any of us really do. Here and there we may have a more intimate knowledge of what's going on in our own little acreage of hunting area, but if any of us had the management responsibilities on anywhere near the scale that the DEC does, there is no doubt in my mind that every single one of us would prove to be a complete embarrassing flop at the job....... every one of us. On occasion I do get the feeling that they may bow just a bit to much to the political pressures that they are confronted with. I think I have seen a movement toward letting anti-deer forces have a lot more say in game management goals and I'm still trying to sort out the right or wrong aspects of that. There are a lot of fiscal-political realities that I am not real crazy about, and sometimes the DEC has to bear the brunt of those frustrations. But always, there is the time when I have to ask myself the question of whether I could do it any better, and if I am being honest, the answer comes back to be "NO". However, I still enjoy the sport of "poke the DEC". I think we all do. With hunters, the favorite prey that follows just second to whitetails is the DEC. It's all great sport, and we all like to play. I'm no exception. Doc