Doc

I understand that the big cats are extremely secretive and certainly would not be around in big numbers, but you would think that with all the interest that people and the DEC has in mountain lions here that somebody would have come up with some kind of absolute proof over the years. I am no way ready to say that all these reports are lies and imaginations or cases of mistaken identity, but I will have to see better proof than just eye witness accounts. In this day of everyone carrying cameras and cameras strapped to trees all over the place, perhaps it is just a matter of time before real proof comes to light. We'll just have to wait and see and be skeptical. One thing I really don't want is for the attitude of ridicule becoming so commonplace that people will stop reporting what they see or think they have seen.

What I am saying is that the year that a big buck starts repeating itself into any sort of defined pattern that humans can detect, is likely the same year that he gets harvested. I do wish that our deer ran on a rail, following the same trails and feeding habits over and over, but they don't.

I will be satisfied as long as I can still get up our killer-hill. Each year the pace is slower and slower, and the ATV gets to be more and more an item of necessity.......lol. So this year my goal is to get A deer. No need for ego-building and being concerned about with point counts and measurements. I am after a bit of venison to add to my diet, and the strength to bring it home. A modest set of goals indeed, but as each year passes, it takes less and less to satisfy me. I just want to participate one more year and enjoy the excitement of the chase and continue to add to a long list of great hunting memories and experiences.

In this case I use the term "big woods" to indicate that there is no agriculture in the area or anywhere near the area. In other words, the deer pattern and move in mature forest without the aid or motives of crops or pastures or fields.

2" difference in arrow lengths? Is that for two different anchors? Or is one length for field tips and the other for broadheads?

Sometimes ...... lol.

To a large extent, I agree with this, but I do recognize that any thinking person does have preferences and biases as to what feels right to them. I think it is not unusual for people to express those opinions, and on forums those expressions are kind of the point of the existence of forums. For example, I have no love for extreme canned hunts and I really don't like the fact that they are referred to as hunting. I don't even want to have that image pop into anyone's head when I say that I am a hunter. That is a most extreme example but to lesser extents there are many other opinions on various methods and techniques that I have some level of judgments on. Many of those things are legal, but I still have opinions on them. Speaking those opinions are how we conduct discussion. And that is the purpose of forums. Does all that involve "judgment"? Yes it does, and I think the activity of hunting will stay healthy as long as we all continue to apply some level of judgment to all things that are considered to be apart of hunting. Legality is one level of judgment, but does not cover the entirety of our thinking. At one point or another everything was legal. The laws were formed only after expressions of opinions and judgments.

Yes, they have purpose to their movement, but have many of those purposes and choices which can occur to them in different ways at any time and in no particular order. In big woods, those choices become even more numerous by necessity. Actually game cameras can illustrate this nicely as a rather nice buck usually only shows up once at any particular location showing how seldom they repeat activity. Farm country may promote more consistent patterns because of crops and reduced areas of concealment, but a lot of deer activity that I have seen appears to be casual feeding as opportunities avail themselves (a leaf here, a few acorns there). In our area of more expansive unbroken forested area, there is very little that will constrict deer movement down especially if you are talking about bow-range distances.

So where are you people finding all these deer who are slaves to a daily habit. Our deer are extremely random in their movements. They do not always bed in the same areas, and their feeding habits are dependent on what favored foods are in season, and during rut the guys go wherever the does lead them and they don't own calendars or watches. There are also interruptions due to land use changes and non-hunting human invasions that can turn a deer from following a trail that they would have otherwise taken. Perhaps farm deer in heavy agricultural areas develop a more repetitive and predictable pattern of movements depending on what crops are planted where. Maybe because of the patterns of scattered woodlots, they must move in certain ways. But in our area of big woods and constantly changing food sources, the deer are pretty much marching to their own drummer every different day (big, small, young, old). If you can determine even a wide general area where they may be filtering through, you are doing pretty darn good. But where I hunt, luck does play a much bigger role than people want to admit. The only patterns that are somewhat reliable are the escape routes on the day that the orange invasion begins. As long as the hunter entry patterns stay the same, the deer reactions will stay mostly the same.

Ok, then challenge is not one of the motivating feature of hunting for you. I was not stating whether it should be or shouldn't be, just stating that in some cases, we seem to be moving toward a hunting culture that wants to remove challenge a motive. To me, I see hunting as a contest between me and the prey, and I do enjoy a worthy contest. If I was only interested in food, I would have been a farmer. Also, my resources have not dwindled to the point where I must forage for my food........yet. We do quite well at the super market and actually find it cheaper when all things are considered...... lol. I think that if you value your time as being worth anything, and when you look at the cost of equipment and supplies and maintenance, and transportation and special clothing, venison is one very expensive kind of meat. Regarding the question of respect, I think I have as much respect for my prey as anyone, and when looked at as a worthy adversary, perhaps even more respect than many who have an attitude of "whatever it takes to get that walking chunk of venison is ok, fairness be damned". I still maintain the perspective that hunting/fishing is recreation, and whatever handicaps that I voluntarily place on myself only helps to further the principles of "fair chase".

I don't think that I ever said that. Almost all hunts have some element of challenge in them even if it only amounts to marksmanship or simple patience and persistence and willingness to suffer the cold. What I DID say was that those that talk about challenge as being their primary reason for hunting, "walk the walk". But the realities are that almost all participants in hunting today are doing their absolute best to eliminate as much challenge as possible. That is a statement that darn few people can argue these days. The examples are everywhere throughout hunting today. I point to the establishment of bow season way back in the early days of bowhunting. Everyone who participated did so to handicap themselves severely with a weapon that was a real problem to succeed with and the deer take numbers reflected that. That was the whole reason for the creation of that season. Those people were obsessed with challenge. That really was their primary reason for hunting. That attitude is really very different today. No, no one is saying that hunting does not have some challenge built into it, but nothing today makes that challenge look like a primary motive for hunting. Everything that I see today is an attempt at removing challenge. I'm not trying to say that that is good or bad. Just saying that motives for hunting seem to be something other than looking for ways to put the odds in the deer's favor.

This year, our garden will likely have value only as a source of exercise. Yes we will get some produce (I hope), but it is the sickest looking thing we have ever put in. The constant rain drowned nearly all the seed inputs, and the plants seem to be quite stunted by the constantly soaked ground no longer having any give left for root expansion. The surface is kind of a hard-cake crusted quality. We were very late getting anything in because I couldn't get the tiller out there until way late. But we were stubborn and still put stuff in when I could even though it was getting quite late. So, what the heck, we will get what we can off of it and enjoy the fact that I have been able to lose some weight because of the effort. The weight loss will likely be the bigger benefit.....lol.

For most of history, every farm had a dump on their property. Every outhouse had all kinds of things dumped in the pit and eventually buried after they dug a new pit and moved the outhouse a little ways. Some of the property dumps had centuries of house hold trash and were huge. We had one such dump on our old farm that had remnants of old ladies leather high button shoes, and old collectable bottles and insulators along with every kind of thrown away household and farm items that could ever be produced on a 13 room house and farmstead. There was no way that the contents of this huge dump could ever be policed up and transported to the county landfill. The cost would have been too high. And so the eyesore remained there for many more decades exposed to the air and view. Far better if we had called in a dozer or an excavator and buried the whole thing. But we didn't. It was contained in an old gravel pit out of sight and way away from the home-site and out-buildings and any yards. When the farm was sold, the new owner did bulldoze gravel over the mess, and no one worried much about it. It is still up there today covered and likely will not be disturbed ever. I think it is far better to be buried many feet underground than still laying there exposed to every living thing that passes by. My feeling is that Grow basically had two choices which boiled down to leave the pollution there exposed to the above ground environment, or bury it. I can't say that I would have made any different choice.

My comment about eminent domain was in response to the previous reply about the gas transport pipelines that cross both participating and non-participating properties.

The real choice depends on what your motives and goals are in hunting. It is an individual choice that involves a bit of an inward look to determine what you personally want to get out of your hunting. Do you need more or less challenge in your hunting? For you, is there some personal attraction to the experience of using one weapon over the other? What level of dedication do you have to become expert at your weapon of choice? Some people don't give a damn what weapon they use as long as they can harvest some meat. For others, it is all about the weapon. Your choice will have to be your choice and based on your own personal approach to hunting.

In general, I would say that I agree about age vs. challenge. However, I am reminded of all those hunts where it was a little snot of a fawn that blew the whistle on me while the more adult deer simply concentrated on filling their face. And then there are the mature bucks that make absolute asses of themselves during that special time of the year when they are staggering through the woods in search of some "action". If you want to hunt the epitome of wariness and intelligence, go after that old seasoned doe who has spent her entire life not only looking out for herself, but also her annual offspring. And almost always, she doesn't have a single antler point on her head. Sometimes the challenge is simply the quantity of eyes and ears that you are facing rather than any particular gender or antler features. There is only one bona fide super challenge posed by that heavy-horned buck, and that is simply that they are more rare in numbers. That is what truly makes a older buck a trophy. There simply are not as many of them in the woods. and every body and their brother are trying to change that element of challenge. And so for many, "hunting prowess" is based not so much on the smartest, but more on the randomness of numbers. And, it has been shown time and again that such randomness is more a result of being in the right place at the right time, or another way of putting it ....... luck. But this whole idea of earning peer respect via increased challenge is brought into question by the constant movement of hunting away from challenge. Just looking at the most popular changes in hunting indicates that most people work very hard at eliminating challenge. We grow special plots to attract deer. With very, very few exceptions, we seek out weapons that give us special advantages. We would bait if it were legal. We have taken primitive rifles and re-designed them such that they are no more of a challenge than any modern day rifle. We hunt places that are known to have more deer. And on and on. There is no special quest for "challenge". Quite the opposite....we are constantly moving hunting toward removing challenge. So it all still leaves me wondering why antler size is our yardstick of success. To me the guys who bowhunt the deep woods of the Adirondacks with simple primitive equipment are the guys that really take on challenge in a very serious way, and there aren't really very many actually doing that.

Very likely that a lot of properties would fall victim to imminent domain. It's like those damned whirligigs that cover up some huge areas of the NYS landscape. The only ones that benefit are the one's who own the actual land that they are put on. Meanwhile the entire area lives with the desecration of the natural viewscape and whatever additional road damage and noise. Yes, these wonderful brain-farts do benefit a handful of landowners at the expense of everyone around them. I guess if you own the land that these schemes are implemented on, you always have the option of keeping the land to collect the royalties and live somewhere else. But your neighbors get screwed no matter what happens.

So, does fire kill it?

But the video was so great, it was almost worth a couple of batteries.

You read about so many of these TV hunter-heroes bending, breaking and smashing hunting laws in order to keep up demand for their shows every week. The pressure must be tremendous when you have to be successful every week and put on a show to make your living. I imagine that hunting takes on a whole different role. At one time or another we have all fantasized about turning our hunting activities into our source of income. But here is yet another story (of many) that shows the reality of such a career. The other shame of all of this is that it makes us wonder about others in that profession whether they deserve that kind of thought or not. I will say that it makes you wonder what kinds of rules they push around to create that weekly show. Its always a case of spectacular weekly success or you become yesterday's news.

Human behavior is a weird thing to contemplate. This thread has brought out a lot about hunter mentality, motives and expectations. It does seem like we are needing peer recognition, and that it is very important to us. We have even concocted a scoring system so that we know when we have won or when we can declare ourselves masters of the sport. hunting seems to have moved from a competition between the hunter and his prey to a contest between hunter and hunter. Maybe its always been that way. But why we have settled in on antlers as a way to measure hunter prowess, is still a mystery. Heaven forbid if you are a hunter that doesn't hunt deer. I guess those people have to invent their own little ways of measuring their worth ......lol.

One thing to remember when you are trying to build bow muscles. At some point through the draw you do have to pull the entire max draw weight. So exercising using only the let-off weight of you future bow will be short-changing the muscles for when you have a real bow in your hands. There is a repetition that your draw requires that makes the muscles require different force as you go through the force-draw curve. Muscle building requires certain loads at certain positions through the entire draw and that is what you are trying to train your muscles to accept. This "practice bow" would have been designed to be more useful if they had tried to replicate that let-off so that the drawing muscles would get used to that kind of change in force requirements throughout the draw cycle.

So, is that it??? Is Crossbow full inclusion in archery season officially dead for another year?

I am curious as to what you all think is the motive behind "trophy-ism" in deer hunting. Does it have to do with the notion that the deer with the biggest racks represent the hardest challenge in deer hunting? Is there an assumption that large racks equate to increased deer intelligence? Is there some relationship between rack size and the craftiness of the deer? Perhaps it is just the notion that you have heard that better hunters get bigger racks and that rack size is a way of measuring success or hunting prowess. Maybe that relates to needed peer approval. Why do you want to get a big-racked deer? There is no right or wrong answer, I am just curious.

Yup, you are misreading the replies. I have yet to see anyone reply that he deserved to die. I am seeing a consensus that perhaps even traveling to such a country probably is not the smartest thing in the world to do, but that has nothing to do with anyone deserving to die.