Pygmy

The .410 shoots a 95 grain slug at 1700- 1800 FPS muzzle velocity. The .243 shoots a 100 grain bullet at 2800-2900 FPS muzzle velocity. No contest. Some folks consider the .243 marginal/minimum for deer sized game. As far as the .410 being illegal, it is true that there are some LEGAL calibers that are less powerful, such as many pistol and revolver calibers. Perhaps it should be legal. However it IS legal in many states and you don't see a whole bunch of people going out and buying a .410 to hunt deer with. There are far too many better choices. The point I am trying to make is that , although the .410 will kill deer at fairly short range with good shot placement, there are many , many chamberings that are more suitable for the task, including 20 and 12 gauge shotguns.

Probably they are as accurate as 12 or 20 gauge slugs, all other things equal. However, there are no rifled .410 bore shotguns made, so , like any other smoothbore, accuracy would depend on the individual gun... MOST .410s ( nearly all) that I have handled are full choke due to thier limited shot loads, and full choke guns do not tend to be as accurate with slugs as more open choked guns.

A .410 slug is underpowered for big game.. Sure, it will kill a deer at close range with perfect shot placement, but so will a .22 rimfire, and that hardly makes the .22 a good deer round.

I do believe that the law states that it is illegal to have a loaded long gun IN or ON a motor vehicle. This includes leaning over the hood or in the bed of a truck. Don't matter if the vehicle is on the road or in the middle of the back 40. I do know people who were hunting ( in the Adirondacks) and came back to camp for lunch. A couple of guys leaned thier rifles against a vehicle...Officer Ferndip came along and issued them tickets for having a loaded long gun ON a motor vehicle. I'm not passing judgement, just saying what the law is, as I understand it. Have I done it ? Heck no, I've never done ANYTHING illegal , except for the time I pulled the " Do Not Remove Under Penalty of Law" tag from a mattress, and I feel terribly guilty for doing that. It may have scarred me for life. << Pygmy hangs his head in shame>>.... I think it's time for my NAP...

That doesn't mean they aren't present...Greys tend to hang in thick, brushy cover and don't frequent open areas nearly as much as reds, so you don't see them as often as reds. They are also more nocturnal and are seldom seen out and about in daylight. Years ago I used to hunt foxes at night. One night my partner and I called in 18 grey foxes . All that said, it is definitely not a grey fox track, nor any other type of canine.

Definitely not canine or feline... Definitely not skunk or rabbit or possum ..... Not knowing the SIZE of the prints makes it tougher....Squirrel...maybe, but I don't think so....Doesn't look like any coon track I've ever seen.. Could be fisher... Mink tracks and fisher tracks are similar, except fisher is a lot bigger...Wish we had a size comparison.

Yeah, Joe...I retired from Corning Inc. formerly Corning Glass Works....As did at least one other member who posts on the forum.. To answer the OPs question, there is excellent deer and turkey hunting in the area,including public land that gets surprisingly little pressure after the first few days of season. As for upland birds, there are pockets of good grouse hunting`, but you have to seek them out...Much of the land that was excellent grouse hunting 40 years ago is now mature second growth forest..You need to look for the thick stuff. Pheasant hunting is pretty much a thing of the past, except for a few released birds in a few limited areas.. Squirrel hunting is superb..Rabbit hunting is good if you seek out the real dense cover areas...Bunnies love multiflora rose, although it is a challenge to hunt them there. Plenty of predators, both foxes and coyotes...

I had forgot how much fun we had on that thread... I spent about 45 minutes today re-reading it..... Glad to get RID of that nimrod, however....

I live in southern Steuben County, not far from the PA border. We have fox squirrels along the river bottoms , at least here in the Chemung/Tioga basin. They are not plentiful, but not rare..I have shot one and have seen some nice specimens roadkilled, always along the river bottoms. Al Strouse, of Strouse taxidermy, has a huge one mounted that he shot along the Tioga River near Lindley while we was duck hunting. I have only seen them here in the higher elevations in one area. A place where I hunted spring gobblers last year, a hilltop oak grove near the PA border, had a colony of fox squirrels. I saw at least a half dozen there in a couple of mornings while I was gobbler hunting.

There were some GREAT commercials this year... I was watching the game all by my lonesome and I laughed out loud at several of them. They made up for the last couple of years, when the commercials were mediocre at best. Heckuva GAME, too !

I had a skunk frequenting my backyard last summer.. Never saw the varmint, but he left his calling card, which I smelled on several occasions. I set the Havahart and tried to trap/ transfer him to no avail, and eventually he moved on.. I don't want to set a conibear or foothold for fear of catching the neighbor's cat, PLUS the fact that if I got him in a convential trap, he'd most likely UNLOAD.... This morning I went out behind my utility shed to put out some table scraps for my pet crows. And there was a fresh skunk track going in and out under my shed... He's back.. No big surprise, since skunks mate in February... I guess he's not doing any harm...He's only a skunk...Could be worse..I could have a DEMOCRAT living in my back yard.

ADK...Not to highjack your thread, but that picture reminds me of a story.. I vacationed several years back in the 60s and 70s on a lake In Ontario, just south of Algonguin Prov. park. The lake had a population of people of Scandanavion descent, mostly Finns...They ALL had saunas on thier docks and used them year round..In the summer they would get all steamed up and run off the dock and jump in the lake..In the winter they would break ice so they could do the same thing, and after the ice got too thick to break, they'd just run out of the sauna and jump in a snowbank. The owner of the cottage that I stayed in told me that soon after he bought property on the lake, he became friends with some of his Finnish neighbors, and hence was invited to come down and sit in the sauna with them, which was considered somewhat of an honor..He had never been in one, but he accepted the invite rather than risk offending his new friends.. He was a rough and tumble, somewhat salty resident Canadian.. His story went something like this.. " I got to the sauna, and the whole bunch of them crowded in there like ducks, men women and children, naked as jaybirds... Some of the women were good lookers.... I was a young man then, and I found out that keeping my composure was pretty difficult with a bunch of them SNAPPIN things lookin' at me"...

Very cool, my friend...Go shoot those shells, enjoy them, and think about your Dad.. Save a few just for memories, though...Old ammo on a shelf makes a nice display... The boxes are nice, too...

Loaded ammo and bulk smokeless powder is most certainly flammable, but it is not an explosion threat... Back in '94 I had a house fire, and when the firemen asked me if I had any explosives, I told them that I had 5 or 6 thousand rounds of loaded ammo, 10 or 12 pounds of smokeless powder, a couple thousand primers and three or four one pound cans of black powder.. They were not at all concerned about the loaded ammo or the smokeless powder, but the BP had them a little worried. As it worked out, they stopped the fire before it got to my gun room. Fortunately, I no longer keep any ammo in my home, other than one speed loader for my S&W .357 mag, which I store in a lock box right behind the security safe where I keep the key to my trigger lock for the revolver, so it is no longer an issue.

Geeze, you guys make me feel old...hehehe.. I have SOCKS older than those shells..Hehehehe.. It really depends on how the ammo was stored, but unless they were exposed to REALLY extreme conditions of heat, cold, dampness. etc. any plastic shot shells should be fine..There is no safety issue.... Go ahead and shoot them... The worst you might get is a misfire..They are not going to blow up in your face. Paper shells are somewhat less weatherproof, but if they have been stored in fairly dry temperate conditions they hold up pretty well too.. I love paper shotshells ( they remind me of my youth) and have shot quite a few over the years, some dating back into the 1920s... I have had a few duds, but most them went BANG just like modern shells, and lo and behold, they still KILL stuff just like modern shells.. Shoot 'em and enjoy 'em... I can remember when Remington introduced the first plastic shotshells in the early 1960s..In fact, I have an accumulation ( rather than a collection) of vintage ammo, and I have a few of Remington's first plastic shells...One piece plastic wads had not been developed yet...They are in a fairly transparent green plastic casing and you can see the shot, the fiber wad and the powder.. It was pretty cool stuff back in those days..

We only got about an inch of light fluffy stuff here in the Southern Tier.... Smow showers are still coming through, though. Roads are a little greasy...Just drove past a wreck on my way home from Corning.. looked like someone was going a little too fast for conditions and slid off the road...

Oh YAH, Ole'....Dat's COLD ya know.....

Easy there, Pilgrim..... Sorry I ruffled your feathers... I never said that more powerful ammo hasn't been made since 1969... However, "modern" metallurgy and heat treatments date back to well before the .357 was developed in the 1930s. Geeze..You called me a jerk TWICE in the same paragraph... I've been called worse in fewer words.. "Little Pig"...hehehehe...Maybe I can get my girlfriend to call me that...hehehehe.. Thanks..I guess I haven't lost my touch...<<grin>>...

SWEEEEET !! Nice revolver, Ants.... You done GOOOD ! No problem with ammo.. Any .357 that was ever made is old enough for modern ammo NOT to be an issue, especially one with modern ( post 1900) steel and a full .38 to .44 frame like the one you just bought.. The chambering wasn't even developed until the 1930s... Perhaps Early isn't as old as I thought he was.. Or perhaps he doesn't know enough about " modern" arms as he thinks he does...

PWGUNNY has a valid point... But I can't help myself.. I LOVE IT !!!...hehehehehe...

The unseasonably warm weather last winter screwed some stuff up..Most of us had NO APPLES this year because of it.. I wish that dam Al Gore hadn't invented global warming...

Yeah Culver..I remember some REAL winters.... That was back when men were men and so were the women....<<grin>>....

I suppose that the silly SOB thought that we were just going to bend over, grab our ankles and TAKE it... He's pretty much had his way since he became Gov....That may be about to change...

I've seen thousands of them on Seneca and Cayuga Lakes....

10-4 on the Google..That's why we have the technology.. As for my current dress, it's pretty boring now that the weather has moderated.. Now if you had asked me a few DAYS ago when it was zero degrees outside, you might have caught me wearing my mink lined THONG and my double knitted frog skin pedal pushers... Yeah, I know...They have to Google "pedal pushers" too....hehehe...