jimbodwb

The good ole days for me are not actually that long ago. This is my 20th season. I do remember getting to the parking area and meeting my uncles and cousins. Everyone talking and cracking jokes. Figuring out where everyone is planning to be. All of us walking in to together and one by one we would all turn off the trail to our spots. I think of hunting as a group or family event. I never go hunting alone. It just would not seem right to me. That is the closest thing I have to hunting camp because we never had our own land with a camp. Most of my uncles do not hunt anymore and I moved 100+miles away. My dad is on his way to my house right now though and we will be hunting with my buddy on his dads farm in Ilion, Herkimer county. There will be about 10 of us and I hope it reminds me of those good ole days! Good luck tomorrow everyone.

I agree. I just realized I forgot to put what I would do in my original post. I would shoot it and wait for someone to come claim it. If ,after a reasonable amount of time, no one showed up I would tag it as mine.

I also think you did the right thing and you did what I would have done. Now lets put a spin on it. What would you all do if you came across a wounded deer like that BUT you had not spoken to someone about it first. You were just walking along and poof there it is. Do you shoot it and claim it as your own even though it was a wounded weakend deer?

When I hunt my buddies farm in Souther Zone I will pass on smaller deer because I have seen what is on this property. I have yet to take a deer in the Northern zone though so up north I will take whatever is legal. Once I get one from up there I will be more selective in the future.

Maybe knowing you took it with a bow subconsciously makes it taste better.

I would have given him one more year...next year he would have been really big.

Awesome buck. Great Job!

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/11/05/michael-bloomberg-nra-wins_n_779468.html

I would in a heartbeat. Nice mature deer with a cool rack.

I have hunted Pittstown state forest in 4L for 20 years now. A few years ago I started hunting Tibbets also. I live in CNY now so I don't get down there too often but if I still have a tag on Thanksgiving I will go for a morning hunt. My folks still live in the area and I am going home for Moms Thanksgiving feast! Next year I am gonna start bowhunting and my buddy has a spot in Albany county so I will be down there a lot.

I hunted Lake Desolation state forest this weekend and didn't see anything. I used to have a lease right where they found that body last year. Actually, the body might have been on the property or just off it cause the pics looked like my old access road. Kinda creepy knowing now that there was a body there. Not too many hunters up there this weekend though. I saw maybe 5 trucks parked at different spots. I love the land there though. It is big woods!

I hunt with my dad all season starting up north. During southern gun season I hunt on a friends dads farm with him, his dad and my dad. That is where I took my first and only deer to date...till this years southern gun opener.

It happened to me Saturday night. In order for me to view the site I have to disable the setting "block reported attack sites" in Firefox under security. I just enabled the setting and Firefox would not let me on the site. Disabled it again and here I am. Someone must have reported the site as an attack site. I hope it gets fixed soon. It is a pain disabling and enabling the setting when I want to come here.

Way better than my first deer. I set the bar pretty low so I could beat it easier though. Good job and great deer!

Reading his first line and then the last line I think the first line was sarcasm. It gets your attention and makes you want to read the story especially after seeing the pic. It is good creative writing. Oh yeah, great deer and I hope it was the same one from last year.

I agree with the original poster. He did what he thought was the right thing to do . He came across a difficult situation and made a decision. His decision was correct because there is no such thing as a wrong decision. Unless you can see the outcome of a situation from both sides of a decision then there is no way of knowing if the decision you made is incorrect. Therefore there is no such thing as a wrong decision. He chose not to take a wounded animal because there is no law that says he needs to. That animal was a victim of nature and nothing else. She would have continued to suffer if he never saw her and eventually die. There are plenty of animals that will feed on her even if there are no coyotes around. Once again that is nature and he just let nature take its course. Steve mentioned that if it were gun season and you had no DMP what would you do. It would be illegal to shoot the deer and leave it there. So why just because you have an either/or tag in bow season should you. This is such a tough call but given the same situation I would have let her walk and let nature handle it just like Predate did. It is not our job to play God in this situation.

Just make the parking spots like the oil change places with a big hole dug out and a mesh platform. Shoot the deer and let the blood flow down to a barrel. But what if they don't measure up? Then you gotta bring em' back to the woods.

Maybe we should all just be required to carry a tranquilizer gun with us. We could knock em' out first, measure them and see if they a 16-18" spread deer first, and then shoot them.

Up until 2009 I leased a 155 acre parcel of land at Lake Desolation in Saratoga county. Finch Pruyn sold the land to the Nature Concervancy and my lease ended. The land became public so we hunted there opening weekend last year. My dad calls me then next evening to tell me that on Monday a hunter found the remains of a body on the land. It turns out the body had been there since 2006. I had a spot I liked to stand at in the area the body was found and I never saw it. It is kinda creepy to me. I will hunt this land this year again but I will stay away from that spot.

Are you talking about the chip plant in Malta? Because my friend works for the construction company doing the project and they are from NY. As far as I know, all the workers live in NY also. That is a great project and it will create thousands of jobs for many years to come. I would say that doing whatever it takes to get that plant in NY was one of the best things NY has done in many years. The tax revenues from that plant will pay back that 1.2 billion in no time.

Hey Doc, so you are saying the 12 years of destruction caused by George Pataki was actually the work of extreme liberals? And the same goes for the 8 years of lets spend as much money as we can, give huge tax breaks to the wealthiest people, and deregulate wall st so much that it will implode on itself done by the Bush administration. I am not a Democrat but history shows that when a Democrat is in office the economy is much better than when a Republican is in office. It takes more than 2 years to fix 8 years of chaos. Ask Bill Clinton. It took him 4-5 years to fix the mess left by Reagan and Bush. Mr VJP, do you or does anyone you know collect social security? Do you keep money in a bank that is insured by the FDIC? Do you buy and drink milk? If you answered yes to any of these then you are also part of the so called national socialist agenda. Anything that is subsidized by the government is socialist. Medicaid and medicare and child health pus and family health plus are all socialist ideals. Do you drive on the thruway? It is owned by NY State so it is a socialist highway. I am so sick of hearing the Socialist argument. Capitalism is just a lighter form of socialism. The only difference is that in capitalism, businesses are free to make as much money as they can without regard to who they stomp on to do it. Just remember people, if there were no subsidies (AKA Socialism) then no one would be able to afford agricultural products. I am not in favor of pure socialism at all but what people are calling a socialist agenda from the Dems is no different then what Rep's have been doing forever. Like I said originally, I wish we had a third viable candidate who was somewhere in the middle that would be a better fit then Far Right Palladino and Left Cuomo.

I got laid off in Feb 09 and haven't worked since. I went back to school in summer 09 and I will graduate with a Computer Information Systems degree in December. 2 more months and then I will see what the job market is like but from what I hear I am screwed. Hopefully I won't have to take a sales or retail job cause that is what I am trying to get out of.

Yeah, I know but what would a political forum be if everyone had the same views? I have been told I do not have the typical hunters political views but I look out for my family and my well being first. I always vote based on economic policy first and then the other issues. Unfortunately lately, the Dems have had the better economic policy's. I really just don't like either party and this "lets do away with all government and have total anarchy Tea Party crap" is at the bottom of my list.

I told my wife that if Palladino gets elected we are moving out of NY. NY is already crippled with issues and I don't think electing a raving lunatic who will accomplish nothing in office would help. This guy has no clue about reality. If he gets elected, NY will fall into an economic hole that will take 50 years to dig out of. So yeah, go ahead and vote for Palladino if your income is more than a million a year cause his policy's are good for you but if you make less than that then be prepared to fall into further poverty. I am not saying that Cuomo is the right choice but he could not be as detrimental as Palladino. At least his economic policy is good for the middle class. I sure wish we had another viable choice.

These are gone. Thanks.