wolc123

Happy B-day Tacs. Carp like 1/4 oz chartruse Mr Twisters.

This unfortunate fella must have never "wised up". I bet that he will learn how to kill deer from the ground pretty quick after he recovers. Safety harnesses are not the "end all be all" that many folks seem to think that they are and this event very clearly illustrates that fact. Everybody out to let that sink in for a while before heading out there this fall.

Praying for you here. My mom went thru a similar deal earlier this year and was back up to speed in a couple days.

My wife is hitting the ground venison pretty hard: Tacos last night and spaghetti with meat sauce tonight. We are now down to our last 5 vacuum-sealed packs. October 10 and the opening of Northern zone crossbow season can't get here soon enough, so I can try and replenish our supply.

The side by sides with a dump box on back are very handy.

Most of mine are at 8 to 10 feet and fully covered below the safety/shooting rail. I have never used a safety harness in such a stand, because it would be nearly impossible to fall out, even if I fell asleep in one. I have used a safety harness on higher stands with rails, but seldom hunt from them any more. I find it easier to get the drop on deer from a lower, semi-enclosed stand. Also, the lower shot angles improve the odds of a "double lung" shot, and easy recovery. The older I get , the more comfortable I am hunting closer to the ground and I have taken slightly more than half of my deer, over the last five years, from ground level. As hunters gain experience and wisdom, they often develop the ability to kill deer consistently from the ground or from lower stands. That is very fortunate, because they also loose the ability to recover as easily from a fall, as they get older. Proper use of a safety harnesses is good, but they can increase risk due to overconfidence or improper use. Risk of injury always increases in direct proportion to height whether a safety harness is used or not.

No permit needed but you have to bury them (they don't say how deep). The first one (from a box trap) is now napping a foot under. It was tough digging after the long drought this summer. It looks like a bigger one (likely his momma) busted out of another box trap on the other end of the corn plot, so I moved a dog-proof to that location. It will be interesting to see what tomorrow morning brings. The second day after the traps are set is usually the best. I placed the repaired, and re-baited box trap directly over the grave of the one from last night. Hopefully another will return to look for their lost sibling. They really are hitting the corn hard now. I hope I can stay ahead of them. Super healthy looking and very strong, so the rabies medicine must be working.

I have used several different methods to deal with that problem. Most of my stands are only up about 8 feet (going much higher than that makes me uncomfortable as I get older), and all of them have shooting/safety rails about 3 feet high. I use to wrap old wood snow fence around three sides opposite the tree, below the rail, and then weave leafy branches thru it every fall. It worked a little better than no cover, but I was still busted on occasion while trying to get in position for a shot. Those deer are amazing at being able to pick up on the slightest movement thru the smallest opening. A couple years ago, I replaced the snow fence with old weathered barn siding. That 140 year old American chestnut blends in perfectly with the fall woods. It has been 100 % effective. Every deer that has got within shooting range, other than a couple that I intentionally passed, has ended up in our freezer. All they see from below is my head sticking out above the rail. I can easily rotate on a swivel chair, without getting busted. The best part about it is, that it is totally maintenance-free. There is no need to get up there and weave fresh branches thru every fall. I christened my last two "barnwood" stands last season. Now I do not have any that I have not killed deer out of.

They let us out of work a little early today and I just got my last plot in this afternoon. I went a little lighter on the wheat and heavier on the soybeans, due to seed availability. The ground worked up well and there was just a little moisture left in it. The cultipacker pushed the wheat and soybeans pretty good into the fluffed up soil, so I don't think the resident flock of turkeys will get too much of it. I don't think they will bother with the tiny clover seed that I spread on top of the packed soil, then packed again. I imagine they will start hitting those soybeans hard as soon as they start to sprout. The forecast is calling for rain on Tuesday, so that should get it going. Hopefully, a nice plump little hen will be hitting some on opening day so I can put my fall tag on her. That will keep me occupied as I am waiting for crossbow deer season to open.

The stock Barnett Headhunter 20" bolts and 20 inch "carbon crossbolt" from Walmart perform nearly identical, with 125 grain field points on targets and 125 grain, 3-blade mechanical (o-ring style) broadheads on deer. With my 300 fps Barnett Recruit, I have to aim at a different spot each time at a target, out to 40 yards, or the first bolt gets destroyed by the second one. My crossbow came with 100 grain field tips. I switched to 125's, because I had a good inventory of mechanical and fixed blade broadheads. I have not fired a fixed-blade broadhead with it, but I intend to try 3-blade Muzzy's, Allens, and Wasps this year. I will hunt with the one that flies closest to the field-ponts. I used my last mechanical last season. I will only buy more if I can not get any of the fixed ones to match the field-points out to 40 yards. I was not real happy with the penetration into the deer from longer range, so I will limit myself to that range anyhow. I don't think that the mechanicals provide a significant advantage at shorter ranges, but they do hit right where the field-tips do out to 60 yards. 70 additional fps might make that sniper a little more finicky with bolts and broadheads. What kind of group are you holding with the stock bolts ? Also, the sniper looks considerably more front-heavy than the recruit. Even though my recruit handles ok offhand, I have only fired it at deer from a rest. I hit all three deer that I shot at with my Recruit, and they all expired within 40 yards from where they were when they took the bolts. The shots were taken from ranges of 59, 15, and 20 yards. I like what I hear about that Centerpoint sniper and if full inclusion would have happened this year, I would have bought one. The additional forward weight would not bother me, because all of my stands and blinds have good rests. That extra 70 fps would help out a lot on penetration for longer shots. Had it not struck the heart, the marginal 8" of penetration that I got at 59 yards would likely have resulted in a single lung hit and a long and difficult recovery. Until full inclusion happens, I will just keep what I got and limit my range to closer shots. I don't plan on spending another dime on equipment for that sport until we get all of archery season (unless something breaks).

I don't have a cultipacker over at my folks place, and I usually just run over it multiple times with an atv. Those wide tires push the seed in as good as a cultipacker, it just takes a little longer to get the job done. I have also dragged a railroad tie, chained at both ends , but the atv tire method seems to get more uniform germination. I would consider broadcasting some white clover on that plot, and then going over it again with the tires. When you cut the wheat off in the early summer next year, that clover will take off like crazy, as long as you soil is not to acidic. That is another reason to go light on the fertilizer, it tends to acidify the soil.

I am going to put in about 3/4 of an acre of wheat/soybean/white clover mix this weekend. I will work about 30 pounds of 15-15-15 into the ground, prior to broadcasting the wheat and soybeans. Then I will cultipack, broadcast the clover, then cultipack again, at ninety degrees from the first time. This ground is very rich in organic matter, because the buckwheat on it was almost four feet tall when I bush-hogged it a few days ago. I don't think much fertilizer will be necessary. For seed quantities, I will use about a bushel of wheat, a half bushel of soybeans, and about 5 pounds of clover. I have found wheat to be quite effective, compared to rye grain. The deer seem to like it more, but not quite as much as oats. Wheat is also cheaper and easier to find than rye. Adding the soybeans to the mix gets the deer using the plot quickly. They seem to prefer fresh-sprouted soybeans over just about any other food-source (including oats).

I guess you can find just about anything on 6.5 million acres. Both of my bucks up there were in the park, but just inside the edge on the NW corner. One of my does was a stones throw out of the park, on the same corner and the other was about 5 miles farther off the edge. All were in WMU 6C, but I incorrectly tagged the first buck as 6F due to a little confusion on the dividing line. It sounds like you must spend most of your time down near the center or opposite diagonal (SE) corner of the park. Only my last buck was full of corn, while the prior was full of nuts. I don't remember what was in the doe's stomachs, but the one that I killed further out of the park was leading her group up onto a white-oak ridge when I took her out with my ML. Back on topic, she was narrowly bested by the other doe for the easiest recovery. She fell down a cliff, after taking the double-lunger, expiring right on the gravel road to the off-the-grid cabin that my in-laws use to rent back then. My sister in law still gives me crap about having to jog past the gut pile later that morning. The other one ran right back towards my in-laws new lake-house, after I popped her behind the shoulder about 100 yards away. She expired less than 20 yards from their pole-barn (where that buck is hanging in the earlier photo). There is enough does up there, that it don't make a lot of sense to kill them where packing them out is an issue. As far as packing out bucks goes, I can't imagine any situation, on this side of the Mississippi, where I would want or need to do it now. Maybe in a few years, when I am old and feeble, I would give it some consideration. More likely I would just hunt a little closer to the road, where help and an ATV were readily available. Getting a bear out would be a different matter altogether though. I would ONLY shoot one of those, where I could get an ATV to it, after listening to your horror stories.

Buckmaster : "Time of year has a lot more to do with shooting one 200lbs than diet. Most 200lb adk bucks are shot in October before the rut starts. All of mine have been shot after the 15th of November and my 10 was shot in December the last weekend of rifle." You have found some heavy ones, way off the road, but no doubt that took many hours and passes of loads of lighter ones. I do not agree with you on the weight loss thru the rut up there, at least in the areas where I hunt on the North-West corner of the park. Up there, I see about (6) antlerless deer per every antlered buck, so there is not a lot of competition for the does. The bucks do not have to run themselves ragged while in competition for a hot one. Each of my bucks up there was killed after Thanksgiving, and there were no signs of weight-loss on them. Both had stomachs that were filled to capacity with corn or nuts. You can clearly see, by the weight carried in the hind quarters of the one in my photo, that he was anything but run-down. Where I hunt at home in the southern zone, it is exactly as you say however. Here, the area farmers hammer the does with their nuisance permits, starting in early summer. That leads to significantly more buck sightings than doe sightings, by the time archery season opens. I see about (4) antlered deer per every antlerless here, and have not had much trouble filling my buck tag during archery season. It has been many years since I was able to fill a DMP here during archery season, even though they hand them out like candy (4 per hunter per year). With the bucks, there is intense competition for the surviving does. It is rare to find one without a busted up rack, or much weight left on his rear, by the time gun season rolls around.

I would go along with the "safety net" deal. If you are up there alone and have no one to back you up, then packing them out makes sense on one pushing 200 pounds, more than 5 miles from the road. However, I don't know of many places in the Adirondacks, that far off the road, with enough food to get them that big. Especially in those vast tracts that have not allowed any logging for more than a century. Those that you do find in such areas are more likely to be thin, easily-dragged "bark-eaters". My own experience up there is limited to two bucks and two does that were all taken within 2 miles of a main highway, and all had access to rich agricultural areas near the edge of the park. It would certainly have been a struggle for me to drag the biggest one (photo below) much more than the half mile or so that I needed to out of the swamp. There is no way it would have got that heavy (check out the rump) on a diet of bark however, and it surely would not have tasted as good. I don't know what it weighed, but I weighed about 200 at the time and could lift myself off the ground on the other side end of that rope and still not get that fat rump all the way off the ground. We had to hook up my father-in-laws atv in order to get it up there. There had to be some friction in the pulley, but it must have been closer to 200 than 150. I wish I would have measured the chest girth at least, but that was before g-man provided us with that handy PA chart.

Lots of times they are looking for dope. This must be close to harvest time when it gives off an easily identifiable heat signature.

No, I will not start deer hunting in the southern zone until Nov 3, when fall turkey season ends, deer crossbow season opens, and the rut kicks off. That young hen turkey would need to be shot (with shotgun), sometime between October 20 and November 2. There is a much slimmer chance that I may fill that fall turkey tag on October 12, up in the northern zone, if such a "target of opportunity" presents itself while I am deer hunting with my crossbow. Thank you for questioning this. In checking all the fine print concerning both zones, I see that it would be legal for me to kill a turkey up north, while deer hunting with my crossbow, on October 13 and 14, but not with my muzzleloading rifle. That gives me another reason, besides heavy rain, to carry the crossbow instead of the muzzleloader on those days. Since wild turkey tastes bad to me while deer tastes good, and my ML range is 3X my crossbow range, I think I will stick with the muzzleloader. Muzzleloading shotguns are legal for turkeys however.

Sod: If I caught a young one, late in the season when it was cold out and relatively bug-free, I might toss it in the crock pot with a can of cream of mushroom soup or some BBQ sauce. That makes any thing edible, even Canada goose breasts. Larry: The state regs allow a landowner to trap and kill "damaging" coons without a permit, however the carcasses must be burried or burned. I suppose that the definition of "damaging" may be up to the discretion of the DEC officer. I always wait until I see some knocked-down corn stalks and nearby coon tracks, that makes it easy to prove. If you wait until the season opens, In October, you loose most of your corn. Now days, since the collapse of fur prices, the only sure-fire way to make small corn plots last thru ML season, is to get rid of the coons yourself. The earlier you take them out, the more corn you save. I use to think that the turkeys took out most of the corn, but I have since learned that they only eat it when it has been knocked down first by the coons. The turkey is my friend now, after many years of considering them nothing but "feathered rats". I never had much luck calling in the spring. I picked up tags, and am looking forward to bush-wacking a young hen out of my deer blind this fall with the shotgun, when they come out to feed on clover. I have been watching a flock and the poults are now nearly as big as their mother. Soon, I will be able to tell the jakes apart from the young hens. A buddy gave me the breast from an old spring tom one time and I would not want to eat that again (dry and tough), but a young fall hen might make another crock-pot treat worth a try . Years ago, area fur-trappers and hunters kept coon populations in check. Coyotes have also done a good job of keeping their numbers down, but I now have excellent trappers on each side (one is actually the town wildlife/pet control officer so he takes them year-round). They make short work of any yote that wanders into our neighborhood. Rabies can also wipe out coons in vast number, but the DEC has put the kabosh on that one in Erie county (at the urging of local pet-owners), with aerial drops of rabies medicine.

We just got a little here on the other side of the creek. I bush-hogged the last of my buckwheat yesterday afternoon and got two passes with the disk on it today before the rain came down too hard. I will work a little fertilizer into that ground over the up-coming long weekend and seed it with a wheat/soybean/white-clover mix. While I was back there this afternoon, I noted that the coons are starting to hit my field-corn pretty hard. It looks like they downed a bushel or two on the back one-acre plot last night. Starting Friday night, I will counterattack the masked-bandits, with (4) box traps, baited with peanut-butter coated marshmellows and two dog-proofs, baited with cat-food. That combination usually sets them back in short order. I only like to trap "damaging coons" when I don't have to go to work the next morning. It is a pain to check those traps in the dark, and I don't like to leave them suffer in the cages all day when I am at work. I carry a shovel and my .22, when checking the traps prior to opening of regular trapping season, because the NY state DEC requires that the carcasses be "burried or burned" immediately. The hides are nearly worthless, so after the season opens in October, I just toss them out in the field to feed the buzzards.

I might try to get out for grey squirrels, sometime in September. We have been hitting the venison and fish pretty hard lately, and a few squirrels would be nice to change things up a little on the dinner table. I put the scope on "my daughter's" new pellet rifle a couple days ago, and that thing is a real tack-driver. With the target at 25 yards, it would almost put the pellets thru the same holes, after I dialed in the scope. I was afraid it would be all over the place with the scope, because it mounts to the receiver, but the barrel must be cocked on a hinge to charge the air-cylinder. I never even sighted it in with the open sights, which attach directly to the barrel. I can't wait to try it on some bushy-tails. It would probably be easier to take a few from the same place, with the relatively quiet pellet gun, compared to the significantly louder .22 rimfire, or the much louder .410 shotgun, that I usually use for squirrels when the leaves are still on the trees. I was going to try my crossbow for early squirrels for the same reason, but those pellets are a lot cheaper than the bolts and the noise is about the same.

The biggest reason I would not cut one up and pack one out of the Adirondacks these days, is because of the tics. Maybe they will back off, if we start getting some cold winters again, but they are really running rampant up there after the last three "non-winters", where there has been hardly enough cold to make good ice on the lakes. I picked over a hundred tics off the last buck I brought home from there, and processed myself. That, coupled with some very reasonably-priced processing up there, was enough to convince me not to try that again. My contact with deer carcasses will be minimized, even if my clothes are treated with permathin. From now on it will be: get the guts out of them ASAP (Thanks Chef for the butt-out suggestion, that has been a great time-saver), attach a long rope, drag them to the nearest ATV-access point, toss them in the back of the pickup, and drive them to the processor (Nolt's in Lowville is great). Most of my handling will involve putting them neat packages they make for you in the cooler and the freezer when I get home. Cutting up a deer in the woods and carrying the parts out on a pack strapped to your back almost seems like begging for Lyme disease.

I remember lots of good times at the Transit drive in. The first movie I saw there, with mom and dad and brother and sisters, was Butch Cassidy. My first date with the wife also happened there (some German U-boat movie). I forgot the number but my attention was not on the screen that night. We usually hit it a few times each summer with the kids. It is cheaper than taking them to the theater, and a cooler with some beers is always nice, especially on the animated films which I don't particularly care for. The concession stand food (money maker) is not too bad. The best part is usually watching the cavalcade of local characters goofing around on the put-put golf course and rides before the movie starts, or watching the workers (or the owner on his Segway) arguing with customers about how their vehicles are parked.

For personal protection, from man or beast, my weapon of choice would be a pre-1990's, Remington, 12 gauge, model 870, pump-action shotgun, with short smoothbore deer barrel and open sights. It would be loaded with 2-3/4", Winchester, foster-type, rifled slugs. I have always been able to place those within a couple of inches of my point of aim, at ranges up to 75 yards, with that weapon. I would prefer the Remington 870, over a model 37 Ithaca pump, because I can look right into the open chamber from the side and see if it is loaded. That would be pure guess-work with the bottom-opening Ithaca. There is something about the sound of the action closing on a pump shotgun, that sends shivers down the spine of anyone on the muzzle end. When it comes to short-range stopping power, there is no pistol cartridge remotely in the ballpark, when compared to a 12 gauge slug. That said, I have never been in a situation where I needed or wanted a gun for personal protection. I usually do sleep with a Ruger 10/22 or a Marlin 336 30/30 and ammo within reach, in case a non-human target of opportunity shows up outside my bedroom window. That has included lots of crows and woodchucks, along with the occasional coon, coyote, or fox.

That has been one of my favorite meals for a long time. My mom makes them like that, all rolled up neatly with ground beef. My wife, who lacks the patience for that, makes them even better: lazy-style with ground venison. The lazy-style ones are a lot easier and faster to make, and also easier and faster to eat. "Lazy-style" is with the same ingredients, just all mixed up in the pan rather than rolled up. For those of us not too hung up on "presentation", lazy-style is the way to go. She made a good dinner tonight: back-strap sliced up thin and cooked medium rare, with sides of acorn squash, garlic mashed potatoes, and fresh silver-queen sweet corn.

My gut said the end of September, but I also was not sure (thanks for straightening us out RobH&F). For that reason, I picked up (5) deer tags at Walmart last night: Reg season buck, bow/ML either/or, bow/ML antlerless, and (2) 9F DMP's. That cost me $ 72, including turkey tags. I will get a couple more 9F DMP's on Nov 1. That also looks like about the date that our current supply of venison will be exhausted. I hope I can fill one of those bow/ML tags up in the northern zone, with my crossbow or ML. before then. We will have plenty of meat for a year, if I end up with (4) average size deer from those (7) tags. I only filled two last year, but one was a 2X, and I had a left-over vacuum sealed from the year prior, giving us just enough to last until Nov 1 or so.