wolc123

Happy birthday wooly.

I printed a copy of that table so that I will always have it. The heavier end was cut-off on the one G-man posted here so I looked up the original on-line, just in case a real big one shows up next year.

The kids got all kinds of stuff, mostly electronics. Hopefully, our oldest daughter won't shoot her eye out with her new pellet rifle. My folks gave me a Flextone buck collector plus grunt call. It is supposed to do buck grunts, doe bleats, fawn bleets, and snort-wheezes. My sister set me up with a Life-straw. With that, I should be able to venture a little deeper into the bush on hunts up in the Adirondacks, without having to worry about staying hydrated. My wife set me up with a couple big bags of hand-warmers and enough books to last a few years. She seems happy with the freezer almost full of venison and fish that I set her up with this year, and the lunch that I bought her at a Greek cafe last Friday. I still owe her dinner and a movie.

I do like lamb. I have never tried goat, but I bet it would be pretty tasty, probably similar to venison.

Thats funny right there. I just got back inside from about 1/2 hour of that. The high winds and snow are really closing in the end of the driveway fast. Hopefully our front wheel drive mini van will get us back and forth to my folks place this evening for the birthday/Christmas party. This will be the first winter in many that we have been without a 4wd truck. I left mine up at the inlaws in the Adirondacks for my father in law to plow with.

Thanks folks. It is really nice not to have ever had to go to school or work on our birthday. The Big Guy has always taken real good care of me. I hope you all have a wonderful Christmas and a great new year.

Here is a simple plan for you that might achieve your goal: Get in your car and take a slow drive around the neighborhood in the daytime, after the snow lets up, and the wind dies down. Look for deer tracks crossing the road. Mark the locations on a map (street address etc). Do this on ever increasing circular routes, near where you live. Find one of those on-line apps that provides the tax maps for the area, or get one from the town hall and get the property owner's names and addresses. Clean yourself up, get a haircut, shave, use some deoderant, brush your teeth, use a breath mint, put on some clean clothes, and go visit these folks. Start with the closest and/or those where there was the most tracks. Introduce yourself and ask nicely for permission to hunt. Offer to do some work for them, maybe starting with shoveling their driveway, etc this winter. Picking up some food or meds at the store or carrying in some firewood for some elderly retired folks would earn you some points. Offer to share some meat with them. Some might turn you away, but don't let that stop you from trying again. Use "inside tracks", ie relative, friend of a friend, etc. to up your odds of success. If and when any of them give you the land access you seek, always try and do more for them than they have done for you. Do your best to leave the land in better condition than you found it when you leave. You will never loose if you can do that, and you will gain a reputation that might give you even more access to their family's and friends land. Also, let them know before bringing others along to hunt with you. Good luck with it and merry Christmas.

Which is why I have never and would never shoot one there. Bad hits happen though, especially to those who don't know who runs the show (hint - what day is today ?).

There are not many states that have more public land open to hunting than NY. At the same time, there are not many that have more hunters, so I suppose much of that cancels out. If you are single, and want more access to private land, all you got to do is marry the right girl. Ask Belo how that works. I know I would have no access to great hunting in the Northern Zone, had not the Good Lord set me up with my perfect match. Without her and her folks, my kills would have been about half of what they have been over the last 5 years.

You are very lucky to be in a zone where rifles are legal. I am thankful that my in-laws built their retirement home up in the Northern zone, where rifles have been legal for as long as I can remember. That has given me the opportunity to fill my buck tag with my rifle every other year for the last (5) seasons. 200 yards would really be pushing it, hunting at home with my rifled shotgun, but is a "chip-shot" up there with my rifle. 30/06 ammo costs me less than half of what sabot shotgun slugs cost. The rifle also seems to do a cleaner, more efficient job of killing the deer. Those that I have killed up there with it have died right where they were hit, never requiring any tracking, while more than half of those killed at home with my shotguns have required at least a little tracking. The one advantage a shotgun, especially a smoothbore with foster slugs, provides is better brush-busting ability at short range. I missed my first shot, up in the NZ on my first buck with my 30/06 and I am 90 % sure that was due to the bullet striking a branch and disintegrating. Fortunately, a followup shot made it thru to put him down in his tracks. Any shotgun, rifled or smoothbore, would have been completely useless on those 300 yard shots. This is also the reason why more and more areas are being opened up to rifles. At short range, a shotgun slug is more likely to get thru the brush to a deer, but also more likely to get thru to another hunter. That makes the rifle less likely to be involved in a hunting accident than a shotgun.

I can grow it legally cheaper than I can buy it and throw it illegally, as long as I keep the coons under control, which is fun.

When I make venison burgers, they are almost 100 % pure venison. I do mix in a raw egg before forming it into patty's. That helps keep it from falling apart on the grill. I also form the patties and keep them in the fridge a while before grilling, which also seems to help hold them together. The most important thing is to not cook them past medium-rare. The burgers are always pretty good, but most our grind always goes into tacos, spaghetti/lazagna/goulash meat sauce, stuffed cabbage or peppers, and chili. Not only is it much better for you than beef in those dishes, but it also tastes as good or better. My wife and girls are somewhat spoiled by it. Just the site of the grease rolling off ground beef in a frying pan at grandma's house makes them sick, and they almost push me out into the woods until our freezer is adequately stocked with "healther" alternatives.

ST2006 hit it pretty good. The majority of deer I have killed have been with an Ithaca 37 16 gauge with a smoothbore deerslayer barrel and a Weaver 1.5x scope. That combination has killed every deer that I shot at with it (not always pretty), but it is very important to stay within it's limitations. I would call that 100 yards, where the groups consistently open up to about a foot on the range. It is extremely effective inside of 75 yards. I picked up a bunch of ammo for it many years ago at $1.00 a box, so the cost of ammo is by far it's biggest advantage. These days, I mostly use it when only shots under 75 yards are expected, which is not very often. I carried it once last season. I missed a nice buck with it the first year I used it, and it had open sites on it, but none since adding the scope and having the trigger reworked by a gunsmith. I pushed the range a bit one time on my largest buck, a few years later, hitting him low in the front shoulder. The only reason I was able to run down and kill that big buck, with a followup shot to the neck, was that he had a rear hoof shot off a week or so prior. Being young and fast at the time, I was able to catch up to him on two good legs. I was extremely fortunate, because a deer on three legs looses little if any speed, and I never would have caught him. I learned a cheap lesson there: not to shoot at a deer beyond 100 yards with it (he was about 120 on my first shot). About 6 years ago, I killed my second largest antlered buck with it, and that was the last time I fired it at a deer. I am certain it would have killed me a buck during gun season this year, on it's one and only carry, but the darn thing would not take another step or two to get off posted property. That would have been a 40 yard broadside "chip-shot", thru a little goldenrod and light brush, the perfect situation for a slow, heavy foster-type slug. I would recommend keeping that smoothbore, and getting a second gun for long-range hunting. Besides much cheaper ammo, another advantage to the slower foster slugs is penetrating thru light brush. They deflect less than the more expensive, lighter, faster sabots, that are used in the rifled barrels. The gun I usually carry in shotgun-only zones these days is a fully rifled, 12 gauge, Marlin Slugmaster, with a 3X Bushnell banner scope. That combination has also killed every deer I have shot it at, most often on the first shot. My farthest kill with it was 163 yards. I think 175 yards would be very doable with it. Maybe even 200, where it holds a 7" group with Hornady SST's, from a bench on the range. I spent a little extra time and ammo on it there this year, after a high spine hit with it last season (required a second finishing shot), and it paid off with a well-hit doe this gun season. My biggest issue with that gun is: while it has smoked more does and button bucks than I can keep track of, for some reason antlered bucks don't seem to show up when I carry it. That is the main reason I still hunt a few times a season with the old Ithaca.

Coyotes, crows, and coons are the only things that I kill and do not eat. Taking a few of them out may help add a bit more venison to the freezer indirectly. Any fawn or rutted out buck that is consumed by coyotes will not end up in my freezer, and taking out the coons makes my corn last a lot longer, allowing it to pull in more deer and keep them around longer. The dead crows may help attract coyotes, but the target practice they provide definitely helps make sure I can hit those coyotes when they come to the same bait pile.

I just added a crow to the carcass pile that is about a hundred yards behind my bedroom window. There were a few of them on the butchered remains and hide of a doe that I put out there over a week ago. Those crows work well to check the zero on my .22 rimfire. I held about 1" over its back with a Rem yellow jacket. I had sighted my Ruger 10/22 dead on at 50 yards with those. There was a very light wind today, which helped with that shot. The last time I shot at one, I missed on a windier day. There is not much left of the doe carcass, so I am on the lookout for a nearby roadkill now. I usually just throw the road kills and butchered deer carcasses on a pile, along with raccoons. It is going to be tough to get a coyote, because there have not been a lot of tracks around this season and I have neighbors on each side who are very good trappers. An odd thing about coyote carcasses, is that the crows don't seem to eat them. Hopefully the coyotes will eat some fresh crow tonight. The .22LR yellow jacket does a nice job on coyotes at 100-120 yards, if you hit them broadside behind the shoulders. The best thing about it is that it does not wake the kids or neighbors up. If a coyote shows up in the daylight, I am going to try my new Marlin 336BL 30/30. I was not able to get a shot at a deer with it on the one hunt when I carried it this season. I like the idea of a garage-door opener alarm on the bait pile, like WNYBH mentioned. My wife is a light sleeper and my alarm has consisted of her elbowing me in the ribs when she hears them yipping over the bait. They seem to be wising up and keeping silent the last few years however, so the alarm might be worth a try.

The rigor takes 24 hours, but it is a few more days for the mortis

It certainly is entertaining and a lot more fun than squirrel hunting out in the cold.

Here is a little Christmas present for you 4SW

It actually depends on the age of the deer and the hanging temperature. You are just about right on for a 1 year old deer at 40 degrees F. I usually try and kill older deer, at least for the first half of the seasons. It never hurts to let them go a little longer though, as long as the temperature is controlled.

Besides the biblical issue, another problem I see with scales, is that most of the weight of a fresh killed deer is made up of water. It would be interesting to see how much weight they loose when hanging over a week to ten days. That is how long it typically takes for the rigor mortis to break down, and for the venison to be ready for me to process. The chest girth method may give a more accurate volume measurement and may better predict the amount of packaged venison that will result, ready for the freezer. Even if your scale has accuracy that is traceable to NIST, and you have it recalibrated each year, it still might not give you as good of estimate of how much venison you will end up with than a cheap tape measure. I do see value in those chest girth tables, because they provide an easy way to get a rough estimate of how much venison is needed to finish out a season. That has a definite value in helping me decide when, where, and if to hunt. It is particularly nice to know that when there are a deer or two hanging in the garage.

That is the doe, but that blood spot on the rear is not a bullet wound. You are not the first one to think that. If you zoom in on the spot, you can see that the red is in the shape of a "c", and not a round hole. The Hornady sst passed thru the front of both shoulder blades making a mess out of her front end. She actually had less than the normal amount of fat to trim from the rear, leading me to believe that we may be in for another mild winter, despite predictions to the contrary in the Farmer's almanac. Also, you give me too much credit, I am not that good of a hunter. Only two harvests for me this year. Fortunately, last year the good Lord blessed me with (4) of my own, plus a couple gifts from friends. We went into this season with a good surplus in the freezer. He provided just enough to get us thru to next year this season. I did not even see a deer, hunting a lot over 4 days of the late ML season. I have never killed a single deer on my own. All of the credit for all of them goes to the Guy who shares my birthday in a couple more days. Merry Christmas to you and thank you for drawing more attention to these facts. As for me, I will stick with my tape measure, because "The Lord detests dishonest scales".

My time can be up to two times better spent processing arrow-killed bucks compared to gun-killed does, when it comes to product produced. My crossbow buck this year yielded close to the amount predicted by the PA "chest girth table". The boneless meat from him filled two large butchering pans, heaped well over the top, which hold 40 pounds level. (90 pounds would be a conservative estimate compared to the 100 pounds predicted). He had very little fat to trim and almost nothing lost to "wound damage". The fat doe, on the other hand, which I put a 12 gauge slug thru the front shoulders, had a lot of fat to trim from the rear, and almost everything from the shoulders forward resembled cranberry sauce from wound damage. She only filled one pan level with the top. That made just 40 pounds, where the predicted yield was 60 pounds for her chest girth. Each deer took about the same amount of time to process, with the extra grinding time for the buck about equaling the extra trimming time for the doe.

Your daughter's must have been heavy to break that cargo carrier off the back of your vehicle.

I am thankful that someone posted that chest-girth table from PA on this site so I don't have to mess around with a scale. Maybe you could use your new scale and a measuring tape to see if that table is close for NY deer next season.

Are you certain that your nipple was not plugged ? It don't matter what kind of powder you use, if there is not an open path for the spark to get thru to it. Maybe it was almost plugged on that first hang-fire, and plugged up solid on the later misfire. If it turns out that it was plugged, then you probably still have a good bunch of 777 pellets. Like I said at the tail end of the initial post, I found mine plugged up solid one time when getting ready for a hunt. I had to drill it open before proceeding. It sounds like others have had similar issues. A sure fire way to see if that was the cause would be to remove the breech plug, hold it up to a light, and see if it shines thru.