wolc123

Everyone’s tastes are different I suppose. I like beef a lot more than chicken, but not quite as much as venison. I am thankful that most folks like beef better, because venison would be a lot tougher to get, if that wasn’t the case.

I enjoy properly-aged whitetail, more than beef, and I am very thankful that my wife and kids do also. My guess is that most of those who prefer beef have no clue how to properly age venison. Kind of like most of those who don’t like eating bass have no clue how to treat the meat (hint-it should still be twitching when you remove it from the fish). Aging is good for red meat, so that rigor mortis can pass, but not so hot for white fish.

I’ll agree that there are simple tricks (ie more carcass aging times at 33-43 deg F) that can make a 3.5 taste as good as a 1.5. It’s actually more of a meat texture thing, or how tough the steak is, more so than the taste . The buttons (less than a year) are in a whole other class. If there was a simple trick for doing that with red meat then there would not be a market for veal. That said, these tenderloins from last year’s 3.5 tasted just as good those from last year’s and this year’s buttons, but only after they had been stored in the fridge for a week prior to cooking.

Can you think of an older politician, where that might not be the case ?

Pickled and on the top shelf:

I thought it was entertaining, kind of like in “Yellowstone” where Beth tries throwing the guy, who is wading down the river, off the ranch. We have a creek that crosses our farm, and is sometimes navigatable. Tresspassing would be a tough question, because the creek was rerouted by the county or the state, about 50 years ago. All of the maps still show the original route. Even Googlemaps shows it wrong, unless you go to satellite view. I just wave, when I see someone go by in a canoe.

My wife would prefer that I killed them all at 5-7 months of age, when they are the best tasting. Then we wouldn’t have to worry about these antler size and age issues, and a lot of wall space would be freed up for other usage. Those “baby bucks” certainly do taste better, but I can’t tell the difference in taste between a 1.5, 2.5,and 3.5, so my preference for 3.5’s is strictly a meat quantity issue. Hopefully, she has the 5 and 7 month frozen buck hearts that I gave her for Valentine’s Day (along with a 3.5 and an unknown courtesy of another member) just about pickled right now:

I gave my wife 4 hearts: and a yellow rose:

As a pure meat hunter, My primary concern is body volume, when it comes to punching my buck tags, hence my affinity towards chest girth. I don’t really care much about brain or antler volume. The antlers are handy though, because they are the easiest way for me to get a fast idea if I am looking at a 1.5, 2.5, or 3.5 year old buck. My general observations have been: that 3 points on a side is most likely 2.5 and 4 points on a side is most likely 3.5. There are certainly lots of exceptions to that though. Some years, I hold out for 3.5, and other years 2.5, during the first half of the seasons, depending on our freezer status. Anything goes after the midpoint, but sightings are usually way down then or my tag is already punched, especially through gun season. One interesting thing I can say for sure, is that I would not have killed (3) of the (4) 3.5 year olds, that I did over the last 5 years, had I “settled” for scrawny 1.5 year olds, that offered me “chip-shots” prior. Here’s “forky” practically begging for a slug on opening day of gun last year: I won’t pester you with another photo of his grandpa, who showed up 5 minutes after sunset for me when I was in that stand, 6 days later.

Maybe folks like targeting older bucks because they think it is a bigger challenge. They can’t really say they are targeting the smartest bucks, when they are older than 3.5 because the space for the brain must start to shrink after that, due to the thickening skulls. I’ll keep hoping for 3.5’s with my buck tags, when available brain volume, body size, antler size, and meat quality are all at or near the peak, for an adult deer.

Thanks for providing the costs and turnaround times. That is more than I am willing to spend, to learn the age of a deer that is most likely 3.5 or less. I can’t recall ever killing a buck, that I thought was older than that, so a combination of the three crappy aging methods (skull size, antler size, and body size) are good enough for me. I am intrigued by the potential of deer skull thickness aging. It seems like it would be very easy to design a caliper, that would fit in an eye socket, and give a relatively accurate age estimate, up to 10.5 or so. It would probably work on a buck or doe. The deerage.com and matson lab folks probably get nervous when they think about that. Such a caliper, molded from plastic, could be probably be made for less than the $ 5 that I paid for my butt-out. They will probably charge over $ 30 for it for a few years though, just like they did for the butt-outs, when they first came out. “A fool and his money are soon parted”.

What if there was no other means of controlling the deer population, like is the case in the town of Amherst NY ? Imagine having to drive thru that town every day to get to work. I could take the long way around, but that would take more gas, which is getting very expensive. I prefer to keep taking the shortest route, thru a town with a well-balanced deer population, thanks to the coyote.

Do you agree that fox are a wild turkey nest predator ? If so, then maybe the coyotes do at least a little good for the turkeys, don’t you think ? I use to dislike wild turkeys, more than I do now, when I used to see them in my fieldcorn a lot more. Since then, I learned that wild turkeys don’t bother with fieldcorn at all, unless coons nock it down for them. Take out the coons, and the turkeys won’t touch the corn. They are a fat lazy bird, unwilling to get it down from the stalks. I had to put in a lot more acres corn, to get it to last thru late ML season, before I started trapping the coons in the summer. Deer, for which I intend the fieldcorn, are very efficient users of it. Coons are the worst when it comes to that. Thankfully, they are the easiest furbearer that I know of to trap.

Loading a snowmobile into the 8 ft box of my 4x4 pickup, with a plastic toolbox “shock absorber”, was real easy. I would just back the truck into a roadside ditch and drop the tailgate to the ground. I would drive the snowmobile into the bed, with plenty of speed, and let the plastic toolbox absorb the extra energy. Lock the parking brake, throw on a strap, and head to my destination. Unloading it was even easier when I got there. I would take off the strap, back up the truck at good speed and hit the brakes, launching the sled out of the bed like a torpedo. Those sleds had great suspensions and had no problem absorbing the energy of the fall. Trailers suck in comparison. I still have that black plastic toolbox. Maybe I will use it in my 2wd truck this year for carrying tools. It’s been more than 10 years since I had a snowmobile.

Maybe they don’t hit the coons as hard in other areas, but they sure do seem to like them around here. Two years ago, I trapped and burried 6 coons (4 adult males, 1 adult female, and one young one) in about an acre of sweetcorn. All but the little one were exhumed and eaten by coyotes within a few days. Last year, I caught just (3) adult male coons and all were dug up in a few days. The relative absence of females and young coons is a good indication that the coyotes are controlling them on their own. We have an extra large coyote population out this way, because the next town to the west (Amherst), allows no hunting and is overrun with deer. That nearly inexhaustible food source attracts plenty of coyotes, and we are just a few miles from the border. The coyotes also seem to keep the fox numbers down, which probably benefits the turkeys. The main reason I don’t want a year round coyote season around here, is because I don’t want to hit deer with my vehicle driving back and forth to work thru that non-hunting town. The coyotes are the main thing preventing that right now. I dont care much for wild turkeys either though, because they taste like dry cardboard to me. While I don’t care much about the wild turkeys, if our deer numbers ever dropped to the point that freezer-filling with venison became difficult, then I would be into a year-round coyote season. With 4 doe permits available around here for all those who want them, for more than 5 years, we are a long way from needing to worry about that. Id say the local deer population is just about perfect (our freezer is packed almost full of venison and we have not hit any deer with our 4 vehicles) around here right now, and the coyote is playing just as big, if not a bigger role than the local hunters, in keeping it that way. The DEC is staying on top of things, and made some major moves last year, to keep that local deer population optimized (early September antlerless season, extra hour of hunting time each day, and Holiday ML season). It don’t get much better than that. I have never seen the deer hunting better in NY, than it was last year, and those changes were the main reason for that.

Did you ever try Dan lake ? I remember getting a few crappies and northern in there, but have not tried it in over 20 years.

Interesting, and I know how you feel. I was once targeted by a coyote, that I am certain had confused me with a deer. I was walking up an Adirondack mountain deer trail, was wearing scent-blocking camouflage, had taken a shower with scent-away soap and shampoo, and had treated my boots with Evercalm deer herd scent. The surprise registered by that yote, when I raised my ML, 15 yards from its planned intercept point, was priceless. I never saw one bolt away as fast as that one did, when it saw me lift that gun . I would have let a shot or two rip, with my fast-handling fiber-optic sighted 30/30, but I wasn’t fast enough with that heavy, scoped T/C Omega 50 cal.. One of the first times I ever tried calling turkeys in the fall, a big boar coon came in to my hen call. He was probably looking for a meal. I think coons do a lot more harm to turkeys around my place than the coyotes do. I am not sure I would support a year round open season on coyotes but I definitely would for coons. I kill “damaging” coons now, legally, after they start tasting my sweetcorn. NY state requires that the carcasses be burned or buried, before the regular trapping season opens. They don’t tell you how deep to I go and the yotes usually dig them up. It’s been more than 10 years since I killed a coyote. Around home, I appreciate the help that the coyotes give me on coon patrol . They also help keep the deer herd healthy and balanced. They do that by preying on the weak of the species, mostly smaller fawns and old rutted-out bucks. The adjacent town, which I must cross twice a weekday to get to and from work, does not allow any hunting. I’d have a hell of time driving thru there were it not for a big population of coyotes, keeping the deer numbers in check. A year round coyote season would be good in areas with low deer numbers, but not so hot in areas where deer numbers are high (like wmu 9F & 9A).

If they have any buckwheat, when I pick up my fertilizer this spring, I am going to get a bag and plant it in a spot where my soil is poor. No gly will be used there though. I try to keep my venison as “organic” as I can. I will chop up the old corn stalks that are there now, with my bush hog, then work it up with the disk. I will plant the buckwheat in late May, if it is warm and dry enough by then. In mid-August, I will broadcast white clover and soybeans into the mature buckwheat, then roll it down with a cultipacker. Just the center of the plot will be done that way. The soil is much better on both ends, so I am going to control the weeds with a drag over the summer on them. One end will be planted with white clover and oats, and the other end with white clover and wheat, after September 1. It will be interesting seeing what clover does the best the following year. Clover has never grown well in the center of that plot. Maybe the buckwheat will make the difference.

Some say that coyotes do the turkeys more good than bad, due to the fact that they help control nest predators. I would be inclined to agree, because I have seen first hand the last three years, how effective they are at controlling raccoons. Give a coyote a taste of a coon, and it has got to be tough for them to go back to eating turkeys. They were digging up coon carcasses here, within two days of my burying them 3 ft deep the last 2 years. By the end of the summers, I didn’t even have to trap coons anymore in my sweetcorn. The coyotes were keeping them totally eradicated, all in their own. Thad said, I haven’t seen much turkey sign lately here on the nw corner of wmu 9F, but my mom reported a flock of seven in their backyard, over on the se corner yesterday.

Did you know that the highest scoring, typical-antlered whitetail buck ever killed in the USA, and second place world wide by less than 3”, was taken with a crossbow last fall in Indiana ? Maybe, if you got yourself a crossbow, you might kill a really big buck. Then you wouldn’t have to worry about folks making fun of the pictures you posted of it on here, and you could finally participate in the harvest thread. Wouldn’t that be special ? As that new National record whitetail buck shows, you will have a tough time beating them. There is nothing stopping you from joining them, at least not during the easiest two weeks to kill a really big buck, in NY’s southern zone. Best of luck to you this deer season, whichever weapon you use. The scoped, in-line muzzleloader is my new favorite, since the Holiday season, and it has already blessed us with a ‘22 buck: NY state made four awesome changes last year: early antlerless gun season, Adirondack early antlerless ML, extra half hour before and after sunrise sunset, and Holiday ML. Each of those put a deer to our freezer last season. As long as they keep those up, I could care less if full inclusion of the crossbow ever happens. I now prefer that it stays the same. I’d hate to have to choose between southern zone crossbow and northern zone early ML week plus opening weekend of gun up there in October.

This is the shed that I found when plowing that back corn plot last spring with my old Ford 8n tractor: I am glad it didn’t puncture one of my 70 years old rear Goodyear’s. It was bad enough that one of the original rear rims rusted thru last year. There is lots of good tread left on them tires with only about 2000 hours on the tractor. It has always been stored inside, so the weather cracking on them is not that bad. It will be interesting to see how it plows this spring with only one loaded rear rim. I didn’t load the new one, because that calcium solution is corrosive and I don’t feel like changing it again. I have another new rim for when the other side rusts thru.

This one that I want to lower, is in a tree that I picked using google-maps, to be slightly over 500 feet from the closest mobile home, in a nearby trailer park. There is a swamp between it and the trailer park, and the deer like to travel the edge, which is about 40 yards from the stand. My parents woods are L-shaped, and the stand is also about 40 yards from the inside corner of the “L”. You can see one of the neighbor's posted signs, on the corner he owns, in the photo. I really don’t want to brush it in or make a big barnwood wall around it, like I have on most of my others. I think that might cause the deer to alter their patterns. The little hang/on is rather inconspicuous there, and I only hunt it once a year. This summer, I think I will just cut a few shooting lanes to the swamp edge, lower it to 6 ft, and use a shorter ladder. I don’t mind changing things a little there now, since I didn’t score from it last year. If nothing else, I will be a lot more comfortable, hunting 6 ft above the ground, than it was at 9 ft. It should also be easier to shoot deer down a trimmed lane, at a lower angle, than it was to try and shoot from higher up, thru and around branches, as I had to do the previous 3 seasons. I have lots of other chainsaw work to do in those woods this summer anyhow, as several cherry trees fell during big wind storms this winter. I am sick of burning almost all ash, for the last 10 or so years, and I want that cherry real bad. The stand is on a maple.

The best thing about it, is that it should help sink lots of Democrats, in the mid term elections.

I haven’t looked yet, but I found a nice shed last spring, while I was plowing that back corn plot. I saw 3 different antlered bucks back there, during the early September antlerless season, a 2.5 yr 8-point, a spike, and a small 4-point. There were not many turkeys around here last year.

Iron is good for you and you don’t get much of that from cooking your food in copper or Teflon.