wolc123

I always add that to the diesel tractor that I use to keep our driveways clear in the winter. I never had trouble with the fuel jelling in the winter, even though I keep it outside and covered, but exposed to the prevailing wind. Several years ago, on a real cold day, I lacked the CCA to turn it over. Hopefully, the new top of the line NAPA Legend battery that I put in it this year, will take care of that issue. I also put a trickle charger on it. It sounds like we are going to get a good snow Sunday night. We don’t get MLK day off at work on Monday, so I guess I will see how or if it starts that morning I have an old gas tractor for backup in the barn, that always starts with a shot of either if needed. I keep the block heater on the outside diesel plugged in and wired to a switch inside the house. 1/2 hour energized is plenty most of the time, but when it gets down close to or below zero, I turn that on for an hour or two prior to start. I have never had a fuel issue with that tractor (bought new in 2005), nor have I changed the fuel filter or drained water from the fuel system. In addition to adding Powerserve anti-gel in the winter, I add a performance mix fuel supplement the rest of the year, to on-road diesel, purchased from a busy station in town. Wind chill and frostbite have never bothered me out there plowing snow on that open station tractor. Insulated coveralls, face mask, mittens with hand warmers in them, and arctic boots take care of that.

I like the old side by sides with two triggers myself. I have two, that my grandfather left me. One was his first gun, an old Ithaca from the 1920’s. It is a 12 gauge with 30” modified and full choke barrels. I never hunted with it, but I used it for quite a few rounds of trap. I would tell the guys with the over and unders, that if God wanted us to use a gun like that, He would have put our eyes that way. The other one is a shorter, but heavier 16 gauge J Stevens Springfield, choked modified and improved cylinder. That is my favorite grouse and rabbit gun. I took it up to the Adirondacks for grouse and bear last fall, because I had already filled my buck tag by the time of that trip. I have checked that gun with slugs on paper targets, and it is quite accurate up to about 50 yards. Unfortunately, I didn’t run into any grouse or bears on that trip.

Do I get a bonus point, if I post the actual 20 cent 16 gauge Remington slugger, that I killed my last antlered buck with on the Friday after Thanksgiving last year ? It makes a nice antler ornament anyhow. I like taking grandpa’s old Ithaca model 37 deerslayer out on a few hunts each year. It has not let me down, since I put the 1.5 Weaver on it, back around 1982. We will probably always have to use shotguns here in wmu 9F. I would probably retire it, if they made center fire rifles legal. Those 20 cent sluggers are a lot more fun to shoot than the $ 5 sabots they try and sell these days. They kill the deer equally dead, you just got to get them a little closer. They also have great brush-bucking ability, compared to most rifle bullets.

Big liver too, made (2) meals and had to weigh about two pounds. I only got one liver meal out of its brother that I killed in September 21. I guess it pays to fatten them up for a few more months.

I usually start to loose interest in deer hunting after Thanksgiving, but didn’t this year, for 3 somewhat trivial reasons: First, I missed out on more than half of my normal hunting hours, during times of heightened daylight deer activity, in the southern zone (the peak two weeks of the rut also known as crossbow season) last fall. Daylight deer activity, at my two southern zone spots, always drops to almost nothing, after Thanksgiving. It picks up sharply, in and around standing corn, around mid-December. I had, and still have, plenty of that at home this year. Second, after a long slump, I finally restored some confidence in my in-line ML last year, killing an old doe with it up in the northern zone, that I had been after for the last 3 seasons. She was much smarter and tougher to kill than any buck that I have pursued. Without confidence in my weapon, I could have cared less about the Holiday season. Third, and most likely a direct result of reason #1, I still had an available buck tag. While I also had (3) available dmp tags, antlerless deer are rarer than hen’s teeth in my two southern zone hunting spots, after October 1. That is mostly because local farmers hit them real hard on their nuisance permits, prior to that date. They do a great job of avoiding the bucks though, as the law requires. I say these are all “trivial” reasons, because none had to do with needing the meat, which is always my biggest hunting motivator. I struggled a bit to find room in our freezers for one of those New Year’s Day “hens teeth”.

How did you all like the Holiday ML season ? I think the warmer than average conditions slowed daylight deer activity, but I still saw more deer thru that new season than I did thru all of gun season (after opening day) and normal ML season combined. I hope we see it continued, for a least a few more years. I like the extra time, when the odds are better for cold, because it makes it easier to handle the meat. It is also great to be able to hunt on some weekday paid Holidays, and not needing to use vacation days.

My in laws use to rent a little lakeside off the grid cabin like that for a couple weekends each fall. It had a bathroom with a shower and a storage tank that was filled with water pumped up from the lake. That water was used for the shower, sink and toilet. There was a propane hot water heater and a 12 volt rv style pump. There were solar panels for charging batteries or we ran a gas generator. Most of the lights, the refrigerator and the stove were propane. A big fireplace and some kerosene heaters provided heat. My wife and I did our honeymoon in that cabin one summer during opening week of bass season, and I killed my first northern zone deer from it during the early ML week one fall. I miss that place a bit, but I definitely prefer the on the grid lake house that her parents built for their retirement home, not far from there.

I always try to take the whole northern zone early ML week off (which also gives me opening weekend of gun up there also) and the Friday closest to Veterans, for crossbow at home in the southern zone. That early ML week up there is my favorite by far. There is always lots of pretty fall foliage left, the fishing is good then, and so is the deer hunting. Those are the only 6 vacation days that I usually use for deer hunting. I added December 30 this year for Holiday ML. Other than those, I usually just hunt the weekends and 5 other paid weekday holidays.

It was only a food safety nightmare when I tried using that little orange drag handle (which appears in the first photo of the earlier post) as a grinder stuffer. The old hammer handle works way better. I kept the little orange chip that I pulled from my last bowl of chile, on my desk at work for a while to remind me not to use it for that purpose again. I am so glad that it wasn’t my wife or one of the kids that found it in their meat. It definitely makes a better drag handle, on a 200 plus pounder (guts in) like that buck in the photo, than the broken half-rotted sticks, that I usually use.

I mostly like them the way they are also. I am very thankful that the crossbow is legal now, for the best two weeks of southern zone archery. A situation beyond my control took most of that away from me last year. I expect things will return to normal this year. One way, that I found by accident to help not burn out spots, is to not use trail cameras. I would rather that be a voluntary choice rather than state mandated though.

You got me mixed up with someone else. All I really want is one more weekend of early crossbow season, up in the northern zone, before the guns come in. The local businesses are currently getting screwed up there, with just 3 weekdays. My preferred archery deer season in the southern zone would be a October 1-14 “traditional”, where just longbows and recurves would be legal, and 0ctober 15-gun opener “modern”, where compounds and crossbows would be legal. Such a structure would put the screws to the “cupcakes” (compound only bow-hunters who oppose the crossbow) as they justly deserve, while opening up new opportunities to the “true” archers.

The point he is trying to make is that he wants more big buck pictures. I have done all I can for now, get with the program.

How about 2 more ? This includes the first photo I took of this one (taken about 10 minutes after sunset on the Friday after Thanksgiving ‘21). I had no idea such a buck was in the area, as it had never showed itself out in the open in the daylight. Thanks for the reminder. I have been meaning to ask a neighbor, who runs lots of trail cameras, if he had any pre-rut photos of it. If I had managed to kill it then, it would have been my first legit 11 pointer and I would have felt obligated to do a shoulder mount, as that would have exceeded my previous best of 10 points. If I could get a picture of it, in all its pre-rut points and glory, then I could hang it from a little frame on the opposite side of the “killing” 16 gauge slug, that I recovered from its rib cage. I guess maybe trail cameras are good for something and it’s a good thing they are not yet banned.

If you can handle the heat, traffic, ticks, and hogs and hurricanes down there, then have at it. I can’t tolerate too much of that bs myself. The current bag limit of (9) on whitetails in NY, is sufficient for my family of 4. 3-4 is usually plenty for us, with some leftover for the next year, when times might be tougher. As a “meat hunter”, I feel more unshackled by the changes the DEC put thru last year, than I would have been if they had allowed the crossbow throughout archery season.

I am just thankful to be able to reflect on a few more meals like this, thanks to the new rules the NY DEC gave us last year.

One is from this year. Maybe become a moderator, so you can make your own rules. This is from this year:

BRAVO, a very well deserved honor indeed. It is good to see the national recognition for the NY state DEC finally listening to the majority of hunters (who hunt for meat not antlers) and making many positive changes last year. Those changes have helped make NY the number one state, for a meat hunter such as myself, and have directly enabled me to fill our freezer to near capacity last year, plus get a jump on this year. Not only have those recent changes made things much better for us meat hunters, but they have also enabled the DEC to get a much better handle on the state’s deer population, for the benefit of other groups including motorists, farmers, and homeowners, using the BEST means of population control - HUNTERS.

I can only recall one time when I successfully tracked a buck. I listened to 3 hours of Laney Benoit’s tracking stories the other night, and I think I may have topped his shortest ever track. A buddy of mine had read about Larry Benoit (Laney’s father) about 30 years ago, and he talked me into trying it. About a week into gun season that year, we got some perfect snow overnight, maybe 4” of fresh powder. I arrived at the trailhead (grandma’s barn parking lot in wmu 9F) with my truck right at sunrise. Another buddy, who hunts down the road, beeped at me when he saw me getting out of my truck. I waved at him, loaded up my Ithaca 16 gauge, and walked down the lane behind the barn. I hadn’t walked 30 yards, when I cut my first track. It was a single deer, with relatively large hoofs. I got down and looked close and I could literally see steam rising up from those tracks. The ground was not froze below the snow, and the tracks had pushed into the soft mud. Before I followed the tracks, I very carefully studied the direction they headed (One of the Benoit’s tricks my buddy told me about). They led into a small patch of thick goldenrod and brush. After staring at that cover patch for a while, the unmistakeable shape of an antler suddenly appeared above the thick goldenrod. The range was about 50 yards, and the buck’s body was completely hidden by the goldenrod. I could only see part of the rack and head, but that was enough to tell me where the front shoulder ought to be. My thought was to take a quick shot at that shoulder, then take up to (4) more, as it flushed across the open hayfield behind. I shot and it never flushed, struck clean thru the shoulders. To this day, that remains my only “drop-tine” buck and the only one that I ever killed by tracking. Technically, I never followed those tracks with my feet, but I did with my eyes, so I can still call it “tracking”. That particular buck was very well known in the area. My cousin and his buddies had chased it thru all of archery season. He had got real close to it in a cornfield one time. It had a broken back leg tendon from the prior year, on the opposite side of the funky “drop-tine” antler. I was kind of pissed off about that, because the ham was small on that side, and it has always been “all about the meat” for me. I always did think drop tines were cool though, so it was nice to finally check that box. That buck had been bedded in the thick brush on the left side of our lane. My buddy’s truck horn that morning had likely spooked it up. It would have been quite safe, in the little patch of golden rod on the right, were it not for those steaming tracks that it left across the lane.

It’s always faster for me to start at the head end when skinning. If it’s cold enough, I usually leave the hide on a week or so, before processing. Leaving the hide on insulates against temperature extremes and keeps the meat from drying out. The small field dress opening probably helps with that, and might be worth a try.

I have one somewhere, but have not used it since the chemical “hot hands” type came out. They are more convenient, because you don’t need lighter fluid, they don’t smell, and don’t burn your hands.

I never grind neck meat because bone-in neck roasts are the best.

I finished butchering my last button buck Thursday, and placed the scraps on the bait pile. I just checked that out and it looks like a fox paid it a visit last night, but not much else. We only got a light dusting from the “lake effect” snow blast that hit the southern part of wmu 9F a little harder. There was just enough snow for me to ski out to my back corn plot. Surprisingly, that 1.5 acre plot is still holding some corn. My larger plot up front, planted 2 weeks later, yielded far less and is now picked completely clean. It looks like the deer were feeding on the winter wheat in front of it last night. It looks like they are really hitting that back corn plot, and the tracks show that there is one old “toe dragger” in the mix. I was surprised to see a few purple top turnips half eaten back there, while there is still some corn on the stalks.