goosifer

My wife and I did our annual go through the pantry food, organize it, throw out stuff that is way past its expiration date. We spent over four hours doing the kitchen pantry and our food storage down in the basement. We are like accidental preppers with all the stuff we have. The oldest can I found was from July 2009, about 8-1/2 years old. How is your pantry doing?

It's not easy, but I do believe this is an effective and reasonable way to do it, especially for the long term. A guy wrote a book on this called Dr. Gott's No Flour No Sugar Diet.

I don't understand what you mean by this line. To whom is it directed? Is it meant to be a signature like some forums have for users? Sorry to bother you with this question.

Wilderness made a post about the DEC's Habitat/Access Stamp program, which is related to the DEC's Young Forest Initiative. There, they had a link to a book from 2006 called Managing Grasslands, Shrublands, and Young Forest Habitats for Wildlife A Guide for the Northeast I don't know if it would be useful to anyone, but the title sounded promising. Chapter 7, Managing Abandoned Orchards and Apple Trees for Wildlife, looks useful. Would anyone here with knowledge about land management care to take a peek and comment on it?

I signed up for a wilderness survival course based out of Messinger Woods in Holland, NY. A lot of what NFA-ADK said above was mentioned at the first class i attended. It will be a bit of a drive, but sounds interesting.

what brand and model is it?

At the end of the report it says: So, can't say for sure, but perhaps your NYS license dollars were spared. The study wasn't done with random individuals. It was specifically for "Non-Traditional Path Hunters". If you really care, you can read the details in the report. It would be nice if they did a comprehensive survey with all hunters.

Good luck with that. I was doing some research on WMA's in 9A last night. Know where you are going yet? Also, I've heard good things about Iroquois National Refuge in 8?)

How often do you check trailcams? Are they up year round? I've been very lazy in this regard.

I guess the research didn't really define what they meant by trophy hunting (that I saw, I didn't read the whole thing.) Do "trophy hunters" typically eat the venison from their deer?

Once you've processed your own, it's hard to let someone else do it. Once I got a deer and because of warm temps and that I wasn't going home for two days, I had to have it processed. My hunting buddy advised me to just ask the processor to quarter the deer. That worked out as I was able to pick up the venison on the way home and do the rest of the processing myself.

My interest in this subject, and your thoughts on it, are sincere. I noted you said the "right" state land. If we started a thread on this subject (maybe there is an existing one?), would you be willing to share your thoughts on the subject?

Bit of a tangent, but would you recommend private hunting land adjacent to public hunting land as an investment?

I'm sorry I missed your point. I recall reading something that defined access to hunting land as being something like an hour or less drive away from public hunting land, and that certain hunters have no access to hunting land by this definition. As far as hunting public land in general, personally that is something that scares me but intrigues me. I worry about getting shot by another hunter, but it really is the place to be to do the style of hunting that certain hunters do (big woods, tracking, etc.)

That's a great point. I wonder if there are any nationwide conservation groups that have done any studies evaluating how NY DEC handles deer compared to neighboring states. I know different states have different issues, but there has to be some way to evaluate the NYS DEC and hold them accountable.

Yeah, there is a self reliance angle to hunting that doesn't really get directly addressed as much as it should. Relatedly, one thing about hunting that gives me a lot of satisfaction is processing my own deer and being able to say I took care of everything from field to freezer. I know exactly where it came from, how it was trimmed, how much fat is in it, etc.

I think this is the sort of info you were talking about. None of the response choices were mutually exclusive. They just grouped them into various categories.

There is a lotof data and different questions in the study that talk about the things you've raised. i just didn't want to do a data dump and overwhelm the thread.

There was another part of the survey that asked the participants their beliefs about hunting, and what they "approve of". Surprisingly, only 25.9% approved and 38.7% disapproved of "to obtain a trophy" as a reason to hunt. If I'm understanding this correctly, this goes against the grain of "you can hunt whatever you want to, as long as it's legal". I note that 45.1% of the respondents were below the age of 31. Again, this is a subset of new hunters, and a small subset of all hunters, in 2016. Interesting.

The authors thanked several people from the DEC for their assistance. So I would think the DEC is aware of the findings of this research from 2016.

It's funny, I was reading some old research from the DEC, like circa 2000, and they were worried about how declining hunter numbers were going to affect their ability to manage deer population and keep the ecosystem in balance. I don't think CWD would be the silver bullet the DEC is looking for in this regard. How much is the hunters' role in deer population control worth to them? How much can they really do? do better?

So I was doing some research on the future of deer hunting topic. This led me to a group at the Cornell Ag school, the Human Dimensions Research Unit, that puts out a lot of research on hunting, et al. This are academic journal studies. Very boring stuff. So for the heck of it I started perusing the article Taking a Non-traditional Path to Hunting in New York: Insights and Implications for Recruitment and Retention from April 2016. It's about how people get into hunting through relationships other than the traditional parent-child relationship. They call these hunters "non-traditonal path hunters (NTPHs)". They surveyed 3,605 of these NTPHs. (I don't know how many "traditional path hunters" there were at the same point in time.) Some of the survey questions related to their motivation for hunting. Now granted this was from a subset of new hunters, but interesting nonetheless. (I tell ya, I hesitate to post this, but given I've posted some stuff that goes in the other direction, I guess this is an attempt to achieve balance.) Their results on "Achievement-oriented Motivations for Deer Hunting" from page 18: Another interesting tidbit is that slightly more survey participants were interested in hunting turkey vs bow-hunting for deer (77.6% vs. 73.6%). #1 interest was gun-hunting deer at 90.6%. The full article is at Taking a Non-traditional Path to Hunting in New York: Insights and Implications for Recruitment and Retention

Big sausage update. We are starting to have some shrinkage! There are voids developing all along the casing and at the tops. I took a pick of them hanging in the fridge. Sorry about the bad lighting.

You were the one that said IF we lost half of the hunters . . . . So, for purposes of my question, it doesn't really matter exactly how/why they were lost. When you said what you said, were you just assuming that this half would just voluntarily give up hunting? My question is, what if it weren't to be voluntary, would you care about these lost hunters?

OK, let me try rewording my question. In your original post you said So my question is, if the half of hunters that were lost were, hypothetically, lost under circumstances such that these hunters would have liked to continue hunting, but couldn't for some reason outside of their control, would you have any sympathy for them?