This is an interesting piece on a park just a few miles from my house. An adjacent landowner is organizing a trial bowhunt for this weekend. Hopefully he will show that controlled bowhunting is a great solution to the population control as well as providing a source of food and recreation. I’ll keep you updated on the results.

In the last few days the weather has warmed up dramatically. It hit 65 degrees Friday and melted most of the ice around this part of the Midwest. As a result the inaccessible geese on the rivers and power plants have dispersed back out into the marshes. We were able to find a few this morning.

This hunt involves an incredible amount of work. The boat was full of 8 bags of decoys, 4 guns, 3 bags, a heater, my dog, and the three of us. We had to contend with a thin layer of ice and a very light wind. Setting up is about a 1 hour proposition plus it’s an hour from my house so it was just after 4:00 when my alarm went off this morning.

All that work was worth it to have a chance at geese that are unpressured. Each one we killed had his feet down over the decoys when we stood up. We also worked several after we got a limit and were trying to kill some more ducks. It was one of the most picturesque goose hunts for me in the last few years.

Friend and blogging inspiration Fountain Shots has a nice piece on the BCS up. Take a gander, and let me know if you can leave comments because I could not

Today’s examination is about what prompted K-State to name their stadium “Bill Snyder Family Stadium.”

Frankly, I thought it was weird before they re-hired him. Now it’s beyond bizarre. Can you name another coach who goes to work in a building named after him? So how’d KSU come to this arrangement? Insecurity? A pathological desire to have a “history”? Epic levels of hero worship fueled by a lack of real world knowledge? A weak AD? Lets take a look:

Could it be that Mr. Snyder strung together an incredible streak of Big 12 championships? Well let’s put it this way: Bill Self has won 3 times as many titles in the last 3 years as Bill Snyder won during his entire career. Colorado, Nebraska, and Texas A&M have each fired a coach with the same number of titles.

Perhaps Mr. Snyder stacked up BCS Bowl game wins in such a historic way that KSU felt they had to immortalize him in some fashion? Nope. 0-1 in his only trip to a BCS game, which was notable only because the star quarterback was accused of raping someone the night before the game. Icons such as Dennis Erickson, Jeff Wiessinger, Chris Pertersen, and Lawrence’s own BF Mangino have all won more BCS games. Nebraska won more under Frank Solich and they fired him. None have stadiums named after them to my knowledge.

National championships? Try not to laugh. A perfect season? Nope. Charming personality? Bob Knight is more cuddly. Incredible graduation rate? Something like half his players can read at a third grade level.

In 17 years at K-State Bill Snyder won less conference titles than the law of averages would predict.

Wow.

So what’s the deal then? Well, it’s really quite simple. K-State sucks. K-State has sucked for decades. It’s a land grant school with 60% dudes and an incoming average ACT that unbelievably is nearly 2 points lower than its, “We take anyone” in-state rival. Each year, there are about the same number of attractive women at K-State (20), as American Indians and non-athlete blacks — combined. “Diversity” at K-State is considered to be the guys who plant cotton or sunflowers. With crack academic courses such as goat breeding and field cultivating you can assume that nothing but the best and brightest Western Kansas farm boys will spend four to seven years drinking beer and delaying an inevitable return to the combine.

So who can blame them if they want to memorialize their pseudo-success, they’ve got nothing else in their history that doesn’t completely suck.

I do hope that we’ve conclusively destroyed the moronic, nearly incomprehensible myth that K-State has some level of football tradition that can be compared with KU basketball.

Well the tremendous bull killed by Denny Austad in Utah has been officially scored by Boone and Crockett. After the 60 day drying period the bull grossed 501-0/8 and had a net non-typical score of 480-1/8 B&C. Obviously that annihilates the previous world record non-typical of 465-2/8 from the bull that was found dead in British Columbia in 1994.

Check out the Boone and Crockett website for more details.

So you’re not down with the whole penned sheep killing thing we talked about yesterday? What are your other choices? Well, if you have regular-American type money you’re stuck with long odds in the general draws of the various states. That’s not good news. Sometimes the odds are 1 in 100, sometimes they’re 1 in 3000. Most of the time you’ll be lucky to draw before you die, even if you’re young.

So what’s the good news? New Mexico changed their rules this year to require that applicants put up the entire amount of the tag to apply. For non-residents that’s a bit more than $3100.00 when historically you could apply for almost nothing. This change should dramatically reduce the number of applicants and improve the draw odds. If you don’t draw you get the tag money back anyway so it doesn’t really cost you much.

Here’s the New Mexico website for more info.

Ever dreamed of chasing a Dall ram in Alaska or Canada? I sure have. Some day I hope to give it a try. But what if you could just buy the sheep without all the work? NOW YOU CAN! For the bargain price of $25,000.00 you can skip the whole hunting part of the experience and just shoot some poor sheep in a pen.

I’d like to be clear on this: This is not hunting. This has no place in the hunting community. The person who will win this auction is not a hunter. Shooting an animal does not make you a hunter.

It’s disgusting that there is even a market for this type of thing.

More ugliness this weekend during my ongoing attempt to get a friend his first deer. We struggled to beat the weather this time. Saturday the wind absolutely howled. Deer sightings were few and far between. The wind blew all night Saturday out of the South. At sunrise Sunday morning it was 61 degrees. At sunset it was 13. About mid-day the wind shifted to the Northwest and the bottom fell out. The wind just cut through me. I’ve hunted dozens of days a year for the many years. I can’t remember being colder.

The good news was that it pushed the deer to food sources. The bad news was that it was nearly impossible to sit on a stand. During the afternoon hunt we saw a total of 9 does but no shots were fired. Bad communication, mind numbing cold, and a rookie hunter conspired against us.

Unfortunately that brings the Kansas general rifle season to a close. Fortunately there is still an opportunity during the late antlerless season. I’ve held off on taking does myself because I’d rather help others first and I plan to bowhunt some over the Christmas break. After all, it looks like the duck season is over. You can walk across every marsh in Kansas by now.

I watched this guy for while from my waterhole blind on a Montana elk hunt a few years back.

This is the picture I promised. Obviously a great deer, but its way cooler proudly displayed in a courthouse. They also have a nice fox rug on display. Can’t say you see that type of decor in the more urban places I usually work. Has anyone ever seen a larger courthouse buck?