Moose Droppings

Changes in North Carolina fishing laws take effect on Monday as we earlier reported on however as part of the new law the poor will now be able to get free fishing licenses.
People who receive Medicaid, Food Stamps, or Work First will qualify for the license provided their right to fish has not been revoked.

State Sen. Charles Albertson, D-Duplin, a sponsor of the bill, said Thursday that lawmakers did the right thing by enacting legislation that allow those eligible for the three social assistance programs to fish free. “We don’t need to be charging license fees to people on food stamps who are fishing for their dinner” he said. “North Carolina is better than that.”

Unlike traditional license that can be gotten from one of the many wildlife cooperative agents across the state individuals will need to go to their County DSS office to complete the application. How DSS is going to issue a license is certainly unclear and I suspect will be problematic at first.

Both the Lenoir County social services director and Greene County’s director, Debbie Jones, said it is uncertain how many individuals on assistance will apply for the waiver. The greatest impact will probably be on coastal counties and those counties with large lakes, they said.
“I hope we are not swamped,” Jones, of Greene County, said. “This is a mandated state law that we have to administer without any additional funding or staff.”

This sounds like a great idea but I predict it will not be a smooth transition as they implement it.

The Free Press

On January 1st some significant changes in the laws for anglers in the state of North Carolina will take place. North Carolina will require a salt water fishing license for recreational fisherman

Beginning Jan. 1, 2007, any person 16 and older who wants to fish recreationally in any water designated as coastal and joint waters of North Carolina must purchase a Coastal Recreational Fishing License (CRFL). The N.C. General Assembly passed legislation in 2004 to create a saltwater license, and Governor Mike Easley signed it into law in 2005.

and not to leave the fresh water anglers out those using live baits in their home county will now be required to have a freshwater fishing license.

Beginning Jan. 1, 2007, any person 16 and older fishing in North Carolina’s public waters (excluding private ponds) must have a fishing license. Additionally, anglers fishing with natural bait (i.e., worms, crickets, etc.) will no longer be able to fish in public, inland waters in their county of residence without a license. In 2005, the General Assembly passed new legislation that repealed the “natural bait exemption,” which allowed people to fish in the public, inland fishing waters in their county of residence without a fishing license as long as they were fishing with natural bait.

Now if you are like me and got a North Carolina Lifetime Sportsman or the Fishing License prior to Jan 1st 2006 then you are grandfathered in on the saltwater license. If you bought your lifetime after that date you either need to add the lifetime saltwater fishing or you’ll have to get a license every year. If you go out on charter boats or fish from private piers in most of those cases the owners have the license to cover you so you will not need to obtain a license for those instances but if in doubt better to ask prior to booking the trip.

Links

NC Wildlife Info Page on Saltwater License

NC Division of Marine Fisheries Info Page on Saltwater License

NC Wildlife PDF about Natural Bait Exemption

Last week I started feeling like I was getting a cold and on Tuesday work gave us our season bonus, a free flu shot. I believe the combination of the cold and the shot conspired against me and put me under the weather good. By the end of the week I was dragging big time I felt so bad I didn’t even go hunting on Saturday and I don’t miss many hunting opportunities.
Christmas was a very nice time with family and friends, as I trust everyone else had a good Christmas. Santa brought me some real nice stuff that I’m sure I elaborate more about in future posts.
I’m back and will get things cranking out here once again. We have a lot to talk about with the deer season ending soon, the up coming wildlife district meetings and the proposed changes for the coming year, the winter turkey season, and the Dixie Deer Classic will be here before we know it. So lets close out 06’ and get ready to great the New Year.

A long forgotten gun hanging in an antique shop has lead to found treasure for Scott Musser.

In July, Musser’s wife, Lisa, spotted the musket hanging high up on the wall of an antique store, Pearl of Africa. The $150 price tag was too good to be true and Musser says he wrote off the gun as a fake.
Upon inspection, though, he realized the gun could be worth a good bit of money and haggled the price down to $125.
Musser took it home and pledged to clean up the artifact. He turned to Bates, a gunsmith he found online, when other repairman said they couldn’t fix the musket without damaging it. Bates thought he could and was willing to give it a go, Musser says.

The gun a 1740’s musket has some historical value but it is what they found inside that really adds to the value. It was not unusual for people to store valuables inside the stocks of guns for safe keeping. 6 Months after Scott purchased the gun he had a gunsmith open it up to see what he could do to restore the gun and that’s where they find items belonging to the family that owned the gun.

To be exact, Musser and Douglas Bates, the gunsmith, had discovered four gold, seven silver and six copper coins. Musser says the owner of the Belgian-made musket had also jammed a will and a $5 silk note inside a fragile leather pouch, hidden behind a metal plate on the butt of the stock centuries ago.
The coins date to 1743. The will is dated Jan. 20, 1848. It’s signed by a New Jersey man, the son of a patriot who died in the War of 1812. The family — the Hillmans — has a rich history with ties to the Revolutionary War, maybe even the French and Indian War, Musser says.
Now more than 250 years old, the gun isn’t in pristine condition. A musket ball is lodged in the barrel and Musser repaired the bayonet this fall, a decision that led to the gold’s discovery when the two men first disassembled the gun three weeks ago.
Still, early estimates appraise the gun and collection around $20,000, Musser says.

Not bad for a $125 investment. Here is a link to the rest of the story. So this Christmas when your at those family gatherings if there is an old musket hung on the mantle you may want to pull it down and take it apart to see if it contains some long lost family treasure.

What to do with those ducks after the hunt? I find them to be very tasty and fix a wide variety of dishes with them. Tonight I cooked Stuffed Peppers this is a great dish for those who are unwilling to even try wild game because they may not realize what it is you’ve fixed.

First things is when cleaning waterfowl it is important to make sure you find any wayward shot that is in the meat because nothing is a bigger turn off to a fence sitting wild game eater then that.

To make this dish you need some good size peppers for stuffing, a couple of duck breasts or one goose breast, dirty rice mix, some sausage, onion, oil, and some good seasonings ( I use Buck Gardner’s Jamaican Jerk )

Put a thin coat of oil in cast iron fry pan and heat. Sprinkle seasoning on duck breasts and drop into pan and cook. Follow directions to make dirty rice tonight I didn’t have any sausage to add so I substituted some turkey pepperoni I also reduce the amount of sausage because I’ll be adding the duck.

When the dirty rice is cooked I chop up the duck into small pieces ( This step makes this a great recipe for shot up birds because you are almost certain to find all of the shot) I mix the duck and some onion into the dirty rice mixture.

Peppers should be washed and cut the tops off them and scoop the seeds out. Then stuff the peppers with the dirty rice mixture. I topped them off with some tomato and a little bit of shredded cheese. Bake at 350 for 30 minutes and then enjoy.

The reopening of duck season this past Saturday found me in a layout blind at the waters edge. I was working off a little over two hours sleep because Friday evening I had been to the hockey game. Billy in the blind next to me was in the same boat seeing where he lived in the mountains and left around 2am to join us on the hunt. With the decoys out and the blinds set up there wasn’t much to do but watch the occasional shooting star and to talk to keep us from falling back to sleep.

As we got closer to the appointed hour we started hearing and seeing ducks flying in. Against the sky they were visible but once the dropped into the tree line there was not enough light to see them anymore but seconds latter you would hear the unmistakable splashes as they hit the water. With only minutes before daylight we hoped these first few groups were only the start of many more to come.
As day broke the ducks kept coming and we began shooting. If any of us could have shot that day we would have limited out easily but that was not to be. In years to come the number of ducks we killed will not be what we remember but the sheer number of flights we saw. At one point I counted 20 ducks circling our set up and I bet we saw close to 200 ducks trying to land in that pond. Billy’s puppy made her first retrieve picking up a duck that crashed into the cow pasture behind the blind.

We had a great day despite our poor shooting and the geese once again being a no show. I may not have a goose for Christmas dinner at the rate this season is going.

Rick and his Dog

Today is the one year anniversary of Moose Droppings. I started it out on a great site Heartland Outdoors and learned a lot with the help and encouragement they gave me over there. Heartland does not host blogs anymore but they are still a very involved with blogging and the great outdoors. If you’ve never visited them before you should check them out they are known for giving away great prizes on their site and this month someone is going to win a Coleman Tent.

In May I moved my blog over here to Skinny Moose Media and this has been great. I’ve learned a lot and I continue to try to improve things out here. I’m grateful to all those who stop by and read, those who send me notes or post comments. Your involvement gives life to the blog and encourages me as I hope I encourage you

I see the world of blogging as a emerging field of communication and especially in the areas of the great outdoors we are a small group of bloggers but growing all the time. What will the impact of bloggers be on the future? I’m not sure but I hope it’s a positive one and for me I want to encourage more people to get out and enjoy the great outdoors.

Tomorrow duck and goose season open back up so I’ll be in a blind lying out beside the farmer’s pond. With the weather we are having, suppose to be close to 70’, I wonder if I should pack some sun tan lotion to take with me. Last Saturday it was 12’ when I left the hunt club and the rest of those guys rolled over and went back to sleep because it was to cold. The weather is just crazy and I suspect it will impact the deer hunting as well. I hope to bust some waterfowl early in the day and then chase whitetails the rest. If the duck hunting is slow maybe I’ll go for a swim. I hope this weather gets turned around before Christmas.

Bear sightings are on the rise in the piedmont of North Carolina as the population in the mountains as well as the coast grows. Additionally in the northern part of the piedmont bears from neighboring state of Virginia are migrating southward into those counties. I have seen for myself the tracks of a black bear in Caswell County while I’ve been hunting.
Recently there has been a bear spotted in Stanly County that has some folks out that way concerned. Wildlife officials are urging people to leave the animal alone and it will eventually return to the mountains. Well leaving the bear alone is a great suggestion but counting on this bear to return to the mountains is somewhat of a pipe dream. A bear being spotted this time of the year in a location, especially in the western part of the state, is probably in his home range.

Bears for the most part avoid human contacts, unless trained or programmed to seek food from humans, and can go for a long time without being noticed. I would suggest this is a bear that is now living in the area and unless given a ride by wildlife he’ll not return to the mountains. The relocation of bears rarely works and they often return within a short period of time.
With some basic precautions and some education for human residents often times bears and humans can live in close proximity to one another without much trouble.

Fox 21 News

Living in Bear Country

Black Bears in Residential Areas

University of Colorado has conducted an experiment based on findings in 2004 where fish were changing their gender from male to female.

The 2004 study showed that certain chemicals from pharmaceuticals and personal-care products made it through the Boulder Wastewater Treatment Plant and into Boulder Creek. Ninety percent of the white suckers swimming downstream of the plant were female. Upstream, there was an even split

Scientists have replicated that finding and it should be a concern to all of us. This is supposedly treated water being returned to the creek.

The chemicals are believed to come from excreted birth-control hormones, natural female hormones and detergents flushed down toilets and drains. In the ecosystem, they are known as endocrine disrupters, settling into cell receptors intended for hormones and garbling the body’s chemical communications.

To bolster his evidence, in 2005 Norris and colleague Alan Vajda, a CU research associate, set up the Fish Exposure Mobile in a trailer borrowed from the Colorado Division of Wildlife

The Fish Exposure Mobile, parked next to the creek on sewage treatment plant property, pulls water directly from the plant’s outflow pipe and can dilute it using precise volumes of upstream Boulder Creek water.

Fathead minnows swim in two identical tanks inside, each 200 gallons. One fills with upstream creek water; the other with varying degrees of wastewater plant effluent. Such control lets researchers see how fish react to varying effluent concentrations.

They aimed to create a controlled experiment and confirm if estrogen and other compounds from the treatment plant were responsible for the fish sex change.

“The males were feminized in seven days,” Norris said. “You don’t need a Ph.D. to sex them.”

The males have bumps on the forehead and often attack each other. The fish exposed to the effluent water lost their bumps and acted like girls. It confirmed effluent to be the culprit.

Not normally an alarmist the impact on the environment could be great and one wonders the impact on other creatures that live in and around the creek. It sounds like it’s still early to see if changes will come to waste water discharge to further reduce the levels.

Star Tribune

Photo from Dunn Daily Record

A trip to WalMart and you can get just about anything you need but how about your limit of ducks? A small run off pond in a local Walmart parking lot has become the scene of a hunting controversy not likely seen to many other places. A posting on a local North Carolina message forum where people keep up on the happenings with the PTA, Church bake sale, the best place to buy seeds, and the most recent controversy with a local politician has became a sounding board about a falconer hunting the run off pond. It seems that the pond at the edge of the shopping center parking lot has become a resting spot for ducks making their annual migration and a great spot to turn a bird of prey lose.

There has been much discussion on the forum around the legalities of hunting with the bird in town limits, hunting on private property without permission and so on. These are all debatable issues but the bottom line seems that by doing this sport in the public eye and using “technicalities” to get around the issues it’s just begging for scrutiny and public outcry. Although there will always be those opposed to every form of hunting I suspect that the general public would be fascinated with this hunting style and locations to hunt would not be hard to come by with more then a door knock or two.

The controversy seems to be winding down and a more positive approach is being utilized. In today’s local paper an extensive article about the sport and the two gentleman from this part of the state licensed to keep birds of prey. Although the article does not mention the WalMart controversy it does educate the public about the sport and the birds being used. Hopefully this will lead to a more positive view of falconry among the public and preserve the art of this ancient sport.

NC Falconer’s Guild

I was surprised when I came across a news article out of Texas about how a lawmaker wants to make laser sights legal for blind hunters.

AUSTIN — A state lawmaker wants to make sure no Texan is left out when it comes to hunting, even if the hunter is legally blind.

Rep. Edmund Kuempel, a Seguin Republican, has filed a bill for the 2007 legislative session that would allow legally blind hunters to use a laser sight, or lighted pointing instrument. The devices are forbidden for sighted hunters

Blind hunters would also have to have a sighted hunter along with them, but they could hunt any game that sighted people can hunt in the same seasons and using the same weapons.

I thought it was a bit of a quirky idea and kind of chuckled about it as I posted up on a message forum I frequent.

I was even more surprised when I received an inquiry as to the source of the story because someone knew of someone helping a blind hunter. Check out this story he shared with me “Not By Sight-Blind Ambition Part 1” by Rev Rusty Asble posted on Sportsmen For Christ. I don’t know about anyone else but loss of sight I always figured was one unbeatable obstacle when it comes to hunting. I guess after reading this story I now see the light.