The Meat Hunt

A few weeks ago my buddy Brian (NC St8) called me wanting to know if I was up for a Game Lands Hunt? Sure I said that should be fun. Part of me questioned my sanity about agreeing to this hunt. My only hope was that NC St8 could find a few others to join us so we could spread the fun around.

NC St8 is a fun guy to hunt with but probably one of the luckiest / unluckiest hunter I’ve ever come across. He’ll get his critter (lucky part) but along the way he’ll have a calamity of errors (unlucky part) that you wouldn’t believe could befall one individual. With that as the backdrop I knew this was going to be an adventure and if we lived there would be some stories to tell.

This has become somewhat of a tradition with a few of us from the website ( NC Hunt & Fish) that we get together one day during the week of Muzzle Loader season and hike into a secret spot on the Game Lands and have a meat hunt.

Being public land that gets hammered pretty hard this is the best time to connect with something because you can take both antlered and antlerless deer. Next week when the regular firearm season rolls in it is antlered deer only till around Christmas time when does become legal to hunt again. This is a stock your freezer adventure and pretty much “if it’s brown it’s down “type of hunt.

We hike in a pretty good distance with the nearest stand more than a mile from the parking area. This year there was four of us ; NC St8, Quiet But Deadly (QBD), Jay Bird, and myself. With 3 carts to haul our stands and blinds we begin the hike in. The temperatures are cool and it’s misting a bit a much better situation then opening day when I hunted in hot & humid conditions.

I set up my blind in a grove of oak trees mostly reds but a few whites to make it interesting and settle in for the hunt. I spend the afternoon watching squirrels and birds enjoying the oak grove. I have a pretty uneventful but enjoyable afternoon in nature.

The first shot of the afternoon belongs to Jay Bird but he has less than perfect ignition and the deer bounds away unharmed. The misty dampness obviously got to his powder preventing him from connecting on the doe.

QBD has an afternoon much like mine where the squirrels entertained him he does see a deer but can’t get a shot. It’s looking like we are going to get skunk but with just a few minutes left in the hunt NC St8 gets a shot.

Moments later I get a call from him telling me that he shot a buck but he couldn’t find any blood but he heard the deer crash. By now it is the end of legal light so I tell him once we get our stuff together we’ll be down. I pack up my stuff and head to the meeting spot. Jay Bird and QBD are coming down another trail to the meeting spot. We decide to hide our equipment and bring just what we will need to track a deer and start heading towards NC St8.

We find NC St8 in the woods looking for where he left his stand and stuff when he went to track his deer. The good news is that he lucked out and found his deer despite not being able to find “much blood”. While we found it somewhat funny that he laid his equipment down and now the dark woods looked pretty much all alike we helped him search for his stuff. It took about 10 minutes or so and he stumbled upon it. Great now to get back out to the trail and go get his deer.

His deer was only about 200 yards from where he shot it and it was really close to the trail. Once we got in there we started back tracking from the deer to learn from the blood trail. There was a pretty good blood trail but without good lights it was difficult to see. QBD talked about how Coleman Lanterns are really one of the best items to use when blood trailing but folks rarely uses them these days. We ribbed NC St8 about not finding “much blood” especially in a couple of places where it looked like it someone poured it out.

Gutting the deer with 3 experts offering advice, holding legs, and shinning lights while none of us offering to gut it for him seemed to make NC St8 a bit nervous. Let’s just say we laughed pretty well while NC ST8 did the gutting job as a light rain fell. Some how he completed the job with all his fingers still attached.

We had a 45 minute hike to our trucks so we got rolling. It was about 9pm when we finally got back to the trucks. I swear someone added a few hills to the trail while we were in there hunting. Once at the trucks I offer to let NC St8 use my game hoist that hooks into my trailer hitch to cut the deer up. He rejects my offer wanting to get home and use his hoist there to finish cutting his deer up.

NC St8 had one more lucky / unlucky event in regards to this hunt after we all split up and went home. I guess his hoist snapped at the house and he barely escaped injury and a trip to an emergency room. I bet he wished he used my hoist.

We had a great hunt; lots of laughs, some great sights, and spending times with friends. We all got out of the woods with all our limbs so I guess it was a very successful hunt. Besides once again NC St8 is the only one to tag a deer…. he is one lucky dude.

Coffee and Hunting

Nothing goes better with a hunt then a great cup of coffee and on a cold morning just about any cup will do. I’m a big coffee drinker and I often will carry a thermos with me to the blind or stand or leave one in the truck to retrieve later.

Now I remember a few very memorable bad cups of coffee on some hunting trips.
I recall a number of years ago when my buddy Jon and I were driving from Maine to Maryland for a deer hunt stopping early in the morning at a Cumberland Farms in Southern Massachusetts and getting a very thick like molasses cup that had a very strong burnt taste. It did its job because we stayed awake arguing about how long it been since that pot had been brewed I think we agreed it was probably about 3 days old.

Now there was one hunting trip where I got two of the worst cups of coffee ever and that was our combination pheasant / duck hunt in Iowa. On the drive out we stopped in a small town in Illinois I believe and checked into a hotel in the wee hours of the morning to get some rest. As we were getting ready to turn in a freight train rolled by the motel sounding its horn and rocking the motel which we thought was funny but that was short lived after about an hour and two more trains rolled through. Needless to say I didn’t get much sleep and I needed a cup of coffee that morning. I grabbed one in the motel lobby as we continued our drive to Iowa. I was barely out of the parking lot when I pitched that rancid thing out the window. I told Billy it tasted like it been filtered through a dirty wool hunting sock.

A few days later on our hunt Billy and I were sitting in a duck blind on a pretty cool Iowa morning. Our good friend Rick had brewed the coffee that morning and filled all our thermoses. Well wanting a cup to help warm us up after a few hours of hunting we tried drinking that stuff and it was horrible. I believe he may have filled the filter completely up because it was strong. Luckily I had a bag of M&M’s in my pack so I poured them into the thermos and shook it up good and made us a Cappuccino right there in the field. It was not great but it made it drinkable.

Well if you haven’t figured it out coffee is pretty important to me and I drink a lot of it. In my opinion as far as coffee goes around here Dunkin Donuts has the best followed by Caribou Coffee and the Starbucks. The worst cup of coffee hands down goes to McDonald’s, I’d stop in a Cumberland Farms if there was any around here before McDonalds.

This all leads me up to the Starbucks taste test this weekend. In case you didn’t know Starbucks has introduced an instant coffee, Starbucks Via, that they claim is as good as the brewed coffee. Well I had to check this out because I had my doubts. I’ll give them credit it is pretty good, very close to the brewed coffee. I picked it out without a problem but it was darn close. I’ll be adding some to my hunting gear so even if I’m in Trainville Illinois, a cold duck blind in Iowa, or traveling through the badlands of Southern Massachusetts a good cup of coffee is only a cup of boiling water away.

Moose Goes Shopping

Stopped at Bass Pro and glad to see they got some motorized shopping carts to help me haul my loot around the store.

Photo of the Day: Typical Day Afield

One of those photos that tells a story. I don’t know who the originator is but hit my inbox and I thought it was funny.

Moose Vs. The Wiley Coyote

About a week ago I promised to tell a story about coyotes. My father in law was having something stealing figs off his trees and I suspected deer. He set up a game camera and to our surprise it was coyotes. We knew they were around because they have been seen a time or two but now we knew they were eating the figs. I hunt his land often, mostly killing deer as of yet the turkeys haven’t moved in and with coyotes around it could delay them taking up residency. I don’t like to compete with other hunters so these yotes got to go.
A week ago this past Saturday I was out at the property before day break and set up quickly to see if I could get a coyote to show himself. I set up a blind, had a fawn decoy, fawn in distress call and my trusty shotgun with buckshot. 10 minutes into the hunt I realized I forgot the most important thing….THE THERMACELL. The skeeters tore me up.

After about an hour I realized that only hawks and crows were going to come to the calls. The sun was getting up and it was getting warm plus I was down at least a quart of blood so I called it a hunt. I was disappointed that I hadn’t even seen the coyote but I guess he wasn’t interested in a deer dinner. Later that day I was talking to my brother telling him about the coyote and how I struck out trying to call him. I lamented the fact that no matter how hard I looked in the Cabela’s catalog I couldn’t find a Fig Call.
Well my ever helpful brother told me I should sing the Fig Newton song and about an hour latter this video hit my box. I’ll get that coyote but don’t look for me to do a song and dance routine to get him.

How Much Will I Miss Senator Kennedy?

No Sir Probably not that much. LOL
Some gallows humor on my part. Got to admit he was a strong liberal that support causes that I certainly opposed and feel would destroy our great country. Misguided till the end…. now part of the history of this great country. RIP Teddy

You Might Not Otter Be Swimming Here

Brigitte France an Austrian on vacation in Wisconsin had a rather unusual wildlife encounter the other day. It seems that Brigitte was out for her customary morning swim when a trio of otters seemed to take exception to her morning swim.

“For 14 years, I swim in that lake,” Brigitte France said in a telephone interview Tuesday. “I like to swim long distances. I swim close to shore so I could get out if something happens.”
When she heard the hissing last Wednesday morning, she turned in the water and saw an otter poking its head out of the water.
“I thought it was really cool,” she said. “I’d never seen an otter before. Then, all of a sudden, there were three of them.”
The otters dived and popped up farther out in the lake. France resumed swimming.
“All of a sudden, one of the otters popped up just a couple meters from me, next to me,” said France, an elementary school teacher. “That made me feel uncomfortable. I decided to get out of the water. I swam right to the bank, about 3 or 4 meters away from me.”
The trouble began just as she approached the lake shore.
“I had my hands on the ground,” she said, “and there they were — one on the right leg and one on the left leg.”
The otters bit her eight or nine times, she said.
“I shook my legs, and they went away,” France said.
She says she remained calm as the otters bit her and that the bites “never really hurt much.”
She believes the otters were adults.

Duluth News Tribune

While I’m sure at the time this was no laughing matter the unusualness of this story along with the mental images of someone getting chased by a group of otters is somewhat amusing. The story does not make it sound like Wisconsin authorities plan to do anything about these otter ruffians but Mrs. France is undergoing the multiple rabies shot regiment. On the bright side she otter have some great stories to share with family and friends when she returns home to Austria next week.

Hen Pecked

This past weekend I didn’t have much luck trying to fill one of my two turkey tags and to be honest this is shaping up to be a tough season. I was hunting our lease in Alamance County which is mostly fields so we have to utilize blinds rather than running and gunning. I was sitting in the blind with some decoys out when I called a hen in to the spread.
She came in real quiet and caught me by surprise coming through some high grass. Not knowing if she was a hen or a gobbler I first grabbed my gun but when she came out it was clear to see she was a hen. There was nothing else with her so I picked up my camera but not fast enough to catch her surprising move.
The hen ran up to the Jake decoy and pecked him a couple of times in the head. Not getting the reaction she expected she seemed confused by the decoys. She never got near the hens and she slowly turned and left the field.
Kind of a funny experience and something I’ve never seen. I’ve seen gobblers go after the Jake decoys but never a hen.
Hopefully I’ll find her boyfriend real soon.

For All You Atkins Diet Folks Looking For A Little Variety

Seems like I’ve run into a number of folks doing the Atkins Diet lately and in case you don’t know the Atkins Diet avoids Carbs and focuses on eating protein. I got to imagine that for some folks the lack of variety may contribute to falling off the wagon so to speak. Well I’ve stumbled across a unique snack food that will certainly appeal to the outdoor types. Big Foot Jerky or Sasquatch Jerky. Supplies are limited so make sure you get your order in soon. Also tell them O’le Moose Sent Ya.

NC State Gets a Real Wolf Pack

The Centennial Campus of North Carolina State University and the surrounding community are overwhelmed with the burgeoning deer herd that basically grows unchecked in the natural habitat within a very urban environment of Raleigh North Carolina. A plan to allow bow hunting to help control this growing problem has been met with much opposition over the past few years so a new plan has been devised. This past year a student wrote up a proposal to use a small semi free roaming pack of wolves to help control the deer population. Under this project wolves will be fitted with a GPS equipped collar and a shocking device that will discourage them from leaving the campus.
Petsafe a company that makes the Invisible Fence for homeowners to keep their pets in the yard is underwriting much of the funding for this project.

In our continuing effort to improve our product the next generation of Invisible Fence will utilize GPS and eliminate the need for underground wiring. We see this as a good test of our new system as well as way to open up new marketing avenues for our products

Today with the collaboration of North Carolina Wildlife Resources Commission and the North Carolina State University three wolves were released with these special collars in a remote area near the new golf course that is under construction on Centennial Campus. For the first few months of this project wildlife biology students and NCWRC staff will provide round the clock surveillance and intervene should a problem arise. Wolves will hunt mostly at night and they also naturally fear man so conflicts are not expected.

In an exclusive interview with outspoken wolf critic Tom Remington he told me;

Boulderdash these are lethal weapons that have been turned loose on the citizens of Raleigh. There are a number of documented cases of wolves attacking humans and besides this is really just a publicity stunt. Next we’ll see President Obama forcing Chevy out of NASCAR

I asked Gabe Karnes noted wildlife researcher and graduate of NC State for his reaction

I’ve heard of Tom Remington and he is the “Henny Penny” of the wolf debate, to him the sky is always falling. This is a proud day here at NC State I was part of the research Team that laid out much of the groundwork to bring this project together. I was surprised at first ,but after I thought about it not, when our surveys showed a very positive response from the general public to use wolves to control the problem. NC State is synonymous with the wolf pack so having a small one here on the Centennial Campus seems very fitting.

Will continue to follow this story as it develops. Other stories I’m working on the Vatican is sending a delegation of priests to help the city of Durham rid themselves of the devil problems they are having. As well as the town of Buies Creek has announced a new “Green Public Transportation System” that utilizes camels.

Poor Economy Leads To DOT Striping of Road Kill in Louisiana

Louisiana DOT earlier this month painted right over the dead carcass of a recently killed raccoon while remarking the highway. While it is unknown when the coon met it’s demise Louisiana DOT is certain of when the body was painted and budget cuts at DOT are to blame for this incident.

DOTD officials have confirmed, after nearly two weeks, that it was one of their crews that striped over the dead raccoon on La. 1 in the St. Charles community near Thibodaux.
“Obviously, it’s embarrassing for us,” Mark Lambert, spokesman for the DOTD said. “It’s unfortunate.”
The raccoon, which met its demise at an unknown earlier date, received its postmortem striping about 3 p.m. March 5 when a DOTD road crew was painting yellow striping along La. 1.
The procedure used to involve three vehicles. The lead vehicle would help anticipate traffic, as well as help remove dead animals or other debris from the road. The second vehicle lays stripes down the middle of the road, while the trailing vehicle cautions oncoming traffic.
However, in an effort to maximize efficiency, the Transportation Department got rid of the lead vehicle, leaving the responsibility of removing road kill to the striping vehicle.
The striping vehicle has to drive at a certain speed without stopping unless there is a safety issue because it is calibrated to stripe the roads at certain points. That means, even if the crew sees an animal in the middle of the road, workers are supposed to stripe over it with the intention of going back and removing it later.
That didn’t happen in the case of the striped raccoon.

Houma Today

I guess in the overall scheme of things striping road kill is a cost cut we may all have to learn to live with. I guess if you can spread the road kill out evenly you can make a passing zone.

Did You Hear This One… An Elk Walks Into A Bar….

Photo by Bill Johnson

Well not exactly a joke but extremely odd that this elk is running around Eagle County Colorado with a bar stool stuck on her neck.

Wildlife officers are aware of the elk’s problem, but haven’t been able to get close enough to tranquilize the elk and remove the extra headgear.
“It is not usual to have this happen to a cow elk,” DOW officer Randy Hampton said. “With bull elk, we run to that situation commonly where they wiill get stuff tangled up in their antlers.”

While the bar stool does not appear to be hurting the elk in any way it can’t be too comfortable. Hopefully they’ll be able to capture and free her from the stool or she gets free on her own.

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