Posts Tagged → blind
Ballistics Lesson #439
Today I learned a ballistics lesson that I have learned before, that everyone under the sun knows, but which I always seem to forget every few years. Maybe it is not forgetting, but curious wondering that gets the better of me. If you are interested in reading about an old man making a foolish mistake, read on.
So late this morning I set out to still hunt a large section of reverting, regenerating forest. It is brutal stuff – blackberry, briars, weeds of every sort, and jungle-thick growth of oak and popar saplings and whips, all anchored in downed tree tops and branches from a timber sale we did about twelve years ago. It is hell to hunt, and that is why this place is full of hiding deer. So, we go to where the deer are, and if we do it right, we can still-hunt our way into close range of a fat doe or a decent buck just rising out of his bed.
When I finally got there after a fifteen minute hike, the wind was howling, tree branches were falling, leaves were flying, and the couple inches of snow on the ground made it all perfect. And so I set out very slowly walking into the wind, taking a few steps, then stopping to look all around, watching not to step on any big sticks that would make a loud crack, and also moving quickly when the wind raged. My own movements and sounds were masked by the crazy roaring winds and falling tree debris from above.
After about ten minutes of slowly picking my way downhill and into the wind, I was looking at a nice juicy doe. Probably two years old and plump, she was just 25 yards away and looking around. She probably was getting brief whiffs of me, but in the blasting seesawing winds she was not able to get a read on where the scent was coming from. Too late for her, I raised the rifle and bang, watched her standing there, unfazed. A clear miss.
Levering another round into the chamber, I took more careful aim at her, now acutely aware of the chunky backpack strap on my shoulder that was making it difficult to correctly anchor the buttstock to my cheek. With her right shoulder clearly centered in the ghost ring, I pulled the trigger and again, watched as she just stood there, stock still and unable to detect where the strange sounds and smells were coming from.
As I jacked a third round in, she suddenly jumped up and took off running fast, downhill, her head pointed low and her tail tucked. She was obviously hit by the second shot, but usually the 325 grain 45-70 caliber bullets just absolutely smash critters at that close range. I know from my own experience. But this running after the smashing blow was a new one to me.
And so I took my time to catch up to her clear trail in the leaves and snow. I searched around on the ground and found the two spent brass shells ejected from the Marlin, shook off the snow, and put them in my left front pocket.
Initially, no blood was visible, but her feet were going in all directions as she staggered. She was hard hit and struggling. A hundred yards later, large smudges of blood and hair appeared on trees. Then blood on the snow. Another hundred yards and we were out of the more open forest regeneration and back into the thick jungle. Her clumsy hoof marks were easy to see, and here and there was blood. This animal was dying and did not know it. At every turn I expected to find her lying there, expired. So much indication of impending death, and yet so much resilience to live on.
The long and short of this tale is, I ended up tracking her for over an hour, which is an eternity. During this time I had bedded deer up and running in all directions, including a large buck. If you really want deer, the thick, nasty, gnarly places are where they are hiding. But I was after this one wounded doe, and I had no eyes for any others, including one that stood up almost in front of me. After quickly checking that she was not bleeding, I let her leave.
Doing a 360 degree circle around where her last blood sign was located, I determined that she was either dead or close to dying in a large tangle of old rotting tree tops covered in Japanese stiltgrass, burdock, mile-a-minute, bramble, and briar. Nasty, difficult, not a place for a man to easily or comfortably move in, I marked where she was and moved on to the afternoon sit a mile away. Tomorrow morning I will return and find her frozen body. Unless the coyotes get to her first, she will feed a hungry family here in Central PA.
After withstanding the afternoon’s buffeting winds and feeling colder than I have in years on the edge of the crop field, I finally gathered my kit, ducked out of my friend’s blind, and headed back to the truck. He later sent me a trail camera picture of the local deer herd walking out into the crop field literally one minute after I had exited the blind. They knew I was there and were just waiting for me to leave.
Back home I emptied my pockets onto the kitchen island, including the two empty 45-70 brass cases I had emptied at the doe. Picking them up to look at them, I noticed that one of them had the Hornady stamp, and the other bore the Star Line stamp. I use the factory 325 grain Hornady FTX bullets for bear and deer hunting (very successfully with both species), and I reload the Star Line with 325 grain brass solids, from Cutting Edge Bullets, for grizzly self defense in Alaska and for black bear hunting here in Pennsylvania. Especially on drives through the laurel. These brass solids will absolutely and unstoppably smash their way through a tough grizzly bear with its heavy bones and super tough muscles, but they will ziiiiip right through a whitetail deer.
And suddenly it dawned on me. I had first overshot and missed the doe with the Hornady FTX, and then literally drilled her body through-and-through with the brass solid second shot. I had jumbled up the two loads in my pockets, and when loading the rifle I had failed to put a second Hornady FTX round in the gun as the initial followup shot. Instead, I had a grizzly bear load as the followup shot, and as one might expect, the grizzly bear load did not kill the doe on the spot. Nope. That brass solid at 2100 feet per second just zipped cleanly through her entire body like a small laser beam. None of its energy was dumped into her by the bullet mushrooming, with massive terminal shock, as the FTX is designed to do.
And only then, when back at home, did I understand why the doe had reacted that way, how she took a few seconds to realize that something bad had happened to her, but that while fatal, it was not something that was going to kill her dead right there. She was only mostly dead from the brass solid. By now, as I write this, she is most assuredly frozen solid in that tangled hell that I will go back to tomorrow morning. Hopefully the coyotes will not have found her.
Had I used the correct expanding bullet, I would have had nothing to write about tonight. It would have been just another successful slow stalk through the thick ‘n nasty, with the rifle butt up at my shoulder, the hammer back, and me ready to jump shoot a deer.
Instead, I had to re-learn a rudimentary ballistics lesson, which is if you want to kill thin skinned game, use expanding bullets that transfer all of their energy into the prey animal’s body. If you shoot a high velocity scalpel at the prey animal, it will cleanly and surgically cut it, even make neat clean holes through bones, but that wound might not bleed much and the animal might not know it is supposed to be dead until it has run a long distance away from the man with the gun, and into impossible cover.
Sign like this, blood smear and hair at deer chest height, says this is a dead deer running.
A 325 grain solid brass Cutting Edge Bullets 45-70 load I make for grizzly in Alaska is a terrible backup load for whitetail deer
PA is at Peak Rut, so just do it
I drove through farmland, mountains, and valleys a couple days ago, and I swear to you, no lie, I saw a huge stud buck out in every field I went by. Half were alone, half were with a doe. Some of these monsters were standing close to the highway, which explains why the highways I drove on were littered with dead bucks from car collisions.
We have deer literally coming out of our ears. And not just any deer, but freaking huge trophy bucks that were unimaginable when I was a kid, and an adult. These are trophy animals by any standard, whether you hunt in Illinois, Ohio, Iowa, or Indiana.
Twenty four years ago, Pennsylvania entered uncharted waters and started a new deer management program. I was peripherally involved as a mostly bystander with field level fifty yard line seats. The PA Game Commission’s new deer management methodology was biologically sound, but untested in modern times. And because it involved axe murdering about fifty percent or more of the standing doe population, and setting aside all the small bucks, almost every old timer hunter went into a kiniption fit.
Families fell apart, PGC commissioners and staff wore bulletproof vests to PGC board meetings, people’s tires were slashed, hunting clubs dissolved, and for about fifteen years PA’s political map was turned upside down. Go ahead and laugh all you flatlanders, go ahead, yuk it up. What a bunch of rubes, what a bunch of rednecks and hayseed hillbillies…who in their right mind cares about deer management so much that literally our state politics got turned upside down?
Fun fact: Hunting in Pennsylvania is about a $1.5 Billion annual industry, and maybe more than that. Hunting is a sustainable, renewable, ecologically sound industry. For just a few months a year. So a lot is at stake when changes are made to the hunting system. It isn’t just hillbilly farmers who like to hunt who are impacted by hunting regulations here, it is literally every small rural town that has a restaurant or two, the deer processors, the hunting clothing manufacturers. Hunting in PA is big business.
So when I say that I saw all these huge bucks the other day, it means that the PGC deer management program, which began with a small mushroom cloud in 2000, is now working as planned like a Swiss watch. You don’t get to see government actually do positive things very often, or implement policies that work, but in this instance we did, we do. The PA Game Commission deserves a lot of credit for both using sound biology AND stoically enduring the brutal politics that followed.
Right now PA is at peak rut, meaning the bucks are in full rut, horned up and lookin’ for love. Like all stupid men chasing tail, huge bucks that are otherwise almost impossible to get near (because they are smart as hell) can now easily find themselves broadside to a bow and arrow at fifteen yards. So go do it, git yerself sum.
May I recommend a few things?
First, whatever skills you developed in the early archery season, they are now only partly applicable. Because rutting bucks are wanderers, the bucks you scouted and marked down in October could be the next county over. This means that you cannot just set up over a trail and wait. You need to lure in the wandering bucks, and that can be done with doe pee (https://kirschnerdeerlure.com/ get the SilverTop), a sparingly used grunt call, or rattling antlers. This also means that bucks from the next county over will be wandering around where you hunt.
Second, work hard on concealing your blinds. Especially your ground blinds. Man, nothing is more garish and glaring than a poorly concealed ground blind. I see guys just setting a blind out in the open and hoping a deer won’t notice. But guys, come on, the deer might now see you inside the blind, but THEY CAN SEE YOUR BLIND and they are spooked by it. It is an unnatural thing on the landscape. So tuck your blind back into the edge of the woods and brush it in well, so that it blends in with the surroundings.
Happy hunting, and just do it, get yourself one of PA’s unbelievable trophy bucks wandering around hill and dale right now. And do not forget to thank PGC personnel when you see them, because they are the ones who implemented the outstanding deer management policy that we are all benefiting from now.
Advice from a deer
As sure as the sun rises, there is sure to be complaining among hunters about the state, condition, blood pressure, and dental hygiene of Pennsylvania’s deer herd. In fact, you can’t escape the topic if you spend any time, like even a minute or two, in the company of devoted hunters. No matter who I am standing around, next to, or in line with, the complaints begin to flow about the Pennsylvania Game Commission and its deer management.
Despite being highly skeptical about government in general, and therefore despite keeping an open mind to complaints about government failings, I find myself repeatedly unpersuaded by these deer management complaints. While not quite ranking up there with UFO sightings or insistence that PGC has helicopter-imported mountain lions and coyotes to eat the deer, the fretting and nail biting and angry denunciations always seem to lack key aspects of any serious argument.
For example, for twenty years I have heard that Sproul State Forest harbors no deer. Then last year I easily killed a deer standing right at the edge of Sproul State Forest, and saw many others. This November, I hunted elk in Sproul State Forest and State Game Lands 100 in northern Centre County, and found myself endlessly surrounded by deer, from dawn until way past bed time while driving. Conventional views that these deer do not exist are easily reinforced around bar stools, but I have found them easily and quickly disproven in personal contact with the deer habitat itself.
One of the real challenges to Pennsylvania deer hunters is the change in deer herd size and behavior since 2001, as well as the maturing of our forests since the 1970s, when a lot of today’s older hunters were really getting into the lifestyle. A hunting culture based on sitting in one place and watching unsustainably sized deer herds migrate by resulted, and now that most rural deer herds have been lowered, just sitting and waiting is not enough. Especially when the mature forests we now experience are devoid of any acorns for the second year in a row.
In 2021 a late frost killed the oak flowers in northern PA, resulting in no acorns up north and spotty acorn crops in the south. In 2022, rampant gypsy moth infestations across the entire state denuded entire oak forests of every leaf and flower, which has again resulted in zero acorn production across a great deal of Pennsylvania’s forests. If you are inclined to blame people for things that are mostly out of people’s control, then I suppose we can point out that PA DCNR seemed to hold back on gypsy moth spraying in 2021 and 2022. Had DCNR sprayed more, then the state-wide acorn crop failure we now behold probably would not have been as bad.
The fact is that a great many of us started sitting or walking in beautiful mature forests this past Saturday or Sunday as PA’s deer rifle season opened up, and found ourselves marveling at the incredible silence greeting us. Hardly any bird activity. Maybe one squirrel seen all day, and certainly no bears and few if any deer. This is the result of there being nothing for anyone to eat in the woods.
So, unless your woods escaped gypsy moth damage and has acorns, get the heck out of the woods and go find brushy and grassy areas where deer can browse. Utility rights-of-way and clearcuts are the best places to find deer this season, and in fact the only person I know of who killed a deer anywhere near me yesterday (Sunday) was an older guy in a deer drive through a beautifully overgrown overhead powerline right of way. His hunting party also reported seeing eight does with the now deceased buck, none of which they shot.
Yesterday, while I was sitting miserably sick in my covered stand and waiting out the miserable cold rain and wind, a deer in a top hat and silk gloves happened by and gave me the following advice:
In general, access your hunting area well before sunrise and start every deer hunt with a quiet Sit from 6:30-9am, overlooking some promising travel corridor, funnel, or feeding area. Then slowly and quietly Still Hunt into the wind or quartering into the wind until lunch time. Then Sit down and eat lunch quietly, while overlooking some promising location through which wildlife regularly pass or eat. At 1pm pack up the lunch stuff and Still Hunt again slowly until 3:30pm, and then find a good spot with good views and shooting lanes and Sit quietly until 15 minutes before shooting light ends. Then slowly and quietly walk out, and maybe kill something on your way back to your vehicle or camp, only unloading your firearm when shooting hours have officially ended.
I myself am about to suit up for a long and slow stalk through some brushy utility rights of way. Yes, they are now wet, and always steep, and the going is tough. But that is where the deer are, because that is where they can eat and survive, and I am hunting deer so that I might actually kill one.
The deer and I must meet in person in order for this transaction to happen.
As much as a covered hunting blind may be a necessity when the hunter is sick or the rain is pouring down, the fact is this not really hunting. Slowly and quietly walking into the wind through good deer habitat with your firearm at the ready is real hunting. Do it.
Should you hen call now to gobblers?
Spring turkey season is just a few weeks away, and a TON of spring gobbler (male turkey) hunters are about to pee in their pants right now, with increasing anticipation and excitement, every time they think about being out in the woods and tangling with a long beard Tom.
In Pennsylvania, any wild turkey that has a beard of any length is a legal bird to take in the month of May. The way we hunt them here is the hunter takes up a stationary position and calls, in order to lure the mate-seeking Tom turkey into shotgun or bow range. Using hand-held tail fans and stalking birds is illegal in Pennsylvania, because we have a ton of hunters and these two methods – hiding behind a turkey tail fan and trying to sneak up on gobbling birds – is a sure fire way to end up wounded or dead. Better to err on the side of safety, and so we hunt from stationary places, either on our butts up against a tree or from inside a man-made blind.
Because of the growing excited anticipation and the desire to locate wary gobblers before the season starts, some guys, and yes, it’s always guys because women are too smart and too mature to behave this way, will go out into the woods or even drive up and down roads, calling out the window(s) of their vehicles. They are trying to get the gobblers to gobble back at them.
Why do they spend their time this way? The official reason is they are verrrry professional hunters trying to locate their quarry ahead of time, so they can be the first to hang their harvest tag on one. Because hunting is competitive, ya know… (and not fun).
The real reasons guys behave like this are [WARNING – Adult themes ahead] a) guys of all ages and incomes are easily capable of becoming temporary morons for the flimsiest reasons, and for some reason hunting and fishing seem to teem with these flimsy reasons, and b) guys like easy stimulation.
To wit, older people might remember the drive-in theaters that once littered the countryside of Pennsylvania, and how in the 1970s and 1980s in addition to showing family classics like Chitty Chitty Bang Bang, they also broadcast fully XXX-rated hardcore porn (often mockingly named after legit movies like Chitty Chitty Bang Bang…use your imagination here) on their gigantic screens for the entire township to see every weekend night. Sure, if you paid to enter the parking lot you got the best view of the giant drive-in movie screen. But if you were cheap, broke, especially rambunctious with your girlfriend, or usually just lonely, some guys would find parking spots outside of the drive-in perimeter where they could watch the no-no movies and ummmmm…pleasure themselves.
And this is exactly what is going on with guys calling to gobblers pre-season, particularly from their vehicles on public roads. Guys will drive by private land that has a field or two, or a good wood lot that can hold a Tom turkey, slow down, lean out their vehicle window, and start cackling or cutting hen sounds to try to elicit a mating response from a nearby gobbler. And when the gobbler responds they get into a sexually frenzied calling match that leaves both human and bird exhausted and confused, with nothing to show for it.
Don’t do it. It is embarrassing for the human, and worse, it makes the turkeys call-shy, which hurts all hunters. Because the more that gobbler hears and responds to hens that never materialize, or who are not there when he suddenly shows up to mate with them, the less inclined he is to believe subsequent calls when the season is actually in. The more wary he is likely to be, the less likely he is to come in to your calls.
Yeah, we know, you need some action now. Need to get your cheap jollies. Deer season ended in January and you’ve just been dyin‘ for something to happen ever since. Trout season doesn’t do it for you, and besides, you just get such a silly thrill when you hear those birds hammer back at your calls from the road. And that is the portrait of a guy, right there, in all of his pathetic weakness. Kind of like a gullible young Tom that runs right into gun range of a bad turkey caller.
On the other hand, women hunters are the stronger of our species. They are spending their time peeling potatoes, dicing carrots, mincing onions, and choosing white wine for their roast wild turkey they are going to harvest and cook. Because when the season finally opens, and women hunters step into the field to begin calling to gobblers, they will not be calling to birds they have foolishly turned call-shy ahead of time, and they will probably fill their tags right away.