Posts Tagged → blind
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.