Posts Tagged → hit
Dogs vs. Drones in hunting recovery, part 1
If you hunt, you are going to end up tracking at some point.
Like it or not, even fatally hit deer, bear, especially elk, sheep, and other wild game animals can and often do run before they expire. Every single deer that I have shot through the heart has run at least 100 yards, sometimes two hundred, despite being mortally hit and having zero chance of recovering. Shot through the heart, a mammal is kaput, done for, 86ed, iced and dead. Nonetheless, all can run while the hydraulic fluid exits.
And the same holds true for animals hit through both lungs with an arrow, a shotgun slug, a bullet, a spear blade, or a round ball from a historic muzzleloader: All game animals can run, many will run, even while they are mortally hit and dying even more with each bound or step.
So, tracking hit game animals is as important a skill as is shooting them accurately with whatever your weapon of choice. Yes, deer often fall over and expire after being hit once, and that’s great if it happens for you. But for a lot of hunters, it just does not happen that way, and the critter runs a bit.
Depending upon the topography and ground cover of your happy hunting ground, your tracking job might be easy or it might be hard. Depending upon your tracking experience, your hunger pangs, your patience, your tiredness, and the amount of ground cover you have to fight your way through, this tracking job might be even harder.
When tracking gets hard to do, we hunters have four options: Call buddies to help us do a checkerboard search, use a buddy’s hunting dog to try to sniff out the hit animal, which rarely works in my experience, three use a drone with experienced operator, or four, bring in a dedicated tracking dog and handler.
Option one, hunting buddies, is the most common way to track down a hit animal. And it is generally successful. Most people just call in whoever is hunting with them, or whoever they know who is closest, and together they start on the expected path of the critter. Many hands make short work, and regardless of whether it is a night time recovery with headlamps or a brutal daytime slog busting through thorny brush, the more people a hunter has helping, the faster and better likelihood of success.
Option two, any dog, or even a “hunting” dog, almost never works. Yes, dogs can smell way better than us humans, but so what does that matter when the dog is excitedly sniffing and chasing every wild animal track it encounters? I recall using my friend’s duck dog to try to track down a gobbler whose head my Remington 870 had literally severed from its body. The headless beast ran unerringly straight across the field to the worst tangle of brambles, deadfalls, timber tops, regenerating forest, and Asian bittersweet on planet Earth, and then took wing. I have had some real bad luck with doorknob-dead turkeys running and flying away, but this one was the craziest example.
I drove to my friend’s house, got his dog Ori (my friend was at work), and drove back to the scene of first contact. Neck feathers and blood were all around where the load of #5s had separated the head from the body, and indeed, Ori started out strong there. She followed the running scent track into the jungle, and went into creep mode. Looked very promising. We stopped at a couple trees along our way, where she looked up the tree expectedly. I looked up too, because hey, I was just the puny human here among mystical animals with superhuman powers. I was just following directions.
Despite following a flight pattern, which has no scent that I can imagine, Ori took me on a pretty straight line through that jungle mess, that in fact directionally tracked with how the bird had run across the field. And also to her credit, at one tree blood and feathers showed where the turkey had crashed into the trunk. How she found that, I can’t imagine. At another tree, Ori found where the headless bird had lain or fallen at the base. I thought surely by now this bird is lying dead right around here. But the certainly dead turkey was nowhere to be found. Gone, vamoosed, vanished.
Another time, we used the purported “hunting” dog of the man whose son had hit a doe right before closing time. Scene of the hit was easy to see, and the initial tracking was easy. We hung bits of tissue paper along the blood trail and followed what projected as a straight death run.
Dark fell upon us, but blood was everywhere, the path seemed self evident, the deer was obviously hard hit, and our feeble head lamps gave us the impression that we could see. But no luck. The dog was then got from home and brought in. He started out on the actual blood trail, but then started going off in wide tangents. We quit at midnight, shaking our heads. When we returned the next morning, that damned dead doe was lying a few feet away from where several of us searchers, AND THAT DAMNED DOG, had walked many times the night before. It just blended in with the forest floor, and the dog’s nose never picked it up.
So, don’t waste your time with option two, a dog not trained to track wounded game, unless you enjoy telling hunting stories of woe and frustration.
Part Two on Dogs vs Drones coming up soon.
Flintlock season recap
- Gunmaker Mark Wheland with the gun of my dreams, a flintlock English Sporting Rifle made just for me
Writing a blog is a delicate walk, because as much as I want to write about the righteous boss daddy treatment President Trump gave to weasel rat dictator Zelensky the other day, I have to stay focused on what our audience of exactly One Person has requested. If I turn off my one reader, then I will literally be writing solely for the air and the stars.
For the record, just because you or I call Zelensky (Ukraine) the weasel rat dictator he is, does not mean that you or I automatically like or support dictator Putin (Russia). Both of these men are in power because they have subverted their nations’ elections, amassed wealth and power at the expense of their countrymen, etc. Yes, Putin is responsible for the war in Ukraine, and yes, Ukraine can and should negotiate a settlement that ends the bloodshed. And yes, Trump should demand and expect to receive rare earth metals in return for all of the taxpayer support Americans have given to Ukraine. This is all normal.
Wanting the war to go on and on with greater bloodshed and destruction on both sides and with more powerful rockets is not normal. That is warmongering.
Anyhow, the late hunting season here in Central Pennsylvania was exciting, but had no filled tags. I used to rabbit hunt a lot, but gave up when the rabbit populations showed signs of vaporizing due to abundant fishers and bobcats. For five or six years now I have hardly seen one rabbit in places where I have created the best habitat, and where rabbits should be swarming. So for many years I have just hunted the late flintlock season for deer, instead, just about daily.
And also trapped for predators, including fishers and bobcats. Not this season, however. On the December flight back from Florida, a man behind me kept coughing and sneezing. He never covered his mouth, and made no attempt to keep from infecting everyone around him. Sure enough, a week later I was showing signs of the same horrible illness half the country has now had, a persistent dry cough and a close brush with pneumonia. Lots of people are getting the pneumonia. So, I was sick as hell during the time I normally set traps, and my kit and steel just sat and sat.
Instead, just about every day after Christmas, I would go out for a couple hours and try to intercept a deer with the new flintlock, coughing quietly into my clothes to muffle the bark. I got off a lot of shots, collected blood and hair, but filled no tags. A new white checked Filson wool coat helped me blend in with the snowy woods.
Made for me by Mark Wheland, the new flintlock is a 62-caliber rifle based on the English Sporting Rifle design, which I have come to admire. It has a 28 inch decently swamped octagonal barrel by Getz from about 15 years ago, a beautiful patent breech made by Jason Schneider at Rice Barrels, a RE Davis late-flintlock era Manton-style waterproof lock, and a gorgeous stock of highly figured and irridescent English walnut. Wheland turned a perfect ebony ramrod, as well as its horn end and its threaded steel connector end.
The Manton-style lock has a roller frizzen, which is both very fast and also very touchy. Hunting in brush without bumping the heel of my hand up against the back of the frizzen would result in some blade of grass flicking it open and dumping the priming powder on the ground. So it requires some special handling, because it is so sensitive.
I also struggled with this gun’s sights all season long, probably also slowly acclimating to the short barrel. This barrel is ten inches shorter than that on my long-time go-to 54 caliber flintlock barrel, that is 38″ long, and my eyes have not yet made the transition. Moreover, the new gun has classic British rear sights, one standing and one folding leaf. The rear sites were conveyed to me with only the most rudimentary and shallow “V” filed in the standing sight, and the front sight was about a half inch high. It was up to me, in a short amount of time, to get this gun sighted in just days before bear season began, which is just days before deer season started.
So I just struggled to get the gun sighted in, and by the time actual flintlock season began, the day after Xmas, it was printing dead center and 2.5″ high at 50 yards. With 130 grains of FFG Swiss pushing the 335-grain lead round ball about 1500 feet per second, I reckoned it was probably dead-on at 100 yards. Or minute-of-deer chest within 100 yards.
I lost track of how many shots I took at deer. Mostly at does. One probably legal buck I let walk past me. Some deer I literally just walked right up to in the snow, and missed, maybe forty yards away. Others I ambushed from concealment on trail crossings, from fifty out to about 95 yards, while sitting. Each miss resulted in a little more blacking being put on the rear sight, a little more color added here or there, and by the end of the season the front sight was filed down to about 1/8″ high and painted bright neon orange. The rear sight has a bright neon yellow inverted V wedge under the V aperature, surrounded by black. I am thinking about scrapping the entire arrangement and going to front and rear fiber optic sights. Old eyes…
One doe was flattened by what seemed like a perfect broadside at 75 yards. I saw her go down through the cloud of smoke, and when I walked up I expected to find her stone cold dead. But while there was a perfect outline of her body in the snow, with plenty of blood, the actual deer was nowhere to be found. With dusk fast approaching, I used my headlamp to follow as far as I could in the snow and the thick brambles, and then went home. The next morning I returned and took up the trail, which resulted in three deer fleeing from fresh beds, one of which had some fresh drips of blood, but not much. Not even the coyotes would end up eating her.
My last shot of the season was taken like a mortar, at the biggest buck I have ever seen in the wild. He was just a bit over 200 yards away, and had been spooked out of his hidey nook by my prowling. When I snuck back towards the anticipated cut-off, he was indeed standing right there, looking all around, on high alert. While down wind, I was as close as I could get without being seen. So I took some pictures of him, which of course did not come out well, and then took careful aim with plenty of “Kentucky elevation” and let ‘er rip. At the shot he flew away with wings, and on my follow up I found where the big lead ball had hit the ground at plane, leaving a 20-foot-long long streak through the snow and dirt directly in line with the buck’s shoulder, but about 20 yards too short. His tracks were among the biggest I have ever seen. Guessing a 200″ buck.
The doe was flattened, and leaked some hydraulic fluid, but was gone and lived on
I have a lot more practice to do with this gun.
What looks like a shallow white “W” is just the higher visibility part of the huge buck’s enormous rack
Overnight beds, tiny amount of blood, a mere flesh wound and a long-lived lucky deer
The long path cut by the 335-grain round ball on its way towards the big buck
Nice view down into the woods, perfect for a flintlock. Yes, the barrel key is loose, which accounted for two missed shots
Hunting around an enormous buck capable of leaving big rubs like this one is excitement enough. Actually seeing him and getting a shot…even the miss is the highlight of the season
Did the FBI try to assassinate Trump?
The more we learn from last Saturday’s unbelievably close call assassination attempt on President Donald Trump in Butler, PA, the more it looks like an inside job. A professional hit.
Everything that could go wrong that should not go wrong went wrong. Even the most basic security protocols were discarded. The Secret Service counter-snipers sat and watched the would-be assassin climb up on an unprotected roof only 130 yards away from Trump’s podium, they watched as the would-be assassin pulled up his gun and aimed, and they watched as he got off something like eight shots before they returned fire and killed him.
None of that makes any sense. All of it is too big to be one after another “Awww geez” mistakes.
Everything about this event stinks of an inside (“deep state” or administrative state i.e. alphabet federal agencies like DHS, FBI, DOJ etc) attempt to eliminate the one man who can and will rein in the rogue agencies who are presently destroying American freedom and constitutional rights and are obviously implementing a Marxist takeover of the federal government.
But now we learn even more damning information: The weirdly cool-ass serene woman sitting directly behind Trump last Saturday is none other than Janeen DiGiuseppi, the assistant director of the FBI.
This is not normal behavior for any person. And especially not for an FBI agent sworn to uphold the law and stop violence. She should have drawn her sidearm and joined in the effort to protect Trump.
But when we consider the FBI’s illegal shoot-to-kill raid on Trump’s home at Mar-a-Lago, and all of the deviously evil and patently illegal shenanigans the FBI has committed against Trump since 2016 (spying on him personally, spying on his campaign, using fake investigations like Russiagate to hurt him), FBI Janeen’s actions on Saturday take on a whole new meaning. It sure looks like she gave the go-ahead to the shooter to shoot, and then pulled out her cell phone to record the assassination of Trump up close from a uniquely close seat that no one else could get.
And think about this again: FBI Janeen did not pull out her sidearm and join in the protection of Trump, like a normal FBI agent would be expected to do. Instead, she looks like she is there to order the assassination and then record it.
Hooooly carp…
And now we learn that the would-be assassin was far from being nobody. He had two cell phones and several international encrypted communication accounts.
And instead of securing the crime scene and collecting clues and evidence from it, the FBI moved right in and hosed the whole roof top off. Like they were trying to wash away the evidence. Like they have no interest in learning anything about the shooter or his position.
A local trauma surgeon out in Butler pointed out that the expected blood splatter is not visible at the would-be assassin shooter’s rooftop location. It appears that the would-be assassin shooter was shot from behind, not from in front. Like he was killed by a second assassin to shut him up. And if this person exists, maybe it was this second assassin who actually shot at Trump? And the publicly known guy is actually a decoy?
So it makes sense for American citizens who care about America to ask if the lawless FBI is behind the attempted assassination of President Donald Trump. It sure as hell looks like it, and it would be in keeping with their prior lawless rogue behavior against their conservative political enemies and Trump alike.
Hooooly carp! America, you are in huge trouble!
UPDATE: A whisteblower has notified several US senators that most of the federal employees guarding President Trump at his rally last Saturday were not Secret Service agents, but rather a hodgepodge of DHS (Dept. of Homeland Security) and other agency employees. The number of actual dedicated Secret Service agents on site protecting Trump was apparently very low. This allegation just adds more fuel to the fire of conjecture and conspiracy speculation, because real Secret Service agents are believed to be uncorruptable, while DHS is a known hotbed of Marxist anti-Americanism. Follow the logic on this and you end up where this essay ended up earlier today. Not good, America!
Agent “Pat” ducked and hid behind President Trump, drew her sidearm and could not reholster it, and settled on continuously adjusting her sunglasses to look like she was doing something other than incompetence.
UPDATE 7/21/25: Turns out would-be assassin Crooks flew his drone all over the rally venue in full public view the morning of the event. In front of law enforcement officers. Later on he was seen using a rangefinder to measure distances from various locations right there in the field. In full public view. Turns out the FBI now admits a second law enforcement official fired a shot at Crooks, from another roof, a sloped roof, and supposedly missed. Turns out the Secret Service considered the Trump rally a “loose security” event and only assigned a couple actual Secret Service officers, plus a bunch of DHS people. Many of whom are obviously incompetent DEI diversity hires. There’s even more weird information coming to light now days later, and all of it raises lots of questions and answers none. Something bad happened last week, and way too many indications are that the near assassination of President Trump was conspired and organized from within our government. Which is outrageous treason. 
Jeff Epstein probably murdered, how did THAT happen?!
Now new information (but not all of the information that would normally be obtained and available in a murder investigation) is released that child trafficking pedophile and ultra-Democrat Party insider Jeffery Epstein was probably murdered. No surprise.
- his neck and throat bones were broken through tremendous violent force. On the other hand, self-hanging is a slow suffocation process, especially with a soft bed sheet, which at its tightest twist is still wide, relatively gentle, and would take a long time to shut off air to the body and kill a person. A self-applied bed sheet cannot break those neck and throat bones.
- the security camera trained on his cell was mysteriously turned off
- his cell mate was relocated, against prison protocol, so that Epstein was alone and vulnerable, and no witness was present to say what happened to Epstein
- his prison guards are said to have fallen asleep
- one of the sleepy prison guards is not even a prison guard and was not qualified to be there, and no one knows how he got there
You do not have to be already pre-inclined to be easily persuaded to believe in various conspiracies to see that this way-too-many-coincidences situation is beyond a conspiracy; it is a murder. All of the circumstantial and much of the physical evidence here points to a hit, a purposeful and targeted murder of a person who knew too much about too many wealthy and powerful people, who could not afford to have him talk about what he knew. The beneficiaries of Epstein’s death are Bill Clinton and a whole bunch of other politically powerful and wealthy people. Bill Clinton is known to have flown some twenty-four times on Epstein’s private jet to his “orgy island,” where little girls were raped and sexually abused.
The big question is how on earth this brazen murder was carried off under the nose of so many watchful eyes. Yes, it happened in New York City, where criminal mayor Bill de Blasio runs things like a mafia boss. That is a first step in understanding the Epstein murder. But so much more had to happen so quickly for the hit to work the way it did.
Another consideration is that Epstein’s prosecutor is James Comey’s daughter, Maurene. Yes, that James Comey, the disgraced former FBI director who has engaged in openly partisan political advocacy from the time he was in the FBI until just days ago. His daughter Maurene is the same radical leftist activist as her father. So did Maurene Comey play a role in having Epstein killed before he could talk?
UPDATE: JANUARY 6, 2020: Newly released photos from Epstein’s autopsy clearly show strangulation marks from a wire garrote, which professional assassins use, not a bed sheet. Epstein’s hyoid bone was shattered, and his body showed marks from being held down. A two-man hit-job in a modern prison…unbelievable, but really powerful people absolutely had to have Epstein dead. Read this article to see more photos and analysis.
This is Epstein’s neck on the autopsy table. The ligature marks are from thin wire, like a professional hitman uses. The angular marks are from Epstein’s fingernails clawing at the wire around his neck. Epstein was murdered in plain view. Who did this, why did they do it, and will there be accountability?
Epstein’s painting of past president Bill Clinton, wearing a Monica Lewinsky dress and saying “I did not have sex with that woman.” Clinton and Epstein were partners in sexual crime
Maurene Comey at the sore losers against democracy pink hat parade, with her hippie mom. Notice Maurene’s shirt: Hillary Clinton, Ruth Ginsburg, and Elizabeth Warren are visible; Nancy Pelosi appears to be the fourth face. Maurene Comey is no professional prosecutor. She is a dedicated leftist activist who apparently used her central role in the Epstein case to have him murdered, so that he could not damage a bunch of Democrat Party biggies.
Turtle Time
It is officially turtle time.
Every spring turtles of all types emerge from their muddy hideaways, under stream banks, under logs, or burrowed deep into the soft dirt on the side of a farm field.
Turtles are gentle creatures, hurting no one, and yet when they make themselves vulnerable by appearing on the sides of roads, or trying to cross roads, many drivers go out of their way to hit them. Seems obvious to say, a turtle hit by a vehicle will either die a long, lingering, painful death, or if they are small, they will be crushed outright.
What the hell is that about, anyway?
Seeing these sad, destroyed, dead little things strewn about on the roadsides is painful. Turtles really bother no one, and they should elicit human compassion and empathy for their slow but intense drive to find a safe and soft place to dig a hole and lay their eggs. It is not their fault that humans have built uncrossable roads with no wildlife tunnels, or that some humans delight in maiming little animals.
Please slow down along Front Street in Susquehanna Township and entering into Harrisburg, and give the turtles there a break. After millions of years of moving slowly, purposefully, and deliberately, they have earned it.
Please brake for turtles
Beginning around the I-81 overpass over Front Street in Harrisburg, and ending about half a mile south, turtles are now trying to reach loamy dirt to lay their eggs.
Oddly, sadly, many dead and dying turtles litter the roadside, hit by cars, either by accident or on purpose.
It’s difficult to plumb the depths of someone’s thinking when they deliberately drive off the roadway and onto the roadside, to crush a tiny helpless little animal like this.
Please brake for turtles. They can’t, won’t, and haven’t done anything to us humans. They deserve to live, too.
Are Turtles Crossing the Road Really a Threat?
Why drivers seem to target slow-moving, non-threatening little turtles is beyond understanding.
Don’t we all have a soft spot in our hearts for innocent, vulnerable, gentle creatures that do us no harm?
The same goes for snakes, which eat the rodent mice, rats, and chipmunks that do so much damage to our homes, crops, gardens, and vehicles.
Every spring and summer, turtles cross roads as they leave water bodies like rivers, ponds, lakes, and marshes, and seek out soft soil where they can lay their eggs, so that the next generation of their kind can continue their unimposing life cycle. Yet every year, roadways are littered with dead and wounded turtles, many dying slowly in the baking hot sun.
Their crime is nothing more than appearing in front of humans behind the wheel of a machine. Are so many of us really so homicidal or sadistic that we go out of our way to hurt, injure, and kill a little helpless animal?
The unfortunate, sad answer is Yes, a lot of drivers go out of their way to hit turtles with their cars. You can simply look at where the turtles lie, crushed or wounded on the side of the road, where the car driver had to actually veer off the roadway to hit the helpless little thing. What is really sad is that turtles take at least ten years to breed, so killing one or two (or stealing one or two) in a given area can doom or kill off the entire population there.
If you have compassion for turtles, you can watch these instructive videos below, where curious turtle-liking guys put a rubber turtle alongside some roads near their homes and generated some unhappy results, and where drivers get out to try and help injured turtles.
Bottom line is Yep, drivers went out of their way to run over the little rubber turtle.