Posts Tagged → outdoors
Pennsylvania seasons…the one that really matters
The longstanding quip that Pennsylvania has two seasons, road construction season and hunting season, still stands.
Anyone living in PA can attest to the seemingly endless roadwork everywhere here that begins in May and ends in November. At one time, Pennsylvania had the greatest miles of roads to square miles of area of any state; but, according to a random 2018 chart on the Internet, eight years ago PA ranked #7 and was pretty much tied with Indiana, Maryland, and Delaware in this regard.
New Jersey now holds this dubious record of most linear road miles to square miles of area, which surprises no one, given how urbanized NJ is. But it seems that no state makes so many crappy roads and bridges quite like PA, and so we do have the endless road construction to fix them, and thus, the adorable quip.
It does seem that our highways and bridges are always failing, or about to fail. Whether this is because of bad contracting, corrupt payoffs like with the recent PA Turnpike scandal, or the high number of freeze-thaw cycles our roads go through, it is tough to know. But whateva… the quip strikes home, every time.
Our other season is worth about $1.5 Billion annually. Call it Elmer Fudd Season, Deer Season, or Red-Check-Plaid Pennsylvania Tuxedo Season, hunting season is still a huge part of Pennsylvania’s culture and economy. Thank God above. This is the Pennsylvania season that really matters, though it has been changing in the past twenty years and ten years, respectively, as more doe permits have been issued and as bear and deer season openers have moved from Mondays to Saturdays.
Despite all the seasonal scheduling changes, which have resulted in northern hunting camps losing their traditional gatherings for big bear and deer drives, the easily renewable economy of hunting chugs along. No broken bridges or defunct roads here; the money just happily flows and flows and flows.
Outdoors people, of which Pennsylvania has a lot, really like to have nice outdoors lifestyle stuff. Things like camouflage flatware, camouflage lingerie, camouflage radios (conveniently made to look exactly like forest floor leaf litter, so that when you inevitably drop your radio, it becomes invisible and forever at one with said forest floor, and you have to go buy a new one), camouflage tee shirts, ammunition, guns (no one ever has enough guns), boots (no one ever has enough hunting boots), fishing rods, fishing lures and hooks, ATVs, etc.
And so here we are, four days into the 2025 PA deer rifle season, and EVERYTHING SUCKS. As in, I have heard nothing but nonstop bitching from friends, acquaintances, and even people I do not know who I bump into at the gas pump, about the lack of deer. And for once, I have to agree with these grouchy complainers. Count me in as one of you guys this year.
Normally, I would scoff and deride these complainers as bad hunters, or unappreciative hunters, but the truth is, I am also having a Bad Hunter kind of rifle season myself. And this is on top of last week’s bear season, where my wonderful flatlander friends, whom I love and whose company I enjoy very much, continued to yet again miss gimme shots on huge trophy bears on tough bear drives, just so they can promise to come back and “git ’em next year.”
Trying to not disappoint me, they say.
Whether there is some kind of invisible solar flare activity that we humans are not privy to, but which is very important to the life of deer, or an alien space ship picked up and removed all the deer in PA, our deer hunting season is off to a weird start. Everywhere, as far as I can discern. It is certainly true without any doubt that most of the deer are having teenage human type life cycle inversion, where 2:00 AM is the time of most activity, and 2:00 PM is for sleeping. Exactly where all the deer are sleeping is a great mystery that a lot of us have sweated off a lot of calories trying to determine the past 72 hours.
Trail cameras report back legal bucks and bands of does traveling past places we normally guard with a rifle, but in the middle of the night, when we are sleeping off that 1,500 foot elevation climb to the mountain top that has zero acorns and zero deer sign. And then there is the descent at dark, the harder part.
So I am going to nominate a third season of sorts, maybe temporary, maybe only for the beginning of the 2025 deer rifle season here in PA: Bitching, Moaning, and Grumbling Season.
Right now and for the next ten days, it is the only season that matters. Good luck, fellow deer hunters!
How many Central PA deer hunters spend our time for two weeks, overlooking a deep wash or draw and picking out shooting lanes. Snow makes it perfect, But we still need deer to show up…
Who us? Yes, it is 11:24 PM in a location with little hunting pressure or human activity, and the deer have gone totally nocturnal.
Maybe not an impressive rub, but the scrawny six point caught on camera that we derided two weeks ago would be most welcome right about now, as the monster 150 inch twelve point has not been seen for two weeks…
Enjoy the end of Summer!
Summer time is almost everyone’s favorite time of the year (skiers can be forgiven for wanting snow). During the summer months, we vacation, adventure outdoors, travel to see beautiful new places, see family and spend real time sitting around and communicating/ socializing face to face instead of device to device, take time off from work to recharge the batteries, etc.
Well, our summer this year has been just as fleeting as every other summer I can remember. It is just about over for most people, but may I make a suggestion: Visit a beach of your desire this weekend and into September. Fresh water or salt water (I grew up going to Pine Grove Furnace State Park far far away from the eastern coast, whose artificial sand beach provided endless satisfaction and happiness well into my twenties). Beaches have a lot less traffic and visitors after late August, and there is something so uniquely and deeply satisfying about sitting on a quiet beach with a good book, toes in the warm sand, and no demands.
The summer is nearly over, and I hope you make the most of what is left of it. Because our life is not just about the future, but the present.
Hunting licenses, 1976 and 2015
Since my first hunting license adorned my back way back in 1976-1977, a lot has changed in the Pennsylvania landscape.
For example, wild game then so abundant that you could go out and shoot a couple for dinner is now practically extirpated.
Why pheasants and quail disappeared from Pennsylvania is a big debate with no clear answers. Loss of farmland to sprawl, low density development is one. Changes in farming practices is another; fallow fields had the best habitat. A plethora of winged and four legged predators cannot be discounted. Successfully rebounding populations of raptors like hawks and owls for sure ate a lot of plump pheasants. But why a sudden and dramatic crash?
Conservation successes since 1976 are plentiful and say a lot about wildlife biology. Wild turkey populations, fishers, bobcats and other animals once thought completely gone are now firmly in our lives, whether we see them, or not.
An interesting dynamic is playing out at our hunting camp. This year we have a virtual carpet of oak and hickory seedlings unlike anything we saw over the past 15 years we’ve owned it. Why?
Conventional wisdom is the deer population is low, and it’s true that it’s lower than it has been in 15 years. That is, deer are known eaters of acorns and tree seedlings. Fewer deer means more of both.
However, another factor seems to be playing out with these newly abundant tree seedlings. Where we once had an incredible overload of tree rats, aka squirrels, the new fishers have eaten them all. Like all of them. Not one tree rat remains in our carefully cultivated forest of white oaks. We see fisher tracks. We neither see nor hear squirrels.
As squirrels are known eaters of acorns and hickories, it stands to reason that their absence means more acorns and hickories hatching into baby trees.
Add a long icy winter that appears to have crushed our local wild turkey populations, also known for eating nuts, and the right conditions emerge to help a forest rebound and grow some new stock, a huge challenge we aggressively tackle every year.
So, my son getting his first hunting license yesterday is now entering a landscape that in some ways is just as dynamic as the one I began hunting so long ago. What a difference these landscapes were and are, and who would’ve guessed the fishers would be responsible for oak and hickory forests regenerating?
A lot has changed in our wildlife landscapes, and yet not much has changed in my lifetime. Different animals, same kind of population changes, variations, pressures. One thing I keep reminding myself: It’s all natural, these changes. And while some are painful to see, like the loss of pheasants, other opportunities open up. Never would I have imagined in 1976, nor would any PA Game Commission staff, that in 2015 my son would get a bobcat tag and a fisher tag with his license.
Totally different opportunity than chasing pheasants in corn fields, but still good.
An outdoor lifestyle, halfway through the season (to hunt is human)
Most of the readers who visit this blog are not outdoors folk. Feats, exploits, and the inevitable tales of woe, cold, and misery from the field would naturally bore, or at best morbidly fascinate, the non-hunter.
Nevertheless, here we go, for the first time here, on a midway retrospective of a singular hunting season still unfolding.
Hunting for most hunters is a way of life literally built into our genes. We do what humans have done since the rise of Homo Sapiens upon Planet Earth: Hunt animals that we eat, wear, and admire. While the Pleistocene ended only 20,000 years ago, it is marked by the full arrival of adept hunter-gatherers who had spent tens of thousands of previous years perfecting their lifestyle.
Humans have been hunters and gatherers for 100,000 years, or 60,000 years, depending upon how long one believes Homo Sapiens has been human.
We have been agrarian for what…10,000 years at the most generous definition of the sedentary lifestyle, but closer to 5,000 years for most humans.
After that, the most modern, most technologically advanced, most “civilized” humans have lived through the Industrial Revolution (400 years), the Technological Revolution (150 years), the Information Revolution (50 years and ongoing). Combined, that’s a total of 600 years out of a total of 60,000 years.
At our core we are all hunter-gatherers. Scratch our civilized surface, and right underneath we are all spear-toting, skin-clad hunters.
To hunt is innately human. Hunting makes us human.
In other words, although many people today look at our current effete, energy-intensive Western lifestyle and think of it as being the peak of human civilization, some of us see this civilization as becoming complacent, detached from the reality of natural resource management necessary to support this modern lifestyle, hypocritical.
When someone believes it is morally superior to have an assassin kill their meat for them than to kill it themselves, you’ve got an unsustainable logical break. Similarly, people want “the government” to protect them, and they want to prevent citizens from protecting themselves, and those same citizens cannot hold the same government accountable when it fails.
Western civilization is full of this weak thinking. In my opinion, Western society is becoming hollow, a shell, full of contradictions.
The hunting lifestyle is a powerful antidote. It is a dose of reality inserted into a cloudy drugged up dream.
So far, this season has been marked by time afield in the most beautiful places in several states with long time friends, new friends, my young son, other kids, and by myself. Like our Pleistocene ancestors, the feeling of the pack on my back and the game-getter in my right hand is about the most natural and satisfying feeling possible.
A number of deer have fallen to various firearms, a Fall turkey, a colorful pheasant; there’s a bunch of photos commemorating the times for the results-oriented. My best moment was late at night, checking a trap with my boy, and finding a large bobcat. There for about four hours, it had really no taste for humans and represented the wilderness in all its wildness.
Catching a bobcat is a real achievement in the world of hunting and trapping, and I confess it was with great mixed emotions that we dispatched it and brought it to Butch at Blue Mountain Taxidermy. Even if a bobcat is again in one of our traps during the short bobcat season, we will release it. One is enough for a lifetime.
One bobcat trophy represents a lifetime of time afield, or 60,000 years.
It’s duck season! No it’s turkey season! No it’s rabbit season!
In addition to picking apples with the family, one of Fall’s greatest attributes is the abundance of hunting opportunities.
A friend sent me a photo of a huge buck he arrowed last week. I am jealous of him because I have not yet had an opportunity to go bow hunt for deer.
Instead, I have been small game hunting, wild turkey hunting, duck hunting, and trapping.
So, it is not as if I have been missing out on the outdoor experience by failing to bow hunt. The problem is that I’m in a frenetic whirlwind of other, related recreational pursuits, because Pennsylvania is blessed with an abundance of wildlife and healthy natural habitat.
Spending time with my kids and friends outside in this environment is one of the healthiest, safest, most wholesome activities anyone can do. Hunting is safer than cheerleading, high school football, soccer, and baseball. It gets my son’s face out of whatever handheld device is sucking out his brain at any given moment.
Successful or not, time afield is the best family time possible.
Here are some old favorite cartoons about hunting, and most important is the Duck Season, Rabbit Season, Duck Season! episode.
New Sportsmen’s Show – Carlisle, PA – March 21-24
The recent demise of the 58-year annual Eastern Sports and Outdoor Show left both a hole in the fabric of the outdoors community, and also an opportunity for some enterprising people to pull it all back together. Nature abhors a vacuum, and into this one poured the good and capitalistic intentions of many veteran outdoorsmen.
Dozens of small groups of people have quickly seen the opportunity, and worked to create a show that will give them momentum for next year, and then the years after.
One such show is being billed as the “American Outdoorsman Sport Show,” organized by a radio station, WQLV 98.9 FM (www.aosshow.com), and it is being held from March 21-24 at the Carlisle Expo Center, 100 K Street, Carlisle, PA.
I know about this because JRJ Knives will be there (www.jrjknives.com). John Johnson of JRJ makes knives every bit as rugged and beautiful as the top-billed makers, but at a third to half the price. I try to purchase at least one every year; many I give away as gifts. John’s self-defense fixed blades are worn by an Israeli general and an Israeli colonel who sees combat every week, as well as sportsmen around the nation. Because he uses ATS34 steel combined with his exceptional skill, John’s knives are often far stronger than the “best” knives being marketed for survival, hand-to-hand combat, etc. In fact, I cook with one of the custom, unique large hunting knives he recently made for me. It is scary sharp, holds an edge forever, and is easy to resharpen.
So get on down to the Carlisle Expo Center this March 21-24, and buy yourself a JRJ knife and peruse some of the other vendors, including Cody Calls and Ducky’s Boats.
Kelty — An A+ American company
Kelty makes all kinds of outdoor equipment. Tents, sleeping bags, you name it, they make it. And they back up their gear with a lifetime warranty.
Example in point, my Pacific Crest backpack is a huge old dinosaur of a pack. It holds all kinds of stuff, has a sleeve for either a bow or rifle, and can easily carry 80 pounds without showing a sign of stress. Two weeks ago I sent this pack in for some rehab work.
Two weeks later, it arrived completely refurbished, at no charge. “Pride in our construction” says the zeroed invoice.
Kelty — a fantastic American company cut from the old mold.
Make sure to give them your business, folks. They’ve earned it.
Eastern Sports & Outdoor Show CANCELLED
Reed Expo (or Exhibitions) just announced that the Eastern Sports & Outdoor Show is being “postponed,” which means it is effectively cancelled.
Reed Expo is canceling because of the enormous boycott of the show over their new anti-Second Amendment policy. That boycott started with a call to me from one of the show’s vendors over ten days ago. I sent a statement which was rapidly shared across the sporting community, and the sportsmen’s community (PFSC, HUSH, WFE Foundation, NWTF) leapt into action. Before you knew it, Reed Expos was getting kicked in the teeth by hurt, angry American citizens. The betrayal was too much to bear.
Reed Expos is a British company. Britain was once a great nation, and the British were once a great people, but they have decided to disarm themselves and to criminalize self-defense. Failed gun control of every sort is de rigeur in England, and Reed Expos took the dubious but very British position of banning from the show the one gun that most symbolizes the Second Amendment: The AR-15.
That upset their core audience. That core audience just fought back. And wait until the breach-of-contract lawsuits start flying against Reed Expos. The company will probably lose tens of millions of dollars. They may go bankrupt. That would be their own fault, however, because at every step over the past two weeks, they were asked to reconsider their policy change. Neither vendors nor paying visitors wanted to miss the show. Reed Expos stuck to their guns, and has suffered the consequences.
Message to businesses: If you stand with us, we will stand with you. And if you stand against us, we will stand against you.
Next stop: Hollywood, the least principled, most hypocritical, most destructive location on Earth. It’s like that one place is the epicenter of a continual tidal wave of crap that splashes all over the planet. It’s time to financially punish empty-headed actors like Danny Glover, who profited enormously from using guns in his movies, but who now says that the Second Amendment was designed to protect slavery.
Three cheers to the American sportsman: You did it. You united. You had an effect. You should be proud of yourselves.