My feelings on rabbit hunting weren’t firmly in place until college.
While I managed to pop a few bunnies here and there as a teen on our farm, it wasn’t until I met two beagles named Flash and Barney while away at school that I found out just how enjoyable it can be to round-up rabbits.
Now I just wish I could do it more often.
My brother-in-law Jeff Albaugh, and his son, Brock, allowed me to join them (and their beagle Abbie) for a holiday hunt last weekend and it brought back a lot of the memories from those rabbit hunts way back when.
We opted to take along a couple handheld cameras in order to make a blog post out of the hunt. Have fun watching it, if for no other reason than you get to see me in a funny hat.
Here’s hoping you all have a great start to the New Year!
The question is better than the answer I told him. My friend had stopped over to the house to take a look at the buck I had harvested earlier that day. That’s a nice buck Greg, he said. What does he score? I haven’t put a tape to him I said, and I’m not sure I ever will.
The buck, a big 9-pointer with a small G5 on his left side that could possible make him a ten, was one of the heaviest racked New York State bucks I had ever killed in my 20-year plus whitetail hunting career.
I had anchored the buck on the afternoon of Nov. 19 with a Winchester slug fired from my Remington 1100 Special. The encounter happened by chance, as I ascended to my stand for the afternoon hunt and spotted the buck standing in a nearby CRP field. A few shots from the stand and a finishing shot from the ground, and the buck was mine for good.
After admiring my kill, my buddy’s question really got me thinking. How do we as hunters really value our trophies? Is score the end-all, be-all in the whitetail woods? Gosh, I hope not. I’ve never been big on score; in fact I’ve never had any of my deer officially scored. That’s just not me. I hunt mature deer, period.
Why, you ask? My answer is pretty simple really, I feel putting a label/score on a deer diminishes the hunt I had for him. Personally, I like to let the memory of the hunt marinate in my thoughts a while. It’s kind of like placing a back-strap in a bag of spiedie sauce for the weekend. Follow me? You have to let it sink in. To me, slapping a number on a trophy buck too quickly devalues the animal.
Now having said that, I recognize the fact that The Pope and Young Club and the Boone and Crockett Club set whitetail records based on the score of a buck’s antlers size. My fear however is that in the new-aged world of whitetail hunting with so much emphasis being placed on harvesting trophy deer, the sport of hunting is getting lost in the mix. Don’t get me wrong, I agree with and practice Quality Deer Management. I enjoy hunting big bucks and like killing them even more, but does the score of a deer inflate or lessen the worth of the animal or hunter? I say no.
I embrace and cherish the sport of whitetail hunting. I live and breathe whitetails. Anyone who doubts this fact can ask my beautiful wife or taxidermist. I just don’t feel we as hunters should base a trophy on a series of numbers.
What say you?
Cat Tales:
I’d like to give a shout out to my Dad who spent the majority of these past summer months conducting a Timber Stand Improvement Project on our property. Dad and I are committed to growing big deer, but with two young children and a full-time job, much of the grunt work gets left to him. He rarely disappoints. Thanks Dad!
I’d also would like to publicly congratulate my friend and good hunting buddy, John Koska who put the hammer down on this mature 8-pointer while hunting my property December 1st.
I cannot tell you how many bucks John has passed over the years on our farm looking for the right deer to take. This guy seemed like a fine candidate. Way to go John!
It was a shot I took with the same confidence as a two-foot par putt – that’s the only reason I let that arrow fly. The 46-yard shot ended up true to its mark and helped me arrow my biggest buck to date.
Never before has archery equipment provided such capabilities to effectively shoot big game animals at distances once scowled upon by archery purists. And the only way to become more proficient at shooting those distances is to practice until your comfortable with them.
I wanted to create a way to practice, and track my progress, at shooting shots longer than normal. Headed into this year’s hunting season, I wanted to feel comfortable shooting well beyond my normal “comfort zone.”
I feel confident in that being the case before September 15 rolls around.
After a few modications, it’s my pleasure to share with you AHuntersTales.com Shoot 25 archery training program. The video blog entry will help explain the program too (nevermind the bald guy shooting so poorly).
The 25-shot program is simple. You shoot five arrows at 60 yards and measure the total number of inches away from the target you’re aiming at (for all five arrows).
Then, you shoot five arrows at 50 yards and measure again. Next, shoot your five arrows at 40 yards, etc. You end up following the routine at 30 yards and 20 yards for a total of 25 arrows.
The downloadable scoring sheet shows how you take each of the cumulative inches away you are at each 10-yard increment, and multiply it by the respective number on the sheet (x1 at 60, x2 at 50, x3 at 40, x4 at 30 and x5 at 20).
Simply put, the program is much easier to shoot than it is to explain!
The primary goal of the program is to have fun, but it’s also designed to track progress over the time you shoot the program. My goal is to shoot it a minimum of three times a week over the next three months. Ultimately, I’d like to feel extremely comfortable shooting distances out to 60 yards.
Give it a try – and let us know how you’re progressing.
It’s a little ironic that it took Lady Luck to close out an otherwise picture-perfect turkey hunt, which netted my hunting buddy Jason Shell’s first gobbler. The irony stems from the fact it was a small group of ladies who nearly botched it too!
This hunt started with a scouting trip to the area a week prior, where a tom strutting in a field piqued the interest of these hunters. Limited time afield this Spring left the final day of the North Carolina turkey season as the last call to try and get Jason connected with turkey numero uno.
We stationed a ground blind in the back corner of a freshly cut alfalfa field, plunked a tom and hen decoy in front of us and waited cautiously for day to break before making the first yelp of the morning.
Our excitement grew long before the first stroke on my David Halloran Sugartown Sweetness pot call as a tom presented a familiar, hair-raising shock gobble less than a football field from where we sat.
“Here we go,” I muttered.
A few series of yelps were met not only by the early-rising gobbler, but also by no fewer than two other birds within shouting distance from our setup.
We were in the game!
The closest bird seemed lazy not wanting to leave his overnight perch in the tree. As such, we started to focus on another bird that had clearly set foot aground and made his way our direction.
He was getting closer.
After a game of flirting back and forth, we knew the interested tom was just in the woods to the left of our blind, although we were not-yet able to see him. He seemed to be strutting back and forth along the hedgerow before making his commitment to enter the field.
That’s when he caught a glimpse of our decoys.
The bird entered our field just 25 yards away. Because we had a small handheld video camera in tow, I told Jason to wait on my call before pulling the trigger. He was going to be to our decoys soon and our picture-perfect hunt would be in the books.
Like most successful hunts, a small audible needed called in our game plan.
Just when everything was going too well, the turkey started veering away from our setup on a slow walk. Little did I know until afterwards, but a group of ladies were making their morning walk on the old road some 400-500 yards away from our setup. The ol’ tom had seen them and seemed to be heading toward safer woods.
It was time for Jason to shoot.
He dropped the hammer on the bird to end a great hunt that nearly turned sour. And his first turkey was on the board. I think it’s safe to assume he’ll be chasing more birds in years to come after this successful hunt and a number of close calls over the last couple seasons.
"In a civilized world, wild animals exist at all when preserved by sportsmen. The excellent people who protest against hunting and consider sportsmen as enemies of wildlife are ignorant of the fact that in reality the genuine sportsman is, by all odds, the most important factor in keeping wild creatures from total extinction."
A Hunter's Tales - Hunting Blog 