The Creepy Yet Diligent Hunter

In many places in the country, large game hunting seasons are winding down or are over.   Although I enjoy the extra sleep I am getting, I am already thinking about next season and how I will improve my odds in fooling whitetail bucks to unwarily walk by locations I chose as ambush points next year.    Between now and the beginning of next season there are many tasks that need to be done and in my mind, this is truly the beginning of the hunting season where preparation, maintenance and information gathering are essential to the later part of the season when the climax of those efforts grants us with properly placed shot and your prey on the ground. This enormous list of duties should be started with one thing that will help you in improving your chances for next season.  This one thing is to retain permissions on private hunting property you already have hunted.  In some cases you may have hunted property of family, friends or general acquaintance...

Continuing with the theme of gaining permissions I thought of adding a situation that I discovered late in the last season that gave me an additional hunting opportunity and allowed me to flex my woodsmanship ability within a few minutes of my home.   No, this story does not end up with a photo of me with a big buck but it does end with some hope for a future promising hunt. Throughout the last hunting season I ventured onto both private and public hunting land for hunting opportunity.  Most of that time was on private land with some public land hunting.  By far the public land hunting was more difficult but way more memorable.  The separation from the security blanket our modern environment provides is invaluable.  The problem for me with public land is that it is not close and requires more planning than throwing a few things in a backpack, grabbing a gun or bow and walking out to a stand or blind that I placed a day or week before. Because I attempt ...

If you are interested in doing any public land hunting that will put you in the back country or just walking back into the woods a short distance on a private piece of property, a small emergency pack is a good thing to carry with you.    Most of the time you will not go digging through it each time you are out but occasionally you will need something in it and when worse comes to worse, you will be glad it will give you an extra edge to survive.    I move it from pack to pack for hunting, fishing, camping, hiking or mountain biking. Since the deer season has ended here in North Carolina and I am doing inventory of all my equipment, I would like to review what I have in my emergency pack and provide a printable and editable check list for you.  It is available to download at the bottom of this page.    Use it to modify or build your own list and emergency kit for upcoming trips. Get the downloadable list here or at the bottom of the page. W...

PREDICTIONS! I don’t know about you but with each passing hunting season I collect a ton of photos from my game cameras.    Many of us out there have folders upon folders of pictures of deer, coyotes, rabbits, bear, ourselves or whatever triggers our game camera when we are not around.    It is easy to have photo overload and to improperly use those photos to determine quality hunt times.     I will attempt to help you learn how to break down some of the information and even provide a spreadsheet you can use to assemble filterable data to make some sense of what you see. Use the results for determining good hunting days and locations.   We need these cameras as part of a tool in our arsenal of knowledge and not just as a gadget we use to skip the real work of woodmanship, which is more enjoyable in my mind.    Used responsibly I think they can be used to boost your ability to read the forest and further understand what ...

ROADKILL and the RUT Hunters are a different breed of people in the modern world and can view various aspects of life from a much different perspective than those that don’t view the natural world as a provider of both refreshing disconnected entertainment and a source of food.    With that skewed view that is different from 95 percent of the population, I have taken some data that I have access to and will apply it to hunting in an interesting way that may have not been presented to you in the past. This will be an evaluation of roadkill numbers and how it relates to the rut. I have charted the number of car crashes in a small city in central North Carolina that were coded as “Animal” and what is interesting is how it shows a relation to the Rut.    Because of the limitations of data available I would gather that some of the reports are not deer but you can assume most reported are deer because of the damage to a vehicle they will cause and that a report i...