| Journal of the Hunt |
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| This page will be used to tell the stories of the hunt as we get them so if you would like to contribute to this page please e-mail your story to me and I will get it posted. Thanks Scott Lyons |
| I would like to take this oppertunity to remind all hunters of few things before you get out in the field. 1. Hogs, we want all hunters to kill hogs. These animals have caused alot of damage over the last seven or so years. The orders are to shot on site, we do not care if you pick them up or feed them to the buzzards. These guys are not a native animal and we need to reduced them as much as possible. We will not be able to get rid of them now but maybe we can control there numbers a little. 2. Your gun, please be sure you site your gun in before you hunt. Its better that you practice shooting and solve all these problems before you get the deer in your sites. You really don't want to have to get a big search party going to track a wounded deer if we don't have to. However this will happen and if you do start tracking please mark the blood trail with tissue paper as you go. This will make it much easier for the search party to pick up the trail later. 3. Always leave a message in camp as to where you will be hunting. We keep a hunting log on the table for this purpose, this lets other hunters know where you are on the lease that may come in late that day. Its also a good idea to leave a little story about what you saw or what happened on your hunt and when you returned to camp. 4. Always record your harvest data, in the report sheets left in camp. Please weigh , age and sex the deer . This will be turned into the state at the end of the season for the MLD program. 5. Aging the deer on the hoof, this is one of the newest and hardest things to learn about deer hunting. It use to be if we saw horns that looked kinda nice we shot it. Now we are expected to guess the age of the deer at a glance, and it is easy to be fooled even if you are pretty good at aging them by the teeth that will not do you any good here. It is something that must be explained to each hunter and we will try to train you as best we can. There are some videos out on the market on how to do this I suggest you do this before you make the mistake in the field. if you shoot one that is to young don't worry, it is part of the learning curve. If you keep doing this you might find yourself on the black ball vote. We are trying real hard to get our deer heard to be aged to mostly 5 & 1/2 year old bucks. please make an honest effort to kill bucks in this age group. 6.The taking of does, we are more than likely to get about 15 or so doe tags, every hunter will get a chance to take a doe and a buck. We do get a recommended buck harvest from the MLD and we try to stick as close to this as we can. Remember that if you want deer meat does taste better, so only take bucks that you want to shoulder mount. Extra doe tags will be given to the members that have the oldest membership first and they may elect not to take any extra tags and give them to the next member down the chain. I recommend that you do not wait until the end of the season to take your does, it is better to start taking them after the second week of the season. |
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