So, deer season is over and you have settled in for the winter. A great time for lazing around watching football and maybe working a little overtime to keep the boss off your back when the turkeys are gobbling and the crappie are moving into shallow brush this spring. The coffee table is littered with Outdoor Life, Field & Stream and outdoor catalogs. Thoughts of the past season still fresh in your mind, you are content, or are you. Football season is winding down and your team has already been eliminated, your boss is starting to expect you to be at work everyday and your wife is piling on the chores. It is time to get out of the house and what better way to spend the day than sneaking up on some bushytails on a cold sunny day. Squirrel hunting can be a very relaxing endeavor after sitting motionless in a tree waiting for the elusive whitetail. Those long hours on …show more content…
Late season tactics usually don’t include calling because the squirrels are just too close to their den and tend to bolt right to their hole at the first sight or sound of danger. There are times, during the late season, that a call may help when used sparingly. If you can hear a squirrel digging for nuts but just can't see it you can hit the distress call very lightly. At this close range it doesn't take much. The desired effect would be a quick jump onto the side of the tree as it glances back at where the sound originated. Be ready and shoulder that rifle or shotgun quick or it will be gone. A good time to use this method of calling is when you know the squirrels are out and the sun is sinking fast. It’s best to take a chance on getting the squirrel to present a shot than to spend the last waning minutes waiting for it to show itself. Call and watch for a shot if there isn't one then move on to other squirrels, this will gives you more daylight to work
There are different regulations regarding hunting in different states, and in Minnesota, the times for hunting run from 12:00 noon until 4:00 p.m. on opening day and at sunrise for the remainder of the season. Although this doesn’t seem like a lot of time, the ten of us made some memories I will never forget. We arrived at our blind at 10:30 a.m. The sky was swarming with ducks before we even got things set up. Everywhere I looked I saw ducks swooping in and out of decoys. It wasn’t going to take long to bag our limit, and I knew we were going to get the season off to a great start. All we had to do was wait until noon!
Cool calm mornings, the fog on the lake is dense and all you can see is your decoys. As shooting hours roll around and the sun is just starting to peak over the horizon, the fog slowly lifts off the lake and the target at hand begins to swoop, lock up and land. What am I talking about? Ducks, one of the most majestic birds at hand, in my opinion. Ducks are one of the best animals to hunt, because one it’s a great challenge and two it is one of the most heart racing sports known to man. But what makes it so heart racing? Well when you’re out there and you hear you’re first mallard quack or your first wood duck whistle you get that deep adrenaline rush, your heart begins to pump faster and harder. Then there they are locking up into your decoys,
The firearm deer season started on Friday, November 15 1996. This was terrible for me because I had to weigh in at two o'clock for a wrestling meet at Muskegon the next day. Even though I had to drive all the way to Muskegon on Saturday morning, I could not stand the idea of not being able to sit out there in the field and just enjoy the outdoors on opening day. I was still determined not to miss opening day, since I had never missed it before. After I weighed in I said the hell with it and hopped in my car and headed for home.
It's five a.m. when I get to the dirt road winding into Ocala National Forest. I park my car in a clearing gather my gear and head into the forest with my eyes to the trees. By five-thirty I'm set up in a tree, my rifle is loaded and I'm quietly sipping hot coffee from my plastic thermos cup. I'm well concealed by tree limbs, and I have a clear shot at the ground below within my line of sight. My camouflage pants and jacket keep me hidden from the poor eyesight of the deer below, and my height above the ground keeps the smell of a human away from the sensitive noses of animals on the ground.
To Mr. Rainsford, hunting is like football to a NFL player. Hunting plays a huge role in his li...
There is no other big-game animal in North America like the white-tailed deer. The whitetails habitat is so widespread that it covers just about all of North America and parts of Central America. The white-tailed deer is the most commonly hunted big game animal ever. Before the settlers arrived, an estimated 30 million whitetails inhabited what is now the United States and Canada. But as settlers pursued them for food and market hunters slaughtered them with snares, traps, and set guns, the deer population underwent a disastrous decline. By 1900, only 400,000 whitetails remained.
The deer are easy to spot. In the summer, it’s coat is reddish-brown and in the winter it is buff. All year around its underside and tail are completely white as well as having a white spot on its neck. The prime deer habitat consists of deciduous trees, primarily cottonwood, ash, willow, elm and box elder. However preferred, the woodland cover is not essential to the deer’s survival.
Squirrel hunting has long been an American tradition and a tradition that many hunters grew up with. Squirrel hunting has just the right amount of action to keep a young hunter interested and more often than not that young hunter will choose to pursue another game eventually. Squirrels are getting a break from hunters as more and more people are hunting deer and turkey, or unfortunately not at all. I remember when the opening day of squirrel season was almost like Christmas. I couldn't wait to walk the hardwood ridges and fencerows to hunt a few squirrels and it was as exciting to me then as any deer hunt could be.
Since the beginning of time man has been hunting animals for food. Even before fire, man needed to hunt, because hunting was the only way to eat. At first man used things such as spears and rocks to kill its prey. As man evolved, they started using bows and arrows. Next came an early model of what we use today, the firearm. It is powerful yet easy to carry around. It puts the animal through less suffering and is a lot more efficient than previous techniques. Hunting was once a necessity, but now it is a tradition, passed on from father to son as a way to spend time together, enjoy the outdoors, and experience what our ancestors went through in hunting their dinner. Since it is considered a sport some think we are killing off the deer population, when in actuality, “While most other big-game species have declined with the spread of urbanization, the whitetail has been able to adapt to its ever-changing environment. Through the efforts of state agencies and conservation groups like Whitetails Unlimited, wildlife officials estimate today’s whitetail population to exceed 30 million” (www.whitetailsunlimited.org).
Wildlife Services also uses the technique of gunning. The first technique is aerial gunning, in which predators are being shot down by use of a helicopter or fixed-wing aircrafts (NRDC, 2011). Shooting is a method that they use by calling an animal and then shooting it. This means, they use a call that sounds like prey and when that animal comes around looking for food, the Wildlife Services shoot it. Hunting dogs are used to track predators or they are used as “decoy dogs” to draw the predators in.
They say that the easy part of moose hunting is up until you pull the trigger. Well, if this had been the easy part, I did not want to know what the hard part was. Then, six hours later, I understood! Actually, we finally had a lucky break; a half-mile before we caught up to the moose they had crossed a jeep trail. So, after we de-boned the Moose, it only took us four hours of packing fully loaded pack frames to get him to the road………and we are still eating that tasty meat.
In the United States today, hunting isn’t as popular in populated places as it is in rural places. Primarily because humans have learned to keep the most needed animals such as cows, pigs and chickens, contained, but also because there are not as many wild animals in these populated places as there is in more unpopulated areas. For the hunters who hunt to survive, they not only hunt for the meat on the animals bones, they also hunt for the furs and pelts that the animals have. The reason hunters hunt an animal for its fur is because they can use them to trade for supplies they may need such as money, ammunition or anything they cannot make themselves. If a hunter is hunting an animal mainly for its fur, they may use a trap instead of...
Part of the problem lies in the number of competing activities. Youth have school, sports, computers and friends vying for their time, and the same thing is true with adults — work, sports and devices take them away from hunting as a primary outdoor
A hunter has two styles of hunting to choice from before a hunt. The hunter can decide between a tree stand and a ground blind. Although decision it up to the hunter, both allow the hunter to be hidden. Each of the two accomplish the task of killing the animal, tree stand from the tops of trees, and ground blinds from the ground. Even though they have the same purpose, tree stands offer a better range of sight, better vantage point, and a back stop for the projectile to hit. Thus making tree stands the more practical and safer choice when it comes to hunting.
Hunting is a prime pastime for millions of Americans. Being able to own a gun and to hunt animals on land that you own is an immeasurable blessing and privilege. With this privilege comes great responsibility which includes following the laws that have been put in place concerning hunting, such as not hunting without a permit, using the correct techniques when hunting specific animals, and knowing what weapons are legal to hunt the specific animal with. There are many different animals to hunt, and the techniques to hunt them are easily managed.