Archive for the 'Hunting' Category

Thanks for the patience waiting for posts. I had a successful hunting trip, at least by my estimation. For what it’s worth, I am profoundly impressed with the 7mm PRC.

Parody, but still amusing.

@waynecountylyfe

Stop Texting Me Pictures of Your Deer!

♬ original sound – waynecountylyfe

Outdoor Life.

Going over the timeline in his head, Harakal figured it had only been a few hours between the time the pheasant hunter found the deer and when he walked up on it. Unsure of what to do, he called back one of his friends, who encouraged him to report it to the Pennsylvania Game Commission. Harakal tried calling but didn’t get an answer as he walked back to his truck.

“I was just going home at that point. And I decided my season’s done. I’m not hunting for the rest of the year.”

Back at home, Harakal was about to hop in the shower when he got a call back from a PGC game warden. He shared the full story with the warden and agreed to meet him at the deer, and then he drove back to Shenango Lake for a fourth time.

Harakal still had the bone fragments in his pocket, and when they got to where the deer was still laying, he showed the game warden the missing puzzle piece. He said he still couldn’t believe someone had robbed him of the biggest buck he’d ever killed.

“The game warden tells me, ‘This is like one-in-a-million chances, but that is definitely your deer. And I don’t even know how to tell you this. But it’s our policy that when something like this happens, we cut the rack off.’”

The game warden then led Harakal back to his own truck, where he pulled the two antlers off his backseat and handed them over. He explained how the pheasant hunter had called the agency after finding the 8-point buck, and that he was just following standard procedure when he confiscated the antlers. Then he helped Harakal drag the buck out of the field.

Why is it your standard procedure to confiscate the antlers? Why do you believe they belong to you? How do you know “fair chase” is over at the point you ruin the game with a saw?

Source.

Hunters in Florida were killed in a freak accident after they were struck by lightning while hunting with their dogs.

Two hunters, 38 and 31, from Miami were struck dead after being hit by lightning while hunting in Floridian wetlands.

Responding law enforcement were called to Rucks Dairy Road around 1.30pm on Wednesday September 24 and began searching for the men who hadn’t returned from their hunt.

Their abandoned car was discovered parked in the area before their bodies were found along with their two hunting dogs.

While the initial investigation determined the hunters and their dogs to have died from a lightning strike, the Medical Examiner’s Office is yet to rule an official cause of death.

Sheriff Paul Blackman said in a release from the Highlands County Sheriff’s Office: ‘Our area gets more lightning than just about anywhere else in the country, especially in the summer. If you can hear thunder, that means lightning is close enough to strike, even if the sky doesn’t look too bad yet.’

‘It is essential to pay attention and plan ahead when storms approach.’

Source.

A teen who did not return after going hunting in northern Louisiana was likely killed by a lightning strike, according to investigators.

The grim discovery was made around 8:30 p.m. Saturday, Oct. 18, near the town of Bernice, the Union Parish Sheriff’s Office reported in an Oct. 19 news release.

“Upon arrival of first responders, they were directed to a remote wooded area where 17-year-old Colton Gauge Honeycutt, of Monroe, was located inside of an elevated deer stand. Family members had become concerned when Honeycutt did not return from deer hunting earlier in the evening,” the sheriff’s office said.

“Investigators believe Honeycutt was killed by a lightning strike when thunderstorms moved through the area, just before sunset Saturday evening. Honeycutt was pronounced deceased at the scene by the Union Parish Coroner’s Office.”

The incident is the nation’s 20th lightning fatality of 2025 and the first in Louisiana, according to John Jensenius, a lightning safety specialist with the National Lightning Safety Council.

“Since 2006, there have now been a total of 8 lightning fatalities linked to hunting, 5 of which have occurred in the last two months,” Jensenius said in a news release.

Great. It’s not just predatory animals, or dummies failing to tether to the tree and falling asleep, or hypothermia, or getting lost and breaking bones or dying of starvation, but now lightning. What are we supposed to do? Carry an electrical safety pad with us on hunts? I doubt that would suffice anyway.

Oh well. You drop your dime and pay your time to do what you love. The rest is up to the Almighty.

Outdoor Life.

Lone Star lawmakers recently added aoudads to the list of animals hunters can shoot from helicopters in Texas as part of a management tool to aid in the ongoing fight against the invasive sheep.

Senate Bill 1245, which passed both state legislative chambers and was signed into law by Gov. Greg Abbott in May, will go into effect Sept. 1. The bill expands Texas’ aerial wildlife management permit system, which previously only listed feral hogs and coyotes, to include aoudad. Aerial culling efforts have helped Texas with its burgeoning feral swine population. A 2019 USDA study found that helicopter hog hunting, also called “porkchopping,” has successfully reduced hog numbers by at least 31 percent.

Gross. Well, whatever. That’s just my reaction. Do as you wish – I see value in hunting hogs any way you can.

As for Aoudad, I think I’d rather stalk them.

Source.

The hotly-debated hunting matter of how far is too far for ethical rifle shots came up again Friday at a Wyoming legislative committee, where lawmakers were in a quandary on how to regulate the issue.

Members of the Legislature’s Travel, Recreation, Wildlife and Cultural Resources Committee noted that extremely long-range hunting shots are a growing concern, as they relate to hunting ethics.

But they questioned whether there’s any practical way to regulate the practice without trying to legislate ethics and morals.

The topic “keeps coming up over and over,” but it’s difficult for regulations to stay ahead of the rapid pace of firearms and optics technology, committee member Sen. Larry Hicks, R-Baggs, said.

In one much talked-about instance, a hunter in Fremont County shot an antelope from nearly 2,000 yards away.

Some hunters argue that any shot beyond about 600 yards is just too far.

Committee co-chairman Rep. Andrew Byron, R-Jackson, said he’s been hearing concerns from the hunters among his constituents.

“It is definitely affecting Western Wyoming,” Byron said.

He noted that he heard a story about a hunter who was preparing to take a 400-yard shot at a big game animal, only to have another hunter blast it from much farther back.

I wouldn’t worry about regulating ethics and morals. All laws are legislated morality.

2000 yards is simply too far to take an ethical shot in my opinion. You’re risking pain and suffering of the game animal and that’s just not a moral thing to do. It’s a shame that hunters can’t self regulate, but also a testimony to a sad state of affairs where hunters want to be the next “stud” who took game from a greater distance than the last record. It seems to me sort of like golfers getting out and wanting to put little white balls in holes in the middle of a field. Men worry a great deal over what I consider to be a stupid game.

Erik Cortina has said that he wouldn’t take a shot on a game animal at further than 600 yards, and anyone else shooting out there isn’t Erik Cortina, plain and simple.

Again, it’s a crying shame that hunters don’t have the morals to self regulate.

Source.

As Florida moves forward with plans to reinstate a regulated black bear hunt for the first time since 2015, opponents of the hunt from around the world are mobilizing an unconventional tactic — applying for the lottery hunt en masse. If these anti-hunters draw a tag, they’ll hold onto it, effectively preventing a legal, well-intended bear hunter from drawing. Their goal is to flood the lottery and, theoretically, reduce the number of bears harvested.

“Never in my life did I think I’d be a hunter,” Chuck O’Neal, president of Speak Up Wekiva, a grassroots organization dedicated to protecting the Wekiva River and its watershed, told Naples Daily News. “Now that we have a constitutional right to hunt, I might as well take advantage of that.”

The obvious answer for these idiots is to restrict tags to people who had a hunting license the previous year.

This is an updated version of a prior article at OL.

I usually aim for a high shoulder shot. This article does a good job of differentiating between quartering-away shots, quartering-to shots, frontal shots, and especially the difference between bow shots and rifle shots.

Source.

Another Texas city is feeling the wrath of an invasive and highly destructive species. The City of Kyle, located just about 20 miles south of downtown Austin is dealing with an “increased presence” of feral hogs. On Tuesday, officials said the Kyle Parks and Recreation Department is actively working within its feral hog trapping contract to devise the best strategy for the removal of the wild pigs. “The city is also exploring additional proactive solutions to mitigate the impact of feral hogs on public land as well as our local ecosystems,” officials said in a statement.

How nice. They are under a contract for trapping. Using this.

So here’s yet another prediction for you. I am a hog hunter and I have studied the hog problem for a long time now. Sounders don’t stay together like the wildlife biologists say they do. You can’t trap them all – I don’t care what the university-trained wildlife biologists are telling you. Boars often run alone because they fight each other when they are together. Sows may be with a lot of other sows, or they may run with one or two. Feral hogs are not like human family units. Please don’t anthropomorphize them. You’re making a mistake and also showing how ignorant you are of hog behavior. This isn’t like Wilbur in Charlotte’s Web. Even the sows fight each other from time to time.

The city won’t fix this problem by trying to trap them. There aren’t enough traps. The trappers are too expensive. You don’t have the money for all of this. If you do this, it must be combined with lethal removal, i.e., hunting. No, not hunting by paid police shooters. There aren’t enough of them. Besides, they need to be locking down the border anyway.

I mean getting hunters after them. $5 per head won’t be enough to get the right amount of interest. You may have to wait for children to get gored by boars with tusks. And your city council is going to have to revisit that whole issue of firearms being discharged within city limits. I know you have such an ordinance because all cities do.

This problem will get fixed, but only when enough people get hurt, enough ranches get destroyed, and city council gets replaced with new members.

Jim does a nice job with this analysis.

For the record, I never shoot my heavier recoiling guns extremely tight to the shoulder. In fact, my 444 Marlin shoots better for me when held just a tiny bit loose.

Concerning the notion of semiautomatic rifle accuracy, I suspect as more hunters begin to use them, the barrels will get better and more like the gun he was using. And yes, they’re capable of sub-MOA performance.