Hunting

On Deer Leases and Boredom

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I’ve spoken with some people who don’t know what a deer lease is, so I thought I’d do my best to explain. Note that I’m still a n00b to all of this so I may not have all the details right.

Essentially a deer lease is an agreement between a hunter and a landowner to allow the hunter to hunt on the landowner’s land. Most of the land in Texas is privately owned. Consequently if you want to hunt, most of the opportunities are on private land. Texas does have public hunts, but they are few and far between. So you need to find someone willing to open their land for hunting, and it’s great that many land owners do just that. That’s really about all it is. You give them money, they allow you access to the land. Exactly what you can and cannot do varies from agreement to agreement. Cost varies as well. You just shop around, the joys of the free market.

So how do you hunt on a lease? Well, most of the hunting down here ends up being done by sitting in a stand or a blind, which will have a feeder stationed some distance away (e.g. 100 yards). Then you sit and wait, watching for a deer. Being creatures of habit, they will have their favorite paths and feeding locations, and hopefully over time they’ll discover the feeder as an easy and reliable source of food, make it a part of their routine to visit it, and if you wait and watch long enough you’ll have a deer.

Doesn’t sound very sporting or much like hunting does it?

It all depends how you look at it.

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My First Deer

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I got my first deer. In fact, I got two deer!

But the way I went about it was not what I expected.

As Mick Jagger once sang, “You can’t always get what you want, but if you try sometimes you just might find you get what you need.” That certainly summed up the past week of my life.

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Making Lemonade

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This weekend marks the opening of the (firearm) deer hunting season in Texas.

And I won’t be a part of it.

*sigh*

All that work on the lease, working towards this point. And I can’t capitalize on it. My first opening weekend.

*sigh*

Why not? Work obligations. To be fair, no one at work is forcing me to do this. I spoke with a co-worker about a problem the product is presently experiencing, and given the scope of the problem, the customer requirements, the greater implications for relations and contracts and revenue and so on well… in my mind the only right thing to do is stay home and work on the problem.

I’m mostly doing it out of obligation to myself. I just feel that’s the right thing to do. As soon as the fix is completed and given to the QA department, you better believe I’ll be out hunting. The rut is on and I don’t want to miss it. I already put in for a day off (to have made for a longer weekend), so if it means mid-week next week I just take a single day and spend it out in the stand, then that will have to do.

It’s life. These things happen. You roll with it. And in this case, I may be able to make some lemonade.

You see, due to all the rain we’ve been having the action shooting bays at the Austin Rifle Club have been soggy and any Steel and IPSC matches have been cancelled for the past some months. Finally the rain has held off long enough for ARC to get in and repair the bays, and so this weekend ALSPPC won’t be holding an IPSC match: they’ll be holding 2 IPSC matches! One on Saturday, one on Sunday. If you read this blog regularly you know I’ve been trying to get out to competition but the weather and range issues or some other 3rd thing always prevented it. But now it’s here, and if workload is such that I wouldn’t be able to go hunt, I ought to be able to at least slip away for half a day and shoot my first IPSC match.

Don’t know how it will go just yet, but here’s hoping for a little lemonade this weekend.

Updated: I want to go on public record saying, Jon you’re a good guy.

If only we could too…

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Look at what I saw in my backyard a couple weeks ago:

Mind you I live in the city of Austin, tho obviously not downtown. There’s some flood control plots that run behind my house and coupled with the few hundred undeveloped acres connecting through (again, all for flood control and other “naturalization” stuff by the City), yeah we get all sorts of critters including deer and coyote. But for a city deer, he’s pretty good looking, isn’t he? Of course the majority of the deer we see on a daily basis are does and fawns or much younger bucks, but still the deer population in my backyard is pretty healthy. Over the years we’ve watched the same does come around, watched their children be born and grow up. And the deer population grows, unchecked.

The City seems to grant this is a problem. City of Austin recently passed an ordinance outlawing the feeding of deer. I know other similar legislative attempts have been made to control the deer population. Trouble is, the deer are oblivious to the hard work of our legislators. They don’t see your pretty flowers and landscaping as improving your house’s curb appeal… .no… the deer just see it as food. And the deer problems increase, because there’s a lot of this food about. The only threat to these deer are all the SUV’s driven by soccer mom’s with mobile phones glued to their ears. Unfortunately that’s not enough of a control measure.

Seems allowing hunters to hunt in urban areas is working to control the deer population. Whodathunkit?

I can understand people getting their panties in a wad over firearm-based hunting within city limits. But why not bow hunting? Mr. Buck above wasn’t but 25 yards from me. Certainly proper guidelines could be set down and the deer population could be better regulated. Furthermore, if the hunter didn’t want the venison, I’m sure the Capital Area Food Bank would be happy for the donation. Hell, Austin being Austin, I’d even find it acceptable if they made it a requirement of getting the “within the city hunting permit” to donate at least half of the meat to the CAFB.

But for now, all I can do is dream… and watch the deer play in my backyard. Hrm. Now if I could just get some buffalo roaming and antelope playing out behind my home too.

Tough Decision

/ hsoi

Deer hunting seasons starts in a couple weekends. I’m all geared up for my first opening weekend.

Then I learn about an Edged Weapons Defense class that happens the Sunday of opening weekend.

I don’t know what to do.

Sit in a blind, in the cold, maybe in the rain, waiting… hoping….

Go do some cool martial arts stuff taught by Leslie Buck.

Hrm.

I’ll admit, I’m really drawn to taking the class. But opening weekend, the rut… I may not have enough free time otherwise if I skip opening weekend.

I thought about hunting Saturday morning and Saturday evening, then driving home and taking the class on Sunday. Not sure yet.

If only all decisions in life could be so tough. 😉

Productive

/ hsoi / 6 Comments

I’ve been fairly quiet today since I’ve been away from the computer most of the day.

The garage has been bugging me lately. Junk has been piling up, hard to get around, and I can’t do things in there. Biggest thing? All that reloading equipment from exodus still sitting there, unused. It’s been getting to me. I took the Speer Reloading manual into the house a few weeks ago and have been reading it. And I think with hunting season upon me I have lofty dreams of my own hunting load. So… before I went to bed last night I decided I was going to revamp the garage.

Off to Home Depot. Buying wood screws, brackets, wood, sundry other things. I also picked up a new Makita cordless drill and circular saw. Some years ago I had a Porter-Cable cordless drill but when it died a couple years back and I couldn’t get replacement batteries I opted to get a corded drill. I made the wrong decision to save a little money and the drill I got lacked important things like a brake and a clutch. So while I was happy with the corded drill the rest of the drill sucked. So the Makita was a great purchase and is very cool, but the battery didn’t seem to last very long. Supposedly it’s a fast recharge tho, but when I put the battery on the charger it flashed the “bad battery” lights at me. Hrm. Not good. I’ll contact Makita in the morning. Never owned a circular saw, but it’s one of those things that the past some whiles I’ve had enough times when it would have been nice if I had one (always managed to get by), so I figured now was as good a time as any to finally buy one.

My ceilings are high so I put the shelves up high all around the perimeter of the garage interior. Just simple brackets, plywood, and wood screws. I was then able to store all the boxes of holiday decorations, coolers, and various other things up high. Threw away a bunch of crap, rearranged a bunch of stuff, and then I was able to give the reloading table a proper home. Ahhhh… 🙂

The garage looks good. Motorcycle looks happy in there (tho it’d look happier out on the road of course). There’s room to move, better organization, and again… a place to reload. That’s the important thing. 🙂

Seven Habits of Successful Hunters

/ hsoi

A discussion of seven habits of successful hunters.

Being a novice hunter, patience is going to be the toughest to come by for me. I’ve been told there are 4 stages of hunting:

  1. Just want to get one.
  2. Want to get as many as possible.
  3. Want to get “the big one”.
  4. Want to get altruistic, teaching others and becoming larger sportsmen.

I’m somewhere in the 1-2 phase. I’ve gotten other stuff (e.g. hogs), but haven’t gotten a deer yet. Patience will be tough to come by. 😉

Friday miscellaneous

/ hsoi

I don’t want to grow up, I’m a Toys R Us kid…

Zipped over to the indoor range this morning to recheck the zero on my hunting rifle. When I was last at the range I had some issues with zeroing and so I wanted to ensure I went back to reconfirm. Got there, shot at 100 yards, cold barrel, hunting load, nailed it just where I wanted it. Shot 2 more rounds, grouped well. Gave it a couple clicks left just to fine-tune, 2 more rounds. It seems to be going where I want it. Any fault now lies with the shooter, not the gun. Was at the range maybe 20 minutes total, which was fine with me. I was the first customer in the door this morning. As I was packing up, lots of folks were coming in. You can tell other hunters are getting ready for the season.

I also had my first real hunting dream last night. I was up in the tree stand, looking down at the hunting grounds. Just a large vast tract of land, but trees and scrub and other such stuff out there. It was early morning, the sun just starting to creep up and light just starting to come into play. I would see some animal, shoulder my rifle, but then not shoot because I would see another animal and change to that. Some of the animals were takers, some not. I recall a zebra. Not 100% sure where that came from, Wife thinks it’s because of my newfound love of Pearls Before Swine. Never shot anything, but I could see the land, the animals. I could feel the cold air. The anticipation. The excitement.

I’m thinking about shooting in the steel match on Sunday. Don’t know yet. We’ve been having a lot of rain (finally) and the range may be too muddy, yet again. No word yet if the match is on or not. If it is on, not 100% sure I’ll shoot it as I’m feeling that I’d like this weekend to sit around and do nothing with my Wife and Kids. Either way, while I was at the gun range I picked up an inexpensive bag for the Buck Mark to make it easier to tote around.

Finally got my badge/passes to the Austin Rifle Club. I’m a full-fledged member now. I hope now I can make it a fairly regular thing to get to the range, and to take the kids.

Final thoughts?

Give someone a hug today. Call your mother. Smile, laugh, play. Don’t spend too much time on Facebook… go outside. 🙂