My My! What a change!!

[RMulhern]

When I was ten years old I started deer hunting with my Dad! He'd take me to a good location where there was plenty of sign and say "Stay here until I come back for you!" He taught me how to read deer sign like a book and sure enough...if there was enough patience...the wait usually paid off! By age 15....sitting in one spot too long gave me the 'tail ache' so I tried a different tactic! This was to wake up about 0400 hrs. and go out and check the conditions of weather to see if there was going to be any wind that day! If the wind was blowing....I had so many places to hunt that I could always figure out where to go so as to keep my nose into the wind. I'd drive and old truck I was allowed to use to a location I'd picked and then I'd walk maybe a mile (sorry guys; no 4 wheelers back then) or so to get into position to hunt into the wind! I'd wait for daylight once I was where I needed to be and as first light came...enough to make game visible I'd ease into the timber. I'd 'slip hunt'; maybe ease through 10' at a time and lean against a tree and scan the timber out in front of me! It might take me 3-5 hours to go a mile but I killed lots of nice bucks using this procedure! During these years, 1955 through 1958 as the hunting pressure increased on public and private lands which I was allowed to hunt...I again changed tactics! I discovered that what worked best for me was to find deer sign and wherever I could find 2-3 trails converging...I would take to the trees; climb a tree using a pole climbing belt and spurs and I'd usually take me a couple of 2 x 4's, a piece of plyboard cut to size, hammer and nails and I'd find a fork about 25' up and there I'd fix me a 'stand'! I killed lots of bucks letting other folks move the game to me; worked well! These were the years before landowners let bulldozers rape their land by knocking down all the timber with the thought that they were going to become millionaires farming soybeans and rice! What they didn't realize was that they had a GOLDMINE in the timber and if they had it today....it would provide untold thousands of dollars being leased for hunting land!! Now....all of North Louisiana has been 'cleared' and it looks as naked as West Texas! In 1958 when I went into the US Army there was 19 million acres of virgin timber ranging from the southern Arkansas border east of the Quachita River all the way down to Natchez, Mississippi and if a man asked permission, any landowner would allow hunting on their property. Along with the dumbness of clearing the timber another problem was created aka lack of adequate rainfall! When wide and vast areas of land are cleared these acts destroy the rainmaking cycle and now.....each summer we suffer from inadequate rain and droughts are a regular thing! If folks could see into the future as well as hindsight is apparent we'd all be a lot better off!

What do we call 'hunting' today? Well...in comparison to the way I did it for several years it's a poor excuse for the old way of slipping though the timber/thickets and catching game out doing their daily activity! Today....'hunting'???....is building a 'shxthouse stand' aka box with carpet on the floor, a heater, and a comfortable chair to lean back in and maybe even a TV so those inclined can watch their favorite ballgame or "Corner of the Morning" show!! In addition there's usually a bunch of $$$$$ spent on planting some weird kind of food plot out in front of the 'box' and basically 'hunting' has turned into a game of 'shooting' instead of using old time woodlore to take home a buck! And whereas I got a kick out of killing a 11 pointer (a spike buck), nowadays everybody is out to take a 185 pt. plus buck and think that anything less than that is terrible! Most Outdoor Channel videos are all pushing the BIG BUCK thing and a young kid can't go out and take a spike or a 4 pt. buck of average size and feel good about it because of all this hype that's pumped up on the TV videos! And in my opinion, what makes all this so ridiculous is the fact that basically all these Outdoor Channel shows are only after the Almighty Dollar and if you took most of these guys promoting these shows to the middle of the Tensas National Wildlife Refuge and told them to find due east....they'd be as lost as I would be if I was told to perform brain surgery on a Snail Darter!! If one pays attention to WHERE all these videos are shot it's easy to see that it's either in South Texas where there's as many deer as there are bees in a hive and usually the terrain is wide arsed open with not much vegatation or in some location like one I watched a while back that was adjacent to a Wyoming river bottom where the hunters could go out and glass their deer jumping a fence and then they'd go put up a stand near that point! That's all well and great but my point is I'd like to see those guys come down here in a few places where there's some timber left and make one of those BIG BUCK videos and take one! After one trip...they wouldn't be back I can assure you! Apparently the bucks I've hunted in the past and present are a lot different animal than what exist in Wyoming and South Texas because most are totally nocturnal!

Well....gotta quit this guys! Gotta go finish working on my 'shxthouse stand'! My!! What a change!!

[bulldog]

Thanks, Sharpsman, for the "huntin hints". Great post for us needing to learn somehting. Course I hunt in pretty open areas compared to you but you got the technique down. Yeah, too bad bout them trees but when I was a kid from hearing about pioneers and woodsman , I dreamed of clearing a forest as I thought thats what one should do. Chop and down and burn them trees like they did from New Yourk to Missouri! Sure sounded like a great work to do and fun too! Strange, isn't it. Wonder what kids now think is the thing to do. Anyways, your right bout them tv shows. Course, I got to admit that eating sausage gravey and eggs while waiting for a Texas Buck to show up is mighty appealing to me these days. One guy said you eat with your rifle resting on the window of the hunt shack. Ima getting sure corrupted! On the other hand the dang deer probably are corn fed anyway and not considered wild either so what the heck. Seems the whole world has gone to Heck in a handbag anyway so about the best we can do is to try to preserve some of nature while we got to survive too which means using nature too. Maybe huntin farms for the city slickers is better than nothin and at least some of them then know and respect firearms but the BP folks just got to keep on showing that we don't need them knecked down 50 caliber machine guns. Hey, out walking today a real big hawk missed a dove above me but the whilrl of the wings as both dived into a gully was amazing! whizzzzzzzz - made me jump!

[Kilts]

Sharpsman, Your story points out the very reason we don't/can't hunt like we did years ago. You say the framer was sitting on a gold mine if he leased his land. Well many do! Most framers complain about the deer or antalope eatting up all their profits then some fellow with more dollars then sence comes along and gives him money to hunt and the bidding is on. I talked to a rancher this fall about hunting and he says sure, $500 for a buck and $300 for a doe. No thanks they can eat your crops for free. I can give you his # but I wouldn't think you are that type of hunter. Hunting as you know has become more about stuff then skill and if your bank account isn't deep enough, as most youths arent, then hunting will end up like Europe is, just the weathy and hunt clubs hunt.

[Old Doe Shooter]

Let's assume you have a modest little ranch/ farm. You raise cattle/hogs/chickens/turkeys, pick one, and a nice polite guy comes to you door to ask permission to hunt deer/elk/pheasants, pick one.
You pay property taxes on your land and income taxes too. If this nice polite guy shoots a deer ( or whatever ), any deer, he puts 50-100 pounds of meat in his freezer. He is no longer or to a much lesser degree a potential customer for your products.
If he consumes a pound of meat a day, he's just put 13-27% of his annual
meat protein in his freezer courtesy of your land and your taxes.
Now, I ask you. Are YOU going to let this nice guy to hunt your land for free. You say YES, of course I would.
Right! And you had dinner with Elvis last night and your wife looks like Pam Anderson. Dream on, it would be a shame to wake you.

[RMulhern]

[quote="Old Doe Shooter"]Let's assume you have a modest little ranch/ farm. You raise cattle/hogs/chickens/turkeys, pick one, and a nice polite guy comes to you door to ask permission to hunt deer/elk/pheasants, pick one.
You pay property taxes on your land and income taxes too. If this nice polite guy shoots a deer ( or whatever ), any deer, he puts 50-100 pounds of meat in his freezer. He is no longer or to a much lesser degree a potential customer for your products.
If he consumes a pound of meat a day, he's just put 13-27% of his annual
meat protein in his freezer courtesy of your land and your taxes.
Now, I ask you. Are YOU going to let this nice guy to hunt your land for free. You say YES, of course I would.
Right! And you had dinner with Elvis last night and your wife looks like Pam Anderson. Dream on, it would be a shame to wake you.[/quote]

ODS

Now...here's the OTHER side of that coin....as for HUNTING FREE!! If you're raising cotton, corn, milo, taters, jelly beans or whatever.....there's a payment that comes to the 'raiser thereof' called a SUBSIDY in a lot of cases! And that nice and polite guy what knocked on ya door is paying a pretty stiff fee in state/federal taxes to your local game department which goes for wildlife management programs to keep and maintain those animals so they can eat ya corn and soybean crop up! Most folks I think are willing to pay a fair price for usage of another's land but a whole lot of folks don't take kindly to being 'skinned' in the form of a BENDOVER PAYMENT with no vaseline!! If it wasn't for the SLOB HUNTER that shoots up the farmer's stock, tears down his gates and fences, and sets fire to his acreage as has been done in many cases I would imagine that most farmers would be more receptive to letting folks use their land but in the final analysis the truth is that people don't respect other peoples 'stuff' and frankly if I was a stockman and some of these things had been done on my property....I'd meet that nice and polite man at my door with a double barreled scattergun!!

[Old Doe Shooter]

Mr Sharpsman
I'm not quite sure what you are saying there... I think a fair number of folks are willing to pay something for land access but I think a larger group thinks landowners should open their land to hunting for nothing. I agree that people don't respect other's property but that's another good reason for putting a price on the privilege. The fact that landowners feed the game simply adds to the cost of owning land and the right to get something back for that cost. I dont know too many folk who will give away their income or potential income for someone else's recreational enjoyment. Charity rarely relates to recreational expenditures.
Slob hunters just make the price higher or the land closed.
The fact that States charge for the right to hunt is another story.
And yet another story is why anyone with 2-5 grand to drop on a Shiloh would even think about the modest cost of private land access, if they don't already own land themselves or the user fees for hunting licenses is beyond my comprehension.
I've totalled my annual license fees from the several States I hunted last year and it's substantial but it's my vacation and my recreation so I don't regret a dime. And I suspect by year's end this year will be about the same. Hey, it's only money. You can't take it with you and if you don't spend it your kids will waste it anyway.