The Monkey and I picked a few paw paws for lunch…
Sorry for the lack of action here. My computer is still in the mass of boxes and my brain is fried. Tomorrow I head to Colorado and Saturday I start hunting. I’ve loaded a few things to run while I’m gone including the second part of antelope hunt.
Unfortunately I have bowhunted exactly once this fall. In the 13 years since I discovered archery I’ve never hunted so little. Last Saturday The Old Man and I spent most of the day hanging stands, checking sites, etc. We quit by 4:30 to shoot our elk rifles:
Then I took a shower and grabbed my bow. I sat in a stand I’ve had fantastic hopes each time I’ve sat in it, and I’ve yet to see a solid buck there. It sits in a narrow strip of timber between a lake and a cut corn field.
Looking left:
Looking right:
The idea is to catch deer trading from the big cover to the cut corn fields before dark. The idea is good, the quality of the deer has not been. Two does came by and that was it. I’m not giving up on it though.
… has been a bust. I scouted Friday, got bored Saturday morning, and ended up picking paw paws instead. By the way, a fruit rollup made from paw paws isn’t very good.
Anyway, a moderate cold front came through yesterday with lots of rain and a drop of 20 degrees. I was hoping it would push some birds down so I went on a scouting mission this evening after work. This is what I found:
The water was about a foot deep running across the road, and over every levee on the place. Kodi and I waded around a bit, saw nothing, and got out of there. The good news is that we should have plenty of water for duck season, and I didn’t have to swim to make it happen, like I did last year.
Yesterday The Old Man and I spent the day working on deer stands, feeders, trails, and the like. It turns out you can get an amazing amount done with two guys, two trucks, a ranger, a tractor, and a bobcat. As I was driving home today my wife and I were talking about how different things are today versus ten years ago when I had 2 stands that I had set up myself. Every year it gets more complicated, and every year we kill more and bigger deer. Anyway we worked most of the day yesterday…
I realize this picture looks like a K-State graduate school class…
We finished in time to dove hunt. The wind was HOWLING which made for a fun shoot. There were plenty of birds so the extra shooting just made the fun last a little longer. We each ran 2 dogs, 3 of which were getting out for the first time this year. The plot backs up to some dense woods and a creek so we needed all the help we could get. There were a lot of tongues hanging out when we were done…
My daughter watched some of the action from a distance. The feathers were a big hit, as were the dogs…
The invasive Silver and Big Head Carp have been moving up the Kansas (or Kaw) River for years now. They are believed to have started in fish farms in the Southeastern states. They then got into Missouri which the Kaw flows into. It was just a matter of time. Then several days ago the Kansas Department of Wildlife announced that spring and early summer floods caused a record spawn. The article can be found here.
Tonight I decided to check it out myself:
There are literally hundreds of thousands of these 3″ silvers stacked up below this low powerhead dam. I’ve never seen anything like it. They were constantly jumping on shore, upstream, on my feet, and into my backpack. You could catch dozens in one swipe with a 5 gallon bucket. I can only imagine what will happen in the next few years as these fish get too big for any of our local predators.
Honestly, I don’t know what can be done at this point anyway. The Kansas River has little recreation value and even less fishing value. Perhaps 5 years from now it will be a premier flying carp bowfishing destination?
One shot, a miss.
I was a Missouri resident more than a decade ago when there was talk of turning elk loose in parts of the Ozarks. I was personally excited but I predicted that it would never fly with the residents of Southern Missouri. These are not people you would call open thinkers. As I claimed at the time, there was just no hope for, “Them there giant deer things”.
But now 10 years have passed and we’re in the heart of NASCAR season. There will never be a better time to try again!
CAPE GIRARDEAU Mo – The Missouri Conservation Commission has directed Missouri Conservation Department (MDC) staff to reinitiate plan development that would enable the agency to restore elk around Peck Ranch Conservation Area (CA) while addressing concerns raised nearly a decade ago.
Following the presentation, the Commission directed Department staff to reinitiate plan development, based on current information and knowledge, incorporating the following:
•A well-defined elk restoration zone around Peck Ranch CA focusing on an area in Carter, Shannon and Reynolds Counties,
•Established herd management guidelines, including a release protocol, population objectives and hunting as the primary management tool,
•Effective health protocols, including disease testing and a contingency plan to ensure the health of domestic livestock and wildlife, and
•Provisions for dealing with elk that leave the restoration zone.The area around Peck Ranch CA was selected because it has suitable elk habitat, a high percentage of public land, low density of public roads and a limited amount of row crop and livestock production.
Now it’s time to see if the cool, thinking, members of the state can slide one by the, uh, Ozarkians. The whole release is here.
“Should I shoot that coyote?”
“No coyotes until after 9:00 am” was The Old Man’s response. He was guiding for a longtime friend and duck hunting partner.
It’s a regular occurance for us to see a coyote while hunting. I told you about The Old Man laying the smack on 3 during one sit during the 2008 rifle season. I didn’t tell you about this mangy looking thing I shot during the 2009 turkey season:
I have no idea what skin problem she had but it was ugly and extremely foul smelling.
Anyway the point is, what should you do when you see a coyote? Obviously weigh your hunting interests. That was the point of the 9:00am rule. But what about the biology of the whole thing? Coyotes eat deer and turkeys so you should kill every one you see right?
It’s not necessarily that simple according to Mike Bodenchuk of the USDA’s wildlife services who argues that the occasional killing of a predator really does not impact populations or predation:
… coyotes have a 60 percent annual mortality rate in some cases, whether they are hunted or not. In order to have an impact, it’s vital to remove either 70 to 80 percent of the entire population, or to remove the right coyotes at the right time.
Randomly killing the occasional predator might help in such extreme situations. However, it’s critical to maintain a high level of predator management for several years in order to have a lasting impact. Researchers working on the National Bison Range in Montana found that deer and antelope fawn mortality increased substantially only a few years after coyote control efforts stopped, because coyotes filled the void left by those taken out of the population. When coyote numbers fall, they tend to produce larger litters to make up for the decrease in adults. And other coyotes will move in from surrounding areas. Killing a couple of coyotes in a single season will likely have little noticeable effect on your deer numbers or the quality of the bucks.
You can read the whole piece from Whitetail Journal here.
In Kansas there is no closed season on coyotes and they can be killed in a variety of ways including running them with dogs. Over the years I’ve tried several times to call them in the late fall or winter when their coats are thicker and I’m bored. I’ve had very little sucess. I suspect that they’ve been hunted hard by that time of year and dumb ones are all dead. For me it’s much easier to find them like this (from last week’s turkey hunt):
Then do like the hunter quoted at the beginning and wait until all your likely turkey opportunities have resolved themselves:
If you haven’t been receiving the enews from The Caesar Kleberg Wildlife Research Institute at Texas A&M you are missing out. They regularly mail out results from their whitetail research projects, many of which have applications for hunters.
A couple of weeks ago I was trying to hang a big freaking ladder stand all by myself. I’d nearly punched a hole in my ribs trying to get it across the creek and I narrowly avoided crushing my skull more than once trying to get it upright and into the tree. While resting and rethinking my approach I hear a walnut or some other large nut fall out of tree right behind me. I go to investigate and find this:
Along the river under a canopy of Oaks, Sycamores, and other normal river trees were these scrubby little trees with what appeared to be green potatoes hanging off them. I dug deep into that pitifully shallow well of knowledge from senior year Field Biology class… and guessed that they might be pawpaw trees. I had some vague notion that they had a fantastic fruit that people loved to eat but was too soft to transport or market commercially. I was no where near confident enough in my identification to try eating one but I picked a few, dissected one, and thought I’d do some research when I got home. Here’s what they looked like:
They were greener on the tree but in the few hours it took me to get them home they had turned brownish. On the inside they were bright yellow and soft with fairly large lima bean shaped seeds:
My research included this little tidbit:
The earliest documentation of pawpaws is in the 1541 report of the de Soto expedition, who found Native Americans cultivating it east of the Mississippi River. The Lewis and Clark Expedition depended and sometimes subsisted on pawpaws during their travels. Chilled pawpaw fruit was a favorite dessert of George Washington, and Thomas Jefferson was certainly familiar with it as he planted it at Monticello.
And:
Growers hope that potential medical use will eventually lead to increased market demand from the pharmaceutical industry. The seeds also have insecticidal properties. Some Native American tribes dry and powder them and apply the powder to children’s heads to control lice; specialized shampoos now use compounds from pawpaw for the same purpose. Currently, pawpaw extract is being reviewed as an alternative cancer treatment alongside conventional and approved treatments.
If you are wondering (and I know you are), it tasted like a cross between a banana and a mango with the texture of a very ripe pear. It was very good. Kinda cool huh?
A particularly nasty muni court docket had me booked until around 3:00 today. After making sure we avoided jail and other nasty possibilities I changed clothes and headed out south to check food plots, move some stands around, and chase some doves if I could find any.
First, check this out:
All the plots look great but I think this one is the best. Everything is shin high and extremely dense. Once again, it appears we used plenty of turnip seed but if you look closely you can see all sorts of things are growing up:
A couple of the food plots have a different seed mix that includes this mystery plant:
Maybe somebody who paid better attention in Field Botany than I did could offer an idea? My partner was an attractive red head who drove us in her convertible to our site visits…
Finally after checking things out I wandered around chasing a few doves as they traveled between a corn field and their roost.
Now for a shower and bed…
