9-pt Buck

Story to follow, but after a long, cold day in the woods Saturday, I got a 9-pt buck!



Me and my buck just "hanging out."

Looks kinda demonic in the next pic, but whatever.


This is accuracy and precision! Shot him twice and both shots hit within an inch of each other!

Awesome Mouse Trap

It's a 5 gallon bucket half full of water. You take the normal handle off and bend a coat hanger to reach across the opening. Take a empty beer/pop can and drill a hole in the center of the bottom. Run the coat hanger through the pop can and hook it into the handle holes. Smear chunky peanut butter over the sides of the can. Set it in a dark corner of the room/shack and let it work.


Here's how it works:
The mice smell the peanut butter and go up the ramp to get it. They try ot reach out for the peanut butter and put their front paws on the can for balance. As soon as they put any pressure on the can spins, they lose their balance and fall into the water where they eventually drown.

No mess, easy to make and clean (dump out mice and water) and it keeps working even after you have caught one. Plus, it's fun to be sitting around telling hunting stories and hear splashes from the corner of the room :)

Wasteful bunch of ingrates!

As many of you may know, I love hunting, whether it be for deer (my favorite), rabbit, squirrel, pheasant, goose, duck, or whatever else is in season. I think hunting is a great way to spend time outdoors, get some exercise and put some meat on the table. I will, however, never shoot an animal that I don't intend to eat. This is something my dad stressed to me from the first day I ever picked up a bb gun, "Only shoot what you plan to eat." This is why I usually don't shoot crows and other nuissance animals except for coyotes which I will shoot because they have been known to eat house pets and kill young children, plus they eat deer which I disapprove of.


Today I went out to the same public hunting land where I got my doe this year and my buck the year before to look for deer tracks around my hunting spot and to see if I could maybe get a squirrel or rabbit or two.

It was a beautiful snowy day for being in the woods. The entire woods looked like this:

Four roosters (male pheasants) flew up from the side of the creekbed as I was walking back to my spot. Unfortunately, pheasant season is over, otherwise I would have had a decent shot at 1 or more of them.

When I got back into the woods, I was pumped because there was a lot of deer tracks, scat and beds right around my usual spot, which bodes very well for next year. I also saw some turkey tracks as well as some coyote tracks, which were interesting to see if nothing else.

Two separate squirrels came into view, but never close enough to get a shot at, which really didn't bother me that much since squirrel isn't my favorite wild game food.

After I left the woods, I walked over to a feed plot which the DNR maintains on this large chunk of public hunting land where I kicked up 3 more roosters, 2 of which would have been easy shoots. Had it been pheasant season, I would have looked at the roosters kind of like this:

After I got done walking aroundin the field, I headed back to my car to go home. I decided to drive around to the West side of the public land to the access road there to see if there were any deer in fields and such. About halfway down the access road, I saw a dead deer on the side of the road partially covered in snow.

I pulled over and was disgusted to see the carcasses of 3 dead bucks laying there field dressed (guts removed) and with their antlers cut off! There was also the carcass of a doe and the skinned remains of a 5th deer, which I couldn't tell if it was a buck or a doe.

Some wasteful bastards had shot them for the sole purpose of cutting off their antlers and left the meat (probably about 70+lbs of meat per deer) sitting there to waste. There are multiple things that bother me about this;
1. The last time any hunter could legally shoot a deer with antlers was Jan 10th. This was before the last major snowfall, yet the three de-antlered bucks were laying on top of the bottom layer of snow, which likely indicates they were poached.
2. The meat was completely wasted, probably more than 300lbs of meat! Iowa has the HUSH (Help Us Stop Hunger) Program that allows hunters to donate their deer at over 80 meat lockers in the state who will process the deer for free and give the meat to homeless shelters, women's shelters, and various other food shelfs. The nearest location that accepts deer for Hush was less than 20 miles from where these deer were dumped. If the bastard hunters/ poachers weren't going to use the meat, they could have at least donated it to people who would! The only problem is that this requires a deer tag (indicating that the deer was legally harvested) on the animal, and based on the circumstances, I don't think these deer were harvested legally.
3. Why shoot the deer if you're only after the antlers? If you want antlers, go on e-bay and buy a set.
4. There is really nothing I can do about this situation or to prevent it in the future.
5. Why the doe? If you're not going to eat the meat from a doe, why even shoot it? She didn't even have antlers these idiots could hack off of her!


Here are some pics of the poached deer (Warning, not for the faint of heart):
You'll notice that in several of the pics you can see where the deer's antlers were either cut off at the base or removed with a portion of the skull.

1st pic: pile of 3 de-antlered bucks
2nd pic: Buck with antlers and part of skull cut out
3rd pic: Buck with antlers cut off at base
4th pic: Other buck with antlers and part of skull cut out
5th pic: Doe

My doe

Well, it wasn't a 13pt buck like last year, but a large doe will eat just fine!

Opening weekend on Saturday I didn't see even a single deer, but I did have 7 different hunters walk within 30 yards of where I was sitting. Nothing helps draw deer in like having deer hunters in bright orange walking right by you making tons of noise. That Sunday morning, I had about a 6-pt buck walk in on me. He was about 60 yards away and I decided to take aim. Right as I was about to shoot, someone/something broke a branch behind the deer and it spooked him so he jumped a bit right as I shot. I still thought I had a pretty decent shot and he went down like a ton of bricks. I jumped up and ran over towards him and he was pretty much just laying there. Then when I got about 10 yards away, he jumped up and took off like a bullet, jumped a 6 ft barb-wire fence and onto private property.

After that, I was pretty po'ed at myself for not putting another round in him while he was down. I didn't see another deer the rest of the day, so coming into the final weekend of the season, I wasn't overly optimistic.

I got out to my spot about 6AM like I have done every day of deer season when I go out (which means getting up at 4:45... 4:45 AM that is). It was pitch black until just about 7AM. By 9:30 I hadn't seen a deer, but I had heard a fair amount of shooting.
At about 10:15 my legs were getting sore so I got up to walk around a bit. About 5 minutes later, I heard a shot relatively close to me, so I headed back over to my spot to see if perhaps the hunter was shooting at a group of deer and maybe by chance 1 or 2 would get scared in my direction. 10 minutes later, i had just gotten back by my spot and hadn't even had a chance to sit down when a doe and 2 fawns came into my line of view about 150 yards away. They were obviously quite spooked and were carefully picking their way through the trees slowly working their way across my field of view angling slightly towards me.

They were just about to a clearing which was about 65 yards away and I decided that if the big doe stepped into that clearing, I was going to take a shot. She stopped right before the clearing and her 2 fawns caught up and were now right behind her. As soon as she stepped into the clearing, I fired. She jumped pretty much straight up, so I knew I had made solid contact. All 3 deer scattered in different directions. 1 stumbled and fell about 5 yards from where they were when I had shot before it took off running. I assumed that this was the deer I had shot, so I took off after her. She gradually got beyond my line of sight and there was no blood trail anywhere. I was getting kind of depressed thinking that for the second time this year a deer that I had a decent shot at got away. I decided to go back to my stand, grab the rest of my gear and go to the spot where I had shot them and see if I could find a blood trail to follow.
When I got to my spot, there was a little asian dude about 20 yards behind my spot standing there looking at me. He asked me "You hunting along?" "Yep" I replied. "OK" he said giving me a big grin and a thumbs up. I didn't think much of it, so I went to look for the spot where I shot the deer. There was a bunch of blood on the ground and as I looked where it headed, about 40 yards away there lay my doe!

I ended up hitting her right through the neck hitting a major artery causing her to bleed out pretty quickly. As I was walking to her, I saw another little asian dude walking about 20 yards on the other side of her.
"You shoot that?" he asked.
"Yep" I replied.
"OK, she big, it bigger than me!"
"Yeah, she's pretty good sized."
"Yeah, bye now. OK!" and then he gave me the same smile and thumbs up. Whatever I thought, asians can be strange people :)

I field dressed her, and then began the long arduous task of dragging her out of the woods, which is a difficult enough chore when there is snow to slide her on, which of course, there was none. It was also about 50 degrees by this point and I was dressed in full gear due to the 20 degree temps from the overnight, so I was sweating like a fat kid on prom night for the entire 1+ hour that it took to drag the deer out of the woods plus putting the deer on the back of my cavalier and the first 20 minutes of the drive home.

Not a buck, but it'll taste just great!

Koren Robinson

ST. PETER, Minn. -- The blue BMW raced into town so fast that police officer Travis Sandland's radar couldn't get its speed. A moment later he clocked it at 104 mph.

It was about 10:45 p.m., minutes before the 11 p.m. curfew for Vikings to report back to training camp a few miles south in Mankato, and receiver Koren Robinson's career was about to be in serious jeopardy.

The felony complaint filed Wednesday details the chase that led to Robinson's arrest and charges that included fleeing police and drunken driving.

Sandland and Sgt. Loren Jansen chased the BMW with their lights and sirens on. Jansen hit 120 mph on Highway 169 on the south end of town and still the BMW was pulling away. After another curve in the road, Jansen couldn't even see the BMW any more. He and Sandland kept driving south on Highway 169, just so they could identify the BMW in case someone else stopped it.

A few minutes down the road in Mankato, an officer identified as D. Freriks heard about the chase and soon saw the BMW race toward him, clocking it at 86 mph where the speed limit was 50.

He gave chase and watched the car run a red light. Freriks' squad hit 100 mph but the BMW pulled away from him, and he lost sight of it on a curve. He told other officers to head to Stoltzman Road in Mankato in case the BMW went there, suggesting he suspected it was headed toward the Vikings training camp.

Officer Jeff Knutson, waiting at Stoltzman Road, spotted the BMW and turned on his lights and siren. The BMW slowed, ran a stop sign, and eventually pulled to the curb and stopped.

Officers arrested Robinson at gunpoint. He didn't resist.

Random pics

I always knew there was Gold at the ned of the Rainbow!

The Sports Worlds' Latest Greedy Jackass

Joe Montana and Terry Bradshaw were the ONLY living past Super Bowl MVPS currently in the U.S. who decided NOT to take part in the Super Bowl pregame show.

Was it because a family member was ill, was it due to a flight getting cancelled?

NOPE, it was strictly due to the almighty Dollar.

Joe Montana reportedly demanded $100,000 to appear. Apparently big Joe wants to be paid MORE money by the league that made him famous and wealthy.

I guess he wants us all to forget the 2 seasons in Kansas City where he faded into mediocrity.

Take away Jerry Rice, a host of other receivers, a great defense and an awesome Offensive Line, and Joe Montana is a Warren Moon type QB, great stats but never even close ot the ring.

Joe Montana is the latest addition to the list of celebrities with egos way bigger than their skills warrant, I hope he gets pancreatic cancer.