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in reply to: Gas Prices Keeping Me At Home #62761
You guys don’t know how good you’ve got it! I’ve been paying around $5.50 a gallon for years.
Good luck with the bobcat 🙂
I thought the elk had Yellowstone’s ecosystem on the ropes there for a while? I’m sure the wolves do cause ranchers problems. I remember reading an interesting discovery with the wolf reintroduction, that it only took one generation of exposure to wolf predation for domestic cattle to start exhibiting aggressive wild behaviour, even to the ranchers.
But surely a cornerstone to conservation is the voluntary limiting of your own behaviour/rights to allow the existence of another member of the community? I get that means only one small part of the human community gets penalised for that, but man, once they’re gone they’re gone.
I second that it would be good to hear from folks who live in wolf country.
dwrobleski wrote: I’m thinking about a ghillie suit,
I suppose it depends on how dense your vegetation is, but if it’s thick, a ghillie will make you louder. And they’re HOT man. I suppose you’ll be hunting in winter so that won’t matter. A ‘head and shoulders’ is a good compromise, like the name says, it leaves most of your torso and all of your legs free, but still does a good job of changing your shape, particularly in long grass or if you’re crouching.
I’ve never hunted deer but my experience is that unless you’re covering a lot of open ground, as long as you move slowly, wind direction and snapping sticks/crunching leaves will give you away more often.
Anyway, plenty more experienced guys than me here. Hopefully someone can help. I intend to buy that book suggested above. No need to reinvent wheels 😛
in reply to: Idaho Pictures #61692Great pics dude. Thanks for sharing.
in reply to: Just Better With A Daypack On #61684Roaming hills and creeks and marshes is a pleasure in of itself, for me at least 😛
Add a bow and the requisite quiet, careful footfall and engaged senses of the hunt and wow, what a great way to spend a morning or afternoon 🙂
Great thread!
I enjoy writing and photography, but I’m ordinary at both. I guess a steady, on going passion of mine is wildlife and ecology writ small and smaller. I love things that creep and crawl. I love the forests that they call home and we call lawns and gardens. I can abandon great swathes of time lying on my belly watching their little world. Now that I have a toddler I have a partner in this pursuit, which is a rather special joy in itself.
I also love my dog. We moved recently but I used to live on the outskirts of Sydney, and the only decent ‘wilderness’ nearby was basically a swampy marsh deemed too useless for any development, industrial or residential. My dog and I would spend many hours there running and roaming and swimming the creeks. I took him on a pretty long swim once, we were in the water for the better part of an hour, just paddling along and he never faltered. He helped me one day when I helped the police search for an autistic boy who went missing there in the afternoon. We found him huddled in the dark swamp covered in mosquito bites, looked like he had chicken pox, poor little fella. But I love my dog. He is mongrel of unknown heritage rescued from the pound as a gangly adolescent.
in reply to: Mental Clutter and Stump Shooting #58690broadhead wrote: I am humbled by the power of traditional archery.
Well said, it is a beautiful thing.
in reply to: Nothing is wasted … #57342R2 wrote: what do you know about taking them down with trad gear. I’ve read old stories but do you have any personnel experience yet? Plans to? Anyone else with experience? New thread perhaps?
Ralph,
I have no experience with them unfortunately. The recreational hunting game in Australia is restricted to private property and I have no contacts in the places they live. There is definitely a buff at the end of one of my many pipedreams though 😛
I read a book just recently by Jay Campbell. He and his wife hunted them successfully. From memory she had a 70# longbow and he had an 80#. Their guide had said a 70# minimum I think. They live exclusively in crocodile country. Hunting them would be a heck of an experience 🙂
in reply to: Please introduce yourselves, I'll start #57264I’m bumping this from the depths of history because I have been gobbing off here to all you guys for a few months now but have never bothered to actually say hi and introduce myself 😯
I’m Jim from Australia. I started bowhunting in the pursuit of adventure about 10 years ago when I was 19 or 20. This started with a cheap compound bow and many misadventures.
By my early twenties I was a (this is a mouthful) Scientific Instrument Maker for an Australian instrumentation company. The two biggest achievements of that time in my life was meeting my beautiful and brilliant Kentucky wife Carolyn and building the bulk of the borehole strain meters for the Plate Boundary Observatory (if you have an interest in wildly boring subject matter you can find more here: http://pbo.unavco.org/instruments/bsm).
As rewarding as it was, a life in a lab was no life for me and in 2009, again seeking some adventure I joined the Australian Army and went from one of the geekiest jobs in the world to become an Airborne Paratrooper. I was and still am a nerd but that fact has been poorly disguised by a maroon beret. In the months leading up to joining the Army my wife and I joined a traditional archery club and delved into the world of recurves and long bows. We were both hooked.
The army, Afghanistan and the gift of two children have seriously thwarted our outdoors/archery pursuits, but my army career is wrapping up now and we’re looking forward to having the time to pursue our passions and share them with the two pint sized citizens of our little family. On a holiday to the US this Christmas just passed, I picked up a magazine with a man wearing a funny hat building a small fire next to a wooden bow. It has been an absolute breath of fresh air. I have never seen or read or heard of anything like this in the land I am from. I have spent the last couple of months pouring over the website, reading OLD threads, in awe of the wealth of experience and thoughtful pursuit of hunting shared here.
To all the folks here who generously share your experience and insight with hopeless little neophyte hunters like me, thank you. I look forward to soaking up all that I can from you and perhaps one day having stories of my own worth sharing.
Jim
in reply to: Nothing is wasted … #56453David Petersen wrote: Jim — That is an odd bird you have there. Wing and body conformation look like a vulture or raptor, but the face seems wholly owlish. We’re you wearing a rabbit-skin hat? 😆
I was only wearing my own thinning excuse for a pelt. He was very curious, though, circling me a few times. Maybe he was hoping I was about to keel over and he could have something besides wallaby for dinner 😛
It’s funny all you guys mentioned Kites because my infantile bird watching skills short listed it to a couple of local varieties of the same. Dave, I think the owlish appearance might just be a visual trick in the shot where he’s looking right at the camera. I have some blurry shots of his head side on and he looks more classic hawk/eagle.
Tradhunter, we have a type of eagle here that’s wingspan is longer than I am tall and is known to eat tasty little sheep in lambing season. My photogenic friend above would be maybe half the size of a wedgetail.
R2, fire and drought are part of life down here, I’d hope we’d be halfway decent in our management, but trust me we are far from perfect. The worst drought in my lifetime resulted in kids only a couple hundred kilometres from the coast who were 8,9,10 years old and had never seen rain, only heard or read about it. Now we’ve had a few years straight of seasonal flooding. Farmers can’t catch a break!
in reply to: Nothing is wasted … #55345Thanks Dave, the cat wearing the citrus helmet was a worry. Perhaps he was trying to stop aliens from reading his mind? Silly cat, aluminium helmet 😕
Brenn, I just ordered the tiger, and a couple of others. Better be good!
I don’t have a trail cam but I was out scouting some new places the other day and someone started checking me out…
I’m new to the area and I’m not sure exactly what breed of pigeon that is, but there were plenty of wallabies around. Alas native animals are off the list for me, but it looked like good pig country, so I’ll keep looking 😛
in reply to: Nothing is wasted … #55016I keep coming back to this thread with the self sadistic purpose of a dieting man walking past a mcdonalds. I am so wildly jealous of predators you guys share your world with.
A few years ago I heard a ranger discuss the growing problem with feral cats in Australia, not just in population but in size. They’re trapping cats a few generations wild from domestic ferals that are as big as cattle dogs. They’re not taking roos yet but will tackle wallabies (similar in size to a big hare I think).
Anyway, my little peanut brain blends this information with a book I read discussing the history of animal domestication that compared the lack of genetic experimentation in cats to the wide variation produced in canines, from lapdogs to Irish Wolfhounds and Neo. Mastiffs. In spite of the turbulent effects introduced animals like cats and foxes have on native populations, I can’t help but hope some ancestor of mine will share a mountain range or a deep creek lined valley with a cat big enough to make him look over his shoulder.
I mean this in the best of spirits, but screw you guys and your wealth in wildlife 😛
in reply to: Giving It Up #54227An aeroplane pilot once explained to me the technical, aerodynamic differences between helicopters and planes. He said planes are so beautiful that angels carry them into the sky, whereas helicopters are so ugly the Earth repels them from it’s surface. Sounds legit 😛
I jump out of planes for a living and I s#$t myself every time. In my leisure time I like to keep both feet on the ground like R2 😉
in reply to: How times change. #54054Steve Graf wrote: So choose your best broadhead, and your best ideas. But keep your eyes wide open and reconsider each critically for reason and purpose every time you have a new experience or obtain new knowledge. And give your fellow man the benefit of the doubt.
Very well said Steve, and thank you all for your shared thoughts.
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