Category Archives: hunting

Deer Camp Realizations

Image November 10, 2015 Shawn West Leave a comment

I had been driving for nearly three hours when I made the turn onto the gravel two-track road that leads to the deer camp. In the inky dark of an overcast, early November night I set to nimbly avoiding deep potholes, muddy ruts, low-hanging branches, and the crowns of large rocks embedded in the road.

I’d like to drive a truck, but my real-world sensibilities as a commuter have me in a fuel-efficient family sedan. Some years back Frank, an often missed and sadly departed member of our deer camp fraternity, took it upon himself to paint the largest rocks a bright blaze orange. Our memories of him have not faded over the intervening years, but the paint on those damn rocks has. Thinking of Frank, I switched off the radio and drove the last five minutes to camp in a somber, pensive silence.

THWANG!!

The loud metallic bang on the underside of my car, right below my passenger door told me that as I attempted to nimbly tiptoe around one of the stones on my left side, one of its brethren had found my runner board halfway back on the right. I swore foully at the rock and pressed on. Further on, a raccoon humped its way across the narrow road and climbed halfway up a spindly tree on the roadside. He glared at me comically as I rolled by and for a moment I forget that he was probably hanging around the camp so that he could try to raid our coolers. I made the turn off the two track road and saw the deer camp ahead; in the blackness of the woods surrounding it, the glowing windows resembled the dying embers of a smoldering, unattended campfire. I parked on a grassy spot adjacent the rest of the vehicles, and pulling my duffel out of the trunk, stopped and listened for a moment. The low hum of the gas-powered generator behind the camp and the murmur of animated conversation and country music on the radio inside competed with the breezy November night.

Closing my eyes for a moment, I take a deep breath before I stretch out my car-cramped legs and back. The November night fills my lungs and for a second all I can hear is the late autumn wind in my ears. I exhale slowly, savoring the taste of damp, cool air as if it were the smoke from a fine cigar. Smell is allegedly the human sense most tied to memories, and the night air bracing my cheeks is heavy with that fine chill that makes the deer, and the men that hunt them, remember the falls of the past and the winters that they inevitably bring.

As I open the screen door and look through the window, I catch eyes with one or two of my comrades as they sit around the long wooden table that is the centerpiece of the camp. Everything of import goes on around that table. Meals and stories. Lies and jokes. Arguments and nonsense. Every year I try to think of some novel way to make an entrance, but every year it becomes an afterthought. Walking in I just say something perfunctory like “Hello fellas” or “Gentlemen”.

Right away someone says to sit down. My Dad asks if I ate and before I can answer he tells me that there’s still some roast wild turkey and stuffing in the kitchen. My cousin Dane says to get a beer for myself and one for him while I’m at it.

And that is about the time that I realized why I show up there every year. The odds are slim that I’ll see a deer, and slimmer still that I’ll shoot one. The weather may be so sodden and rainy that we’ll spend hours in camp reading magazines, playing cards, or napping. Close quarters will fray a nerve or two and someone will get lippy with someone else and then immediately forget about it. People will argue about politics, economics, dishwashing, sweeping and all sorts of other things because we are all exceptionally strong and belligerent personalities when we’re in the same space together for five or six days. Odors of varying levels of pleasantness will waft through the cabin and we will laugh a whole hell of a lot. In between all that we will spend several hours of every day in the forest waiting on a deer.

It is an adventure and a trial, a vacation and chore, and the most fun you can have while being an occasional asshole to your family and friends. The hours in stand whip by, and the time spent in the woods melts into my memories.

And then as soon as it started, it ends. Driving out at the end of the week is a mixture of relief and regret. Regret at the passing of another deer season, but relief that it all went to plan, even if no deer strayed into the crosshairs. I’m not far up the road before I’m thinking about the next year, or in this case, the next week. Another deer camp calls my name, and this one is even more cramped, argumentative, and hilarious.

I can’t wait.

goose calling, goose hunting, hunting, waterfowl hunting

Deferred Gratification, or, A Two-Truck Kind of Morning

Image September 30, 2015 Shawn West Leave a comment

The concept of deferred gratification, in a psychological sense, is that if an individual’s mind can be trained to delay a small reward in the short term for greater rewards in the longer term then research seems to indicate that those individuals who can defer rewards to a later period are typically more successful later in life.

Now, I can only trust the research at hand, but last weekend’s hunting in Bruce County seemed to bear out that hypothesis.

Having a real job, instead of my fantasy job of one day being a kept man who just goes hunting all autumn long, I was forced to miss the opening day and, by extension, the opening weekend of the 2015 early goose season due to work commitments in Western Canada. It isn’t the first time that’s happened and it probably won’t be the last time.

As I sat in the Calgary departures lounge I was ruing a missed opportunity. Historically, that early opener weekend has been a good few days of hunting with good weather, good friends, and willing birds that had not yet developed a hyper-sensitive wariness to decoys, goose calls, and ground blinds. Family and several friends had plans to be out in the fields with their shotguns, and the social media world was counting down to the opener with heavy anticipation.

As that opening weekend progressed I puttered around the house aimlessly, not really interested in cutting the grass, or getting groceries, or any of the other mundane things that needed doing. My mind was in the goose blinds with my friends and I lamented all the action, laughter, and fun they were no doubt having.

My Twitter feed was full of men and women who were out hunting their respective early goose (and in some realms, teal) seasons and I was getting more and more antsy. Finally, late on Sunday evening I texted one of the guys in our group for an update.

He informed me that they had shot two birds all weekend. I was slightly shocked.

I had plans to hunt the weekend of September 119th and 20th, which is the last weekend in our area before the goose season takes a five-day government-mandated hiatus, and I was worried by his report of slack shooting and limited suitable fields for hunting. I texted my cousin and he echoed the sentiment, but he did say that several fields were scheduled to be harvested in the week ahead and that when I arrived there would be greater opportunities to get after the geese.

Then the weather took a turn for the worse.

I arrived to the farm the Friday before the hunt, and there was a 100% chance of rain forecast for Saturday morning. Early in the season, our group has some shockingly fair-weather hunters in our midst. Nevertheless I set an alarm and woke to the sound of rain hitting the farmhouse rooftop. I still dressed and geared up, before texting my compatriots to see if they were down for getting a bit soaked in search of good shooting. One of them never even replied (no doubt fast asleep to the soothing patter of late summer rain at his window) while the other fellow said he was staying in bed.

So much for that, I thought.

I was just about to undress and get back in bed myself when my uncle arrived and we decided to forge out into the damp for a hunt.

We settled on a huge field that was frequently holding birds, but not surprisingly, they skirted our setup and landed a few hundred yards away. After a time, something got those birds off the ground (I still have no idea what it was that spooked them) and as their honks, clucks, and moans hit a crescendo, we flagged and called them our way. They slid past me on the furthest distance of my range, but they squared up nicely over my uncle and he scratched down a double. As he shot I swung at the trailing birds and sent them on their merry way with two shots that tore through the wind and drizzle but failed to connect with feather, flesh or bone.

One of the birds my uncle had shot was banded, and after a half hour of not seeing any more action we decided to dodge any more potential foul weather and headed home. I registered the band with my cell phone and found that the bird was two years old, was banded near Ypsilanti, Michigan, and was too small to even fly when it was banded in June of 2014. Bird band data is always interesting and puts the journey of these game birds into distinct perspective.

Two early-morning geese, one of which was sporting some jewellery.

The weather steadily improved and after an early afternoon nap, I outfitted my six-year-old son and with renewed hope we headed for a field that my friend Brian had said was flush with birds earlier that day.

This spot did not disappoint.

As we walked in from the road, birds were already trying to land in the cut grain field, and after getting safely situated and inserting my son’s ear plugs I loaded up and the shooting began. Handfuls of geese traded across the skies steadily for the greater part of three hours and many groups worked our spread and responded to our calling. Eventually we decided it was time to go, but not before 23 geese were piled in the back of Brian’s pickup truck. We cleaned geese by the glow of truck headlights and then we sat at the picnic table at the farm under the starlight, sipping some cold beers and reliving the hunt that had ended just a few short hours earlier.

My oldest son, and the geese from Saturday evening's hunt. — My oldest son, and the geese from Saturday evening’s hunt.

We planned a return to the same field the next morning, fully expecting to experience a fraction of what we had just been through. We were wrong in a very good way.

Geese whispered distantly in the dark as we put out decoys and found familiar hiding spots trampled down from the previous evening’s hunt. I checked my watch and settled in as legal light came and passed; it was not long before the shooting started in earnest.

A light breeze blew from the east while geese begin to wing their way around the Ferndale flats on the purples and burning oranges of a coming dawn sky. I flagged and called, trying to sound enticing and entirely non-threatening, and before long birds swung wide out over the cut grain field before dropping their feet into our spread. We opened up on them over and over again, and in more than one instance I was emptying my gun and immediately jamming more shells into it as line after line of birds seemed to make their way for our field.

Professionals call it “being on the ‘X’”. I just call it unreal goose hunting.

Geese fell, feathers floated in the sky, and Brian’s dog Levi worked retrieve after retrieve. All the while the pile of birds we were concealing in the long grass of the deep ditch that formed our blind grew and grew. Rough counts began to tell the story of the morning.

25…more birds.

29…a few more were fooled.

31…I shot badly that go around, punching holes in the air with my 870.

37…A great group and some excellent shooting; six came in and not a single bird left.

When we reached forty birds in the bag, we had a chat down the ditch. We decided on one more group and the birds promptly obliged by sending a good-sized flock over. The guns of seven hunters barked again in a carefully orchestrated cacophony, and five more geese found their way to hand before we set down our arms and traded laughs, smiles and high fives. We were done and Brian headed for the truck. My cousin Lukas joined him, because this was going to be a two-truck kind of morning.

Seven hunters. 45 birds. One great morning.

While we cleaned up, to a man we agreed that it had been one of the most memorable hunts we had been together for, and the weekend had seen a polar opposite of experiences from what had gone down just seven days earlier. In a way, it proved that waiting made things sweeter.

Still it was officially hunting season for me then, and the short week-long interval between that morning spent in the ditch and the morning that would kick off the opening of duck season on September 26th was going to drag by ever so slowly. Still, as I sat at the breakfast table that morning, a pile of decoys in Brian’s truck bed and lot of fresh goose meat waiting to be processed in the back of Lukas’, I was just basking in the afterglow of a fine morning spent afield.

hunting, hunting ethics, hunting regulations

The Only Thing I Like Poached are my Eggs Benedict, or Why Are We Destroying Ourselves?

September 17, 2015 Shawn West Leave a comment

It broke across my social media feed on the afternoon of September 15^th:

“Sportsman Channel Suspends Hunting Show Amid Federal Poaching Allegations”

I swear I got an instant headache.

Apparently, The Syndicate, a show hosted by one Clark W. Dixon of Mississippi was alleged to have been party to over two dozen illegal acts of poaching in Alaska, some of which were later edited to appear as law-abiding hunts and were subsequently shown on the program. The full release that I received can be found here and the Sportsman Channel’s response can be found here.

This is not the first time this has happened in the hunting industry, and unfortunately, it probably won’t be the last time.

I have no affiliation with any of the parties involved, so I only know what I’ve researched. The production companies have commented, and the Sportsman Channel has commented. To date, I can’t find any comments or on the record statements made by the alleged perpetrators of the illegal acts, but I don’t particularly care at this point, because there is always some form of excuse or admission of guilt bracketed by a ‘misunderstanding’, or whatever, and it makes me weary.

Sigh. Can I just go hunting with my friends now and not have to worry about crap like this?

No, I can’t because I have a real problem with this ‘celebrity hunter, body-count, above-the-law, hero-shot’ mentality and what it does to hunting in the public perception.

The problem here is two-fold. Of primary importance is that the non-hunting public holds these acts as their standard of what they deem hunting to be. They presume that if a ‘professional’ hunter is poaching and hunting unethically, then all the non-professionals must be doing it too. This is of course an incorrect stereotype of the most egregious variety, but it is a pretty natural response. I’ve heard many hunters make the same manner of stereotype about ‘anti-hunters’ or ‘vegetarians’ or ‘environmentalists’ or anyone else that may for some reason oppose hunting. For the irony-impaired, it is pretty hypocritical. Still, it happens and the hunting community already has a big enough image challenge on their collective hands without public figures in their own fraternity buggering things up. You can get all self-righteous and say “Screw the public! Hunting is my right!” but that does not help and in reality is not really a true statement anyways.

If it were your right, you would not have to buy game licenses and be subject to hunting regulations.

So instead, every time this happens that a hunting ‘celebrity’ is found on the wrong side of the state, provincial, or federal game laws (I’m looking at you Jeff Foiles, Ted Nugent, and William Spann just to name high profile cases in the last five years or so) everyday hunters have to bear the burden of public opinion and we are forced into either defending our own actions which for the most part should be pretty clean, or we have to come up with clumsy and ineffective rationalizations and explanations. Just Google “professional hunter poaching” and the scores of articles you will find is extremely depressing.

So to the professionals and celebrities that keep screwing up, thanks for making us regular guys who just want to hit the woods and wetlands have to work harder to keep doing what we love. Trust me it is harder for us since we are without thousands of dollars in production values up our sleeves, and we typically do not have a team of outfitters and production companies and various sponsors backing us.

But secondarily, and of a more insidious manner, is that this brings the ‘support a fellow hunter argument’ out. This mentality embraces a fallacy so grand that it borders on the comical, and it severely runs the risk of ‘normalizing’ breaches of hunting regulations. I refused to weigh in on the whole ‘Cecil-mania’ of last month or so because primarily, to my eye, that simply did not involve hunting, it was poaching out and out from all accounts and it was more or less the matter of a private transaction that was on the face of it, grossly illegal. That it became a public matter occurred in due course, but it did not start out that way, and in fact it was nearly a month after the actual poaching of the lion before the media picked it up. It also falls well outside my bailiwick in that I have no real ties to African Safari hunting, or really trophy-hunting in general. Much has been written on it by others more knowledgeable in the field than I about this whole sloppy mess, so I’m just going to more or less leave it alone.

But where all that nonsense in Zimbabwe dovetails nicely with the argument I’m making above is that many, particularly the most vocal, in the hunting industry felt that the Cecil issue when it occurred, as well as the current “celebrity-hunter-caught-poaching” scenario I’m referencing here should somehow be excused and that the greater hunting community at large should ‘show support’ to the perpetrators in some rally of common-cause-collectivism among sportsmen and women everywhere.

Well, to use a cliché, that dog won’t hunt.

Because, at the risk of being unpopular (which has not stopped me before) the dentist who shot that lion is no more of a hunter than the accused at The Syndicate should their allegations be proven, or any of the others named above who have been convicted. They are by definition poachers and thus fall outside the law, to say nothing of what the greater definition of ‘hunter’ actually is or should be. Recreational hunting at its core involves regulations and the explicitly stated adherence to those regulations. To do less constitutes an act of poaching, plain and simple and if you do it, there are consequences.

This is not a concept fraught with grey areas. Ethics are one thing, and could (I stress, could) be subject to debates, but the law is clear in that respect. If it is legal, you can debate the ‘ethic’. If it is prohibited by a law and due process convicts you, then there should not be a granted chance for debates. Period, full-stop.

(That said, the Sportsman Channel’s release regarding The Syndicate’s situation stresses that they stand for “ethical practices in hunting” but they still align themselves with and praise the support of convicted poacher Nugent in this recent tweet, so maybe it really is all about ratings and marketing, and this is more nebulous than I had initially thought.)

Now there is little doubt in my mind that the public figures in hunting do genuinely love the tradition as much as you and I do. I’m sure they are sincere in their support of conservation organizations, and they might even be decent men and women to sit down across from, crack a beer and swap stories with. They are likeable, which is part of their draw to be certain. But by nature of their public persona, they are almost obligated to comport themselves to a higher (and arguably, the highest) standard with regards to both those shadowy areas of ethics and fully illuminated areas of the law proper. Many of them do it correctly, and the bad apples do not spoil the bunch out of hand.

My primary question is, why are there bad apples to begin with? Is there no validation method or process in place to vet the people who do this for a living? Surely some of this graft can be weeded out?

My hunting mentors repeatedly stressed to me: Don’t take a shot you can’t make. To turn that into a metaphor for this whole messy, PR nightmare perhaps the approach of the ‘celebrity hunter’ would be to not do anything that you would not normally do if you were not being filmed. That is to say, if the goal is to create kills on camera so that you can somehow self-aggrandize your ego, or keep your sponsors happy, or increase your ratings, which would probably also achieve the prior two desires, and you show no regard for what game laws state, then it may be best to not pull the trigger. If you would still pull the trigger after that…then I can’t help you in re-examining what motivates you to hunt.

But rest assured, you are a bigger part of the problem than anti-hunting groups could ever hope to be.

duck calling, duck hunting, game calls, hunting, hunting gear, waterfowl hunting

Gear Review: RNT Short Barrel Duck Call

Image August 26, 2015 Shawn West Leave a comment

The first duck call I ever ran was a wooden single reed Olt that my Dad gave me when I was eight. I finished second in a youth calling contest with it in 1990, but then drifted away from duck calling and into other things during my juvenile and adolescent years. When I dove headlong into waterfowl it was goose hunting that I fell in love with and while most of my disposable income has been funneling its way into goose calls (see the post previous to this for more on that), I’ve long been considering a solid, high quality single reed duck call for my lanyard.

The colours on this call are just gorgeous.

For the last decade or so various average double reed polycarbonate duck calls have worked serviceably on my lanyard and names like Buck Gardner, Knight & Hale, Zink, and Haydel’s have had their chance. They’ve been passable but not without limitations, and this week it was time to move into high-performance territory.

Now this is not to say the above brands were not good calls, and I’ve been particularly fond of my Red Leg mallard from Haydel’s and will likely keep it on my string, but after testing countless calls, I made the move to RNT, and specifically to a single reed Short Barrel in bocote wood. The call is, in a word, impressive. I tried other single reed calls in the RNT line in the lead up to this purchase and two weeks ago I found myself holding an acrylic Daisy Cutter and the bocote Short Barrel in my left and right hands respectively. I was filling the local BassPro store with racket as I sawed away hail calls, single quacks, and feed calls on each one. I ultimately settled on the Short Barrel for reasons I will explain below. As always these are my personal findings and preferences and I’d encourage anyone to do what I did and try out as many calls from as many manufacturers until you find what sounds and works best for your style of calling.

As I said, RNT won the day on this one, and I’ll start by saying that their ‘brand’ definitely had a hand in this decision. Located in the heart of (and some would the epicenter of) southern USA duck country, RNT operates out of Stuttgart, Arkansas which happens to be where the World Duck Calling Championships are held annually (in case you’ve been living under a rock for a while). But more than their location, I’ve always respected their no-nonsense, non-gimmicky approach to waterfowling. These guys just make duck calls and hunt ducks in a straightforward, no BS kind of way and that is appealing to me.

It doesn’t hurt that they churn out some of the purest-sounding duck calls on the market either, and the Short Barrel is no exception.

On first run, it was obvious that this was the call I had to have on my lanyard come this fall. I have a lot of ‘loud’ duck calls so windy day range or aggressive hail calling was not something I was worried about; instead I wanted something a little more true sounding for close-in work and finesse, and that is something the Short Barrel has in spades. The compact size and mellow sound of the wood puts a smooth edge on the mid-range and soft quacks, while feed calls roll out of this little call with ease. It can still get loud, but not in that ringing, nasty-edged way that an acrylic call would be apt to. The risk here is that when blown too hard, this call does seem to squeak and lock up. In short it requires a lighter touch than I may be used to, so of course practice has been the key for the last few weeks.

The call is new but even now it is surprisingly responsive, so I’m chomping at the bit to hear how it sounds once I’ve broken bit in somewhat. As it stands currently, this call descends down a five note scale cleanly, and changes speeds with only the most subtle variations in air pressure. Speaking of pressure, absolutely no back pressure is required to run this call through all the sounds a hunter would require; the mellow tone of the bocote softens the feed calls and quacks nicely. I have found that applying back pressure only muffles the resonance that the Short Barrel has naturally built into it.

The bottom-end sounds are mellow from the bocote wood, but the call can be charged up for aggressive calling as well.

Now of course, the sound is the key here, but it should be noted that the Short Barrel in bocote looks damn sexy as well. The wood has a dark chocolate grain that runs through a caramel-colored body and the call is completed with a low-gloss band. I have also always loved the smell of wooden duck calls and this one is no different; something about the smell of wood call takes me back to my childhood of learning to call ducks on Dad’s classic Olt call.

Since it is the off-season right now, the one part missing from this review is field performance, but that just means in a month or so I get to write about this call again, so that’s a plus. In the meantime, I’ll just be sitting in the basement, practicing and rasping away on this new toy of mine and waiting for the October morning when I get to slide on my waders, find an out of the way spot in the long grass, and wait for the whistling of mallard wings.

When it happens, I think the Short Barrel will be ready for the spotlight.