Frosted

Posted on October 21, 2015 by Jerry Johnson

frostyIt seems to me that the natural world is the greatest source of excitement; the greatest source of visual beauty; the greatest source of intellectual interest. It is the greatest source of so much in life that makes life worth living.

   – David Attenborough, British journalist and naturalist (b. 1926)

Frosted

No deer ventured out of the woods this October morning to follow their well-traveled trail to the bean field, so my two-hour wait with my back propped against a round bale and my muzzle loader rifle across my knees could be considered a fruitless hunt. But some rewards of North Country deer hunting have little to do with deer.

As the sun rose above the horizon, an unexpected temperature drop slowly turned the heavy coat of dew on the grass to frost, changing it from glittering silver to pure white in the course of ten or fifteen minutes. This was not the first time I had witnessed this frost-at-first-light phenomenon but it was certainly one of the most beautiful and memorable.

Continue reading →

Posted in Beauty of Natural World, Deer Hunting, Muzzle loader hunting | Tagged , , | 3 Comments

Doing the splits

Posted on October 16, 2015 by Jerry Johnson
The first autumn we rented the hydraulic splitter was a life-changing revelation. I now swing an axe, maul or sledge hammer only in extreme circumstances; a sub-zero night when the rural electric cooperative’s grid system goes down, for example.

The first autumn we rented the hydraulic splitter was life-changing. I now swing an axe, maul or sledge hammer only in extreme circumstances; a sub-zero night when the rural electric co-op’s grid system goes down, for example.

I’ve been rich and I’ve been poor, and rich is better.
   – Mae West, American actress, singer, playwright, screenwriter, and sex symbol (1893-1980)

Doing the splits

Rich is having enough cash in your pocket to rent a hydraulic wood-splitting machine.

If that seems to you to be an overly modest standard for personal wealth, you have probably not split a year’s supply of firewood with maul, sledge hammer, wedge, and axe. Manually cutting, stacking, splitting, hauling, and re-stacking several cords of northern hardwoods is an exercise that raises awareness of small luxuries. A 26-ton log splitter, for example.

Continue reading →

Posted in Firewood, Hydraulic Wood Splitter, Wood Splitting | Tagged , | 3 Comments

Why we hunt the grasslands – a single photo

Posted on October 10, 2015 by Jerry Johnson
Why we hunt the Dakota grasslands: a single photo of Abbey, taken with a pocket sportcam. Beautiful country, beautiful dog, beautiful day. Here's hoping we have a few more hunting trips like this before then end.

Why we hunt the Dakota grasslands: a single photo of Abbey, taken with a pocket sportcam. Beautiful country, beautiful dog, beautiful day. Here’s hoping we have a few more hunts like this before the end.

Posted in Uncategorized | 2 Comments

Senior hunting camp

Posted on October 9, 2015 by Jerry Johnson
A good day of bird hunting seems especially sweet now that the Over-The-Hill Gang is part of the 'senior camp' fraternity.

A good day of bird hunting seems especially sweet now that the Over-The-Hill Gang is part of the ‘senior camp’ fraternity.

This list is not intended to be comprehensive, and there may be some regional and cultural differences, but I expect that every bird hunter past middle age will identify (or identify with) several of these axioms that I have titled “You know you are in senior bird hunting camp if…”

Senior hunting camp

Senior hunting camps are different, and they are the same. Depending on the hunt and the country, camps are different from one another for the obvious reasons: deer camp (all those backpacks and rifles) does not much resemble bird camp (all those dogs and shotguns), and the typical camp in the frozen aspen forests of Minnesota (all that wood stacked by the fire pit) does not much resemble the typical camp in the sweltering piney woods in Louisiana (the 80-quart cooler full of ice).

Continue reading →

Posted in Bird Dogs, Bird hunting, Senior Hunting Camp | Tagged | 4 Comments

Broken arrow

Posted on October 3, 2015 by Jerry Johnson

IMG_1803Hunting success should not be gratuitous. If you do not earn it, you should take no pride in it.

Broken arrow

Seeing the broken-shafted arrow at the side of the game trail sparked a memory: for the Plains Indians the act of breaking an arrow shaft signified that a man had broken faith with the tribe. Since that memory is undoubtedly from a western movie seen during my youth, it likely originated in the studio nation of Hollywood rather than the Sioux Nation of the Dakotas, but on this first day of bow season it represented my troubled mood as I followed a series of blood splashes through the woods. I had broken faith with one of my own hunting tenants by killing a deer I had not earned.

Continue reading →

Posted in Bow Hunting. Deer Hunting | Tagged , , | 2 Comments

September ablutions

Posted on September 24, 2015 by Jerry Johnson
After using a power washing to flush a year's worth of grit and grime out of my old Ford F-150 pickup, a few hours of air-drying was required.

After using a power washer to flush a year’s worth of grit and grime out of my old Ford F-150 pickup, a few hours of air-drying was required.

Ablutions (əˈblo͞oSHənz) – the act of cleansing oneself or a sacred object as in a religious rite; Middle English; from Latin ablutio(n-), from abluere, from ab- ‘away’ + luere ‘wash.’ The original use was as a term in alchemy meaning ‘purification by using liquids,’ hence ‘purification of the body or objects by washing’ (mid 16th century).
   – Merriam-Webster Dictionary
 
September ablutions

For eleven months of the year no one would call my old Ford F-150 pickup clean and tidy. The cab resembles my room from college days, and the box is full of wood chips, pieces of barbed wire, a few metal fence posts, various rusty tools, pieces of rope, a few empty beer cans, and whole lot of dog hair. The window glass is smeared and spotted, and the body’s exterior is an advertisement for a television program about a cross-country, four-wheel-drive race through some muddy jungle in South America.

But come September, usually a week before the annual trip to South Dakota to hunt prairie chickens and sharptail grouse, my psyche is seized by a cleaning mania that is clearly a primitive spiritual rite of some sort, a cleansing of the soul and the mind – symbolized by the act of washing the pickup – in preparation for the sacred days of bird hunting. Or maybe I just don’t want my hunting companions to know how badly I mistreat my truck in the off season.

After cleaning and prepping all my hunting gear and trimming and brushing the dogs, the obsession to restore the pickup to factory-new appearance takes hold and the long-practiced ritual begins. I back the truck from the garage, hook up the power washer and shopvac, find the buckets, sponges, scrub brushes, terrycloth rags, Turtle Wax polish, Armor All vinyl cleaner, and Windex, and have at it.

Continue reading →

Posted in Pickup cleaning | Tagged , | Leave a comment

Squirrel woods

Posted on September 16, 2015 by Jerry Johnson
photo from the website Island Ecology 2012

photo from the website Island Ecology 2012

The world does not owe me a squirrel woods on my doorstep, especially since I have given not one moment’s thought to squirrels while designing and implementing all the wildlife habitat projects on our place, but I rue the loss of the little bird feeder bandits.

Squirrel woods

My father loved squirrel hunting. The sport was less appealing to me in my childhood, probably because of the way it was practiced. We would wake in the pre-dawn hours of a cold autumn morning, gulp down a breakfast of lumpy oatmeal, drive an hour to a woodlot on a southern Ohio farm, stumble through the dark to a likely grove of trees, and then sit for hours awaiting the appearance of a few gray squirrels and the much sought-after fox squirrels, but most often we saw the chipmunk-size red squirrels that we never shot.

Compared to a pheasant hunt’s constant movement and anticipation of explosive action, this squirrel hunting business was boring stuff for a 10-year-old. Also, the quarry looked like bushy-tailed rats and were a misery to skin and clean. It was many years later that I acquired a greater appreciation for squirrels and the hunting of them.

Continue reading →

Posted in Squirrel habitat, Squirrel hunting, Squirrel woods, Squirrels | Tagged , , | Leave a comment

One-hole groups

Posted on September 11, 2015 by Jerry Johnson
A rifle sight-in session with my surrogate niece Heather was a humbling experience. She shot a one-hole group with her new deer rifle. Zen, she says, is the key.

A sight-in session with Heather was a humbling experience. She shot a one-hole group with her new deer rifle. Zen, she says, is the key.

One-inch groups (let alone one-hole groups) are pretty, but the hunting rifle does not really need that degree of accuracy. As a hunting companion once said, “If your rifle can shoot a three-inch group at 100 yards, any deer you miss can be attributed to operator error.”

One-hole groups

A “one-hole group” of bullet strikes on a paper target is the ne plus ultra of a preseason sighting-in session for a rifle hunter. I have shot only two in my life, so it was a humbling experience to watch my surrogate niece Heather place three consecutive shots from her new 7mm-08 rifle in the exact same hole on the grid-and-bullseye target on the backyard shooting range last week.

I was in awe. She was nonplussed. Target shooting, she explained, is Zen. You focus, erase everything else from your conscious mind, merge with the rifle, see the target, acquire the target, become the target, let your unconscious fire the shot in one smooth transition from thought to action. Slowing one’s heart rate so that the trigger trips between beats is advisable, she suggests.

Whatever.

Continue reading →

Posted in Hunting Rifles, Rifle Shooting | Tagged , , | 5 Comments

Honor among thieves

Posted on September 8, 2015 by Jerry Johnson
The fellow at the general store carefully marked the map with X's and O's indicating the areas I would or would not find birds.

The fellow at the general store carefully marked the map with X’s and O’s indicating the areas I would or would not find birds.

All bird hunters are jealously possessive of their birds – or their best bird coverts, at any rate – and they would more willingly tell the IRS all their sources of income than reveal the location of good bird ground. Consequently, any information you receive from a bird hunter afield is assuredly misinformation, and you would be a fool to follow it.

Honor among thieves

The Senator and I, along with his Vizsla Booker and my springer spaniel Herco, were enjoying a great morning of grouse and woodcock hunting back in October of ’02. In the first hour we had each bagged two grouse, and now we were preparing to plunge into one of our premier woodcock coverts, the hundred-yard wide belt of young aspen trees that surrounded an abandoned gravel pit in the Chengwatana State Forest.

We call this place the Gravel Quarry Hunt, and it had been one of the most productive spots for both local woodcock and migrating flight birds for more than five years. We were working out the “you take the north edge and I’ll take the south edge” details of the plan when we heard the voices of a trio of hunters walking up the trail behind us.

“Damn!” muttered the Senator…

…to tell this story with the least confusion I must provide background information. Without some explanation, several names  and phrases would make sense only to the members of our Over the Hill Gang of aging bird hunters, their ill-fated wives and families, and perhaps the county sheriff’s department.

Continue reading →

Posted in Bird hunting, Woodcock, Woodcock Coverts | Tagged , , | Leave a comment

Molly’s grouse

Posted on September 4, 2015 by Jerry Johnson

Molly 2 (2)Deep inside, Molly knew that she could tug my heartstrings and do anything, get away with anything, and be forgiven, because my soul held her in an embrace more needing and more desperate than a shipwrecked sailor clinging to a life raft.

Molly’s grouse

Molly was the best bird dog I ever owned. And the best pheasant dog I ever hunted over. For 10 years Molly was my every-bird, every-hunt companion. She owned me in ways that no other dog ever did or ever can, and memories of her come rushing back to color all my bird hunts, always and forever. Every opening day brings a rush of joy when I recall the great hunts we had together, and a touch of sadness when I remind myself those days are over and she is gone.

Molly’s time in my life lifted my heart and spirit to heights I never thought they could reach, and her passing dropped them into a pit of despair I thought they would never escape. Great love inevitably means great sorrow in this life, it seems to me, so giving your heart to a dog that you know will be with you but a short time is the height of folly. But looking back on all the happiness and all the tears Molly brought to my life, I wouldn’t have it any other way.

Continue reading →

Posted in Grouse hunting. Springer spaniels. Bird Dogs | Tagged , , | 3 Comments