Hunting and Fishing Catalogs

What age to introduce hunting?

April 1, 2012 By admin Leave a Comment

Taking kids hunting is a great thing, but thats how you should look at it: “I’m taking junior hunting”, not “Junior is going hunting with me.” They set the pace, and when they wanna go home, go home. If you head to the field with the expectation that you are going to have a typical day’s hunting, you are going to have a bad attitude and a budding anti on the way home. I taught my son how to shoot at the age of four (air rifle) and took him deer hunting at six, him with his own .357mag carbine with custom stock. The day he really first totaly enjoyed hunting, all day, no complaints, no wanting to go home, he was nine and we were squirrel hunting.

We both got the limit, and he shot about 200 rounds of 22′s and we had a real ball, laughing and cutting up while we hunted. We were at the Jeep, cleaning the tree rats when he looked up at me with a bit of blood on his cheek and said : Dad, it doesn’t get any better than this . Well that was 14 years ago and when I think of it ,I get this good felling inside of that day. He has never been in trouble and I believe its because of that one day, when he truly feel in love with hunting. Now he makes a good living in the hunting industry and hunting is only second to his wife (who Hunts with him) and his step child.

I’ll never regret teaching him when he was very young about the hunting sport. Last year my 4 year old daughter wanted very much to go deer hunting with me. I tried to explain that we (my cousin and I) hunted all day and she might get cold and very tired. She was not easily dissauded – in fact she would not be talked out of it – not no way – not no how. Fact is she asked Grandma if she would watch her “’cause Dad says I can go hunting for a couple hours but all day would be too cold and too tired for me.” So Opening Day was cool, windy and generally unpleasant and she stayed in with Grandma all day (we did not see a single deer anyway which is way depressing on Opening Day).

The next morning my cousin and I went out early again whilst she slept in a bit. After seeing some deer I went back up to get her and thus fulfill my promise to let her come hunting with me for a couple hours (so she would not get too cold nor too tired). She was so very happy and excited she could not keep from asking a jillion questions despite my prior instructions to be perfectly quiet when we got close to the woods and in the woods. Inside of a half hour on stand (sitting up but snuggled down inside a sleeping bag to keep warm) she got to witness my cousin and I both fill our anterless tags inside of a minute of each other. She loved it and remains excited about hunting.

Hunting in the Past Time

April 1, 2012 By admin Leave a Comment

In much of America, up until recently, hunting was a popular pastime for all classes, from blue-collar manufacturing workers in the Rust Belt to aristocratic land-owners in the West. That tradition is under attack now from all sides. Forces in the government regularly propose eliminating non-hunting arms and disarming of the “unwashed masses.” Animal rights activities prey on the misconceptions of a public ignorant of hunting.

The lack of inexpensive, public lands, with quality hunting experiences available for all, does great damage to America’s hunting tradition. As hunters, we are engaged in a political struggle to maintain our sport. We are a minority, albeit a strong one thanks to the NRA. However, we should attempt to increase the participation of the general (voting]) public in our pastime. The way to do this is not to restrict quality hunting experiences to the upper classes, as has been done, with disastrous effect, in Europe.

Whether or not you can afford leased hunting–even if you are a land-owner who makes a good profit off of leased hunting–as a hunter, you have a vital interest in protecting the egalitarian tradition of hunting in this country. If we don’t promote hunting for all, powerful political forces in this country may just achieve their goal: Hunting for NONE. As it relates to hunting, lease hunting or hunting on private property is not the landowner selling game or the right to hunt game on his(her) land.

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Hunting Opportunity in Tidewater Area

April 1, 2012 By admin Leave a Comment

Memberships are available in a hunt club S.E. of Tappahannock in the tidewater country. Club is has a state D-Map program, and a very good relationship with the game and fish dept. Generous doe season, nice bucks too. Hunter success rate last year was 75%. Hunt on 3200 acres, whitetail, turkey, fox and small game. Land has thick pine stands, hardwood stands low hills and valleys with a few wetland areas.

Good roads, very nice clubhouse with full cooking facilities, sleeping dorm and full-shower bathroom. Shotguns, muzzle loaders and bow hunting allowed for big game. Can use .22s for small game. No centerfire rifles allowed in county, except for groundhogs in spring/summer. Weekend deer hunts feature drives with dogs. Meat is shared and no one who wants meat goes home empty-handed. Still hunting during weekdays and in the “still hunt” zone on weekends.

Friendly members, excellent safety record. Membership fee is $500. No initiation fee. Ten mandatory work hours per year and one day of dog care per year (can be waived for individuals who wish to pay additional fee). Many areas of the country are too populated to allow a longer traveling centerfire rifle cartridge to be safely used. The southern part of Wisconsin is like that as well, shotgun/muzzleloader only, but the hunting can be spectacular. If you know and understand the limitations of a shotgun slug or muzzleloader projectile, there’s no reason in the world why you cannot make a clean kill on a deer with either weapon.

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Waterfowl Equipment

April 1, 2012 By admin Leave a Comment

Out here in Saskatchewan we do a combination of field hunting and water hunting. After scouting the day before we like to drop field decoys consisting mostly of shells and full bodied Canada goose decoys as well as full bodied mallard enticer decoys (these seem to work extremely well in the late season when the geese have been shot at a few times, downside is they are pretty expensive). When the snow geese first come down we put about 200-400 Texas rags out.

We normally only decoy the young snow goose a few adults will take the bait but it’s a bonus if you can shoot a mature snow goose. I mainly use one shotgun all season, it’s a Benelli Super Black Eagle and have a 3″ Browning BPS as my backup (mainly because my friends don’t have a 2nd shotgun so we keep that one in the truck so no one’s day has to end early). Just in the process of putting a sling on it (I’m a big fan of having a sling on a shotgun when I’m out waterfowling).

I have found Kent Fasteel to pattern extremely well with my factory chokes as well as the Kent Impact (Tungsten) line to be extremely effective on pass shooting large geese (downside is it’s expensive).I prefer to hunt waterfowl from water. Slough, swamps and rivers or a combination of that are my choice of hunting location. I find that field shooting although a lot more comfortable, to be a one shot affair. The birds come and you shoot and then the birds either leave or move locations. It’s over then. With swamp, sloughs and rivers there is hunting and shooting all day long usually.

There are bonuses as well and that is there are other things happening. Let’s be honest field shooting is a lot of work for a short amount of time the work happening usually in the middle of the night. With SSR shooting you get to see the sun come up and birds flying like mad then you get the lull in the action where the rest of the land wakes up, the other creatures going about their business eagles and hawks soaring by. I can’t tell you the number of wonderful days I’ve spent in a boggy river with my hunting partner sipping coffee and enjoying life. Some of my best hunting memories are of that exact thing.

We’ve occasionally taken a fishing rod and some frozen minnows and caught a pike or two as well. I prefer a stout canoe over a boat only because the reeds and rushes make pulling a boat into them tough. I have a Coleman Scanoe and it’s been excellent. Painted in a camo motif mind you. For years we used just a dozen decoys as it was a handy number but like all hunting accessories that has grown to 3 dozen and a 1/2 dozen floating geese. Actually I don’t really thing we get anymore ducks with the bigger spread but we do get more geese opportunities.

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Culling vs Hunting

April 1, 2012 By admin Leave a Comment

What are the practical differences between culling and hunting? I think there are some schools of thought where it is perceived that hunting is the ”sport” form – so animal/bird is gauranteed to be there/ numbers kept artificially high/ ‘hunter’ pays for the privilidge, wheras culling is the management form – marksman requires some skill to do his job/ efforts are to lower numbers/ hopefully bird/animal wont be there/ hunter paid to do job (or often keeps kills in lieu of work).

Though I do subscribe to this differentation I still use either word interchangably except on this ng, where it seems that some means of classification is required. Most people I’ve spoken to (the general public) don’t care that there is any difference in terminology, as in the nature conservation context it is obviously going to be the ‘culling’ dfeinition that will apply. I suppose the thinking behind it is that people do not often pay others for the privilege of doing a job for themselves, normally you pay someone elso to do a job -for- you.

That means that the person doing the culling does it as a job, so that’s supposedly ok, wheras in the case of ‘hunting’ where it is for sport, that isn’t ok (where poor defenceless animals are reared for the purposes of being killed…. and so on). If you haven’t already thought of it, you might like to consider that if ‘hunting’ as a business was stopped in the UK, then after 40 – 50 years the need for culling might also be reduced (although it would not go away completely until all muntjac, sika, japanese water deer, fallow had been eradicated).

In almost all cases culling and hunting amounts to the same thing but those in favour of killing wildlife find “culling” a more acceptable word to euphemise the killing of wildlife perpretrated by the same people who do so for fun, in the name of “sport”. Many, many people accept the need for culling and not the need for ‘sport’ hunting. To quote the League Against Cruel Sport: “In the absence of a state wildlife management system, the League does not oppose shooting for the purposes of pest control, the provision of food or population control – provided that such shooting is efficient and selective, and a more humane alternative is not reasonably available.

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ad hoc management for hunting

April 1, 2012 By admin Leave a Comment

The very characteristics that make ad hoc management for hunting necessary in such environments make it unnecessary to hunt at all. “Third, hunting in moderately fluctuating environments is not necessary if a good complement of effective natural predators is present. The selectivity of natural predators (more correctly stated as the vulnerability of the prey) is a more exact way to retain equilibrium values of residual populations.

Hunting can accomplish the same end, but because of its lack of selectivity, a higher kill is required than for natural predation to achieve the same end. Stated another way, natural predators are better at reducing chronic mortality than are human hunters, because the former remove the vulnerable individuals most likely to succomb to chronic mortality factors. Thus there is very high substitutability of predator kills for chronic mortality, while for human hunting, chronic mortality is somewhat more additive, although still substitutable to a considerable extent.

“As professionals, wildlife biologists and managers must distinguish between cases where hunting is necessary and where it is not. It is possible to recognize the legitimate interests and necessary roles of human hunters without becoming apologists or advocates for the recreation. Bias toward hunting in situations where hunting is not necessary can only result in loss of credibility. Professional integrity demands that no side of a controversy be given favor on biological grounds that cannot be justified by the biology of the case under review. If hunters are favored because they pay the costs of management through license fees and special taxes, let that be the justification, and not an indefensible position that hunting is necessary in cases where it is not.

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How to sustain a yearly hunting?

April 1, 2012 By admin Leave a Comment

Many environmentalists have made whales a flag issue. This originates from the fight to save the blue whale (and in the US, from the TV-series about Flipper). Unfortunately, this has led many people to beleive that *all* whales are endangered and threatened with extinction. This of course, is not the case. There are presently about 90000 (ninety-thousand) minke whales in the Northern Atlantic.

This population can (and should) sustain a yearly hunting of about 2000 (or was it more? I don’t remember the exact figures) animals.Now let’s look at the figures. We can estimate the minke whales’ weight to 1000 kg, giving about 750 kg of meat (this is not an exact figure, but close enough). In addition, the minke whales’ meat is extremely nourishing, healthy and well-tasting, and the whale is at all times living in its natural habitat eating its natural kind of food.

Compare this to chicken raised in modern farms. These chicken are cramped together, they are hardly able to move, they are raised on a special diet to make them grow faster, and they have never tasted the sweet freedom of wild life.Their average weight is about 1 kg, giving about 0.75 kg of meat. Now where do you find the most suffering, do you think? One of the great AR arguments raised against whaling is the method of killing, which has been accused of being barbaric, inhumane and so on. The ARers claim that whales go on living for hours and hours after being shot. This of course is *not* true.

Wildlife- associated recreational hunting

March 31, 2012 By admin Leave a Comment

An earlier Executive Order on recreational fisheries requires agencies to expand fishing opportunities on Federal lands. Including this year’s additions, 49 new fishing programs and 30 new hunting programs have been initiated during the Clinton Administration. In 1996, 77 million U.S. residents, or about 40 percent of the population 16 years old and older, participated in wildlife- associated recreation activities spending $101 billion.

Of this group, 35.2 million enjoyed a variety of fishing opportunities and 14 million hunted, while nearly 63 million enjoyed at least one type of wildlife-watching recreation activity including observing, feeding, or photographing fish and other wildlife. Recreational visits to national wildlife refuges generate substantial economic activity; in 1995, recreation-related spending generated more than $400 million in sales in regional economies.

As that spending flowed through the economy, it supported 10,000 jobs and provided nearly $170 million in payrolls. Since the first refuge was created by President Theodore Roosevelt in 1903, the National Wildlife Refuge System has grown to include 514 refuges and thousands of waterfowl production areas. At least one refuge is located in each of the 50 states and U.S. territories and insular areas. Some 30 million wildlife enthusiasts visit refuges each year, fishing and hunting, birdwatching, hiking and engaging in nature photography.

Hundreds of thousands of schoolchildren visit the refuges each year, studying nature, wildlife, and the environment. Hundreds of refuges are strategically located along major migratory bird flyways, and dozens were established to protect endangered and threatened species. National wildlife refuges teem with plants and animals of virtually every variety, from mallard to moose, walleye pike to whooping crane, cactus to caribou. At least one national wildlife refuge is located with an hour’s drive of almost every major city in the United States.

The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service is the principal Federal agency responsible for conserving, protecting, and enhancing fish and wildlife and their habitats for the continuing benefit of the American people. The Service manages the 93-million-acre National Wildlife Refuge System comprised of more than 500 national wildlife refuges, thousands of small wetlands, and other special management areas. It also operates 66 national fish hatcheries and 78 ecological services field stations.

The agency enforces Federal wildlife laws, administers the Endangered Species Act, manages migratory bird populations, restores nationally significant fisheries, conserves and restores wildlife habitat such as wetlands, and helps foreign governments with their conservation efforts. It also oversees the Federal Aid program that distributes hundreds of millions of dollars in excise taxes on fishing and hunting equipment to state wildlife agencies.

Non-consumptive tourism and hunting

March 31, 2012 By admin Leave a Comment

The probability of mankind being able to maintain the diversity of wild animal and wild plant life – for which purpose these national parks were set aside – is now highly questionable. Finally, if wildlife in Africa is to survive this generation – let alone the next one – then satisfying the very real needs of the African rural communities on the boundaries of national parks must become a principal ingredient of future national park management policies.

Man has been left out of Africa’s wildlife management equation for far too long and the result is clearly evident: poaching to the point of extinction in many cases of commercially viable elephant and black rhino populations that once thrived with the “protected” boundaries of most major national parks. The message is clear. Without the emotional ownership and support of local rural communities, national parks cannot protect Africa’s priceless world heritage – its wildlife.

As human numbers increase (they now are doubling every 20-25 years in Africa), so the pressures on Africa’s wildlife resources will increase, too. It is imperative that the people living on the boundaries of Africa’s national parks – cheek-to-jowl with dangerous wild animals that constantly threaten their lives and their livelihood without compensation – be given realistic and tangible benefits from the use of “their” wild animals. And the best way this can be achieved – with the least impact on the non-consumptive tourism use of these national parks is by way of selectively hunting the trophy bulls, even within national park boundaries.

There is a conflict of interest in this regard, however, because gameviewing tourists like to see the big tuckers, and these are the elephants that are most sought by safari hunters. Nevertheless, there are many solutions to this problem, and it can be resolved if there is genuine communication between national park authorities and leaders of the safari hunting industry. The alternative is too dreadful to contemplate. There will be an increase in poaching over time, resulting in the gradual elimination of all big-tusked elephants in Africa’s national parks, as has happened in Zambia’s Luangwa Valley. And there will be a major reduction of even small-tusked animals.

Elephant Hunting

March 31, 2012 By admin Leave a Comment

The greatest and most counterproductive “conservation” myth of recent years is the so-called “endangered” status of the African elephant. In reality, when the species was placed on the CB Appendix I list in 1989, it initiated a sequence of emotional public reactions that set back progressive elephant management problems in Africa three full decades. The true picture concerning the status of the elephant in Africa is light-years away from the image that the media – with a great deal of self-righteous urging from the animal rights brigade – have built up in the public mind.

Indeed, it is scandalous how “truth-seeking” media and several so-called Irresponsible” governments have allowed themselves to be led by the nose of radical anti-hunters. Surely it is time society began to properly rationalize the facts of such vitally important matters, rather than simply to accept the subjective, emotion-wrapped ideologies put out by self-interested anti-hunting groups. While this may be true, it may have been necessary to “let the wheel turn” – to let the hype, the hypocrisy, that accompanied the CITES “endangered” declaration in 1989 burn itself out.

The cycle has prepared the ground for the truth to emerge, for a time to “ripen” so that the world can be presented with the facts in a properly objective manner. Certainly, all is not lost. We can make up lost ground very quickly, provided governments and society this time round are prepared to adopt (or accept) elephant management programs that are based upon sound ecological principles, upon economic and social realities in the range states, and upon simple common sense.

Neither governments nor the public, however, will ever be able to reach responsible conclusions unless we hunters provide them with facts. On the other hand, hunters will never possess those facts unless the few of us who have been deeply involved with elephant management, and who understand the intricacies of elephant management practices, share our knowledge with hunters. Hunters – who also are elephant managers – have a vital role to play in returning common sense to the equation.