Chicago deer

I just saw as many deer while taking the dog to the dog park in chicago as we saw in SD. Some of them were a little farther off at about 50 yards. But about 6 of them we walked up to about 30 yards to take this picture (with a camera phone... sorry for the quality) (did you bring your bow Chris? :-) We saw 9 total, 6 in this photo, although you can only really see 2 right by the bill of Patricia's hat. Several people with dogs walked by about 10-15 yards from them.

Mountain Lion

GFP reported a farmer shot a mountain lion on December 3rd in Miner county. For those who don't know, Miner is the county just south of Kingsbury. The news release can be read here.

Just something to think about next time you're walking through a slough in the dark to your deer stand...

Florida Connections.

The guys had a fantastic pheasant hunt last week. they wanted a cold weather hunt, and they got one.

Most of the guys that came were from Florida, They had never been hunting with a shotgun, and had never seen snow. Temps were about 5 above zero, and about 10 inches of fresh snow.

They had a lot of gun problems, their automatics and pumps did not work well, but even then, they must have each fired about 3 boxes of shells. They figure that they must have seen about 1000 pheasants the first day.

One of the guys was a commerical and charter fisherman from Clearwater Florida, his web site is (T-Kat.com). Tom brought a bushel of fresh crab legs, we stood around the fire ring outside the house, cracking and dipping crab in hot butter, when it was about zero outside. If you set your beer down for more that just a few seconds, it started to freeze. Did you know that commercial crab fisherman catch the crabs, just cut off the claws, and throw the crab back, and it grows a new set of claws. I brought about a dozen back for Terri, she really liked them. Tom is available for a charter almost any time, depending on the season, check out his website. Phil, how far is Clearwater from you?

Looking forward to seeing some of you in January.

Gary

Food plots

Phil and I talked about financing some food plots for next year. He talked to several of you and it sounded like a good idea so I talked to Dad some and he has talked to the Pioneer seed guy about options.

There is a corn variety that is shorter (they call it maize?) that is roundup ready. He asked about grain sorgum and they don't have any that is roundup ready.

We're looking at roundup ready so that it will require less tillage throughout the year. Some weeds are ok but the intended food needs to not be choked out.

Anyone want to do a little research on other food options? Or just make some suggestions?

Deer stand plans

Here are the basics of the plans that dad and I put together while we were in SD for the hunt.

The basic dimensions are 4x6. Small enough that you can see in all directions without moving around to much but large enough to be able to swing your rifle around.

The entry will be through a trap door in the floor that you can close and then stand on (makes it so you don't have to deal with a full size door on the end) Hinges will be against end wall? and a few inches from the wall so the door will stand on it's own. How do we want the ladder to flow to make entry easiest?

Side windows dad already has and I believe they are 54" wide and about 14" high. We'll mount them about 36" high (so that you can rest on the sill) The windows will hinge inwards and up so that you can hook them out of the way to shoot and be able to clean them from the inside.

End windows are small sliding windows should give about a 12x12 opening to shoot through.

Sides and roof are tin, floor is made of either plywood or 1"x lumber (which we have some of already)

I wanted to get some feedback on these if anyone has ideas. Also, if someone has free time and wants to they could create a better set of plans