Squirrel hunting over fall break

For the Good Hunting Club, Columbus Day and Cornell's fall break meant an extra opportunity to hunt some squirrels. We took six squirrels this weekend (4 gray and 2 red) on two morning trips to the Danby State Forest.

Leaves are starting to cover the seasonal roads at the Danby State Forest.

See if you can guess which is the giant male that aggressively
responded to my new Lohman Distress Whistle.

When I got home I tried a new recipe for Squirrel Nuggets that proved delicious:

1. Chunk squirrel into bite size pieces
2. Dip a piece into milk, then coat with seasoned flour (mix your own blend)
3. Drop into an inch of hot oil and fry until light brown

About one squirrel's worth of nuggets makes a tasty snack.

Calling Deer in the Rut

Archery season is fast approaching, and with it the peak of the 'rut'. The rut is the mating season for deer, and here in central New York it usually peaks between the last week of October and the first week of November (smack in the middle of archery season). During this time bucks are so focused on mating and fighting that they let their guard down somewhat. They become more active during the day and more likely to respond to calls; and this makes them a bit easier to hunt if you know what you're doing. In this post I want to share some information on deer calling that has helped me take advantage of the rut and become a much better hunter.

I used to think, as i suspect many hunters do, that a few short calls on my grunt and the occasional rattle from a set of old horns might attract an inquisitive rutting buck. I regarded deer sounds as simply noises rather than communication, and I thought it was impossible to call deer in the way you might call turkeys or coyotes for example.

Now I feel silly for having thought that way. It turns out that there are lots of great videos available online for learning about deer communication, and knowledge of just a few deer behaviors and sounds can help you call deer just like any other animal. After watching some of these videos I was able to confidently call in this buck I took last year:

Some of the best videos I found were by a group called Wild Talkers, and it is now my firm belief that the following videos should be required viewing for all archers. This first video is a fast paced overview covering several different deer calls and some deer body language during an exciting hunt. It is definitely a must-watch.

For more details on each of calls and behaviors illustrated in that first video, check out these followup videos. Each is much shorter than the first one, and each contains a 30 second intro that you'll want to fast forward through after you see it once.

• Mature bucks
• Contact grunt
• Calling in cover
• Buck body language
• Rattling
• New dominant buck
• Calling does
• Calling too much

Scouting deer at Cornell

Scouting is one of the more critical elements in a successful deer hunting experience. Even those who hunt the same property year after year always have to be diligent about observing where and when the deer move so they can fine-tune the locations of their stands. Scouting is especially important for archers, who need to be within ~35 yards of their quarry to safely take a shot.

With this in mind, Travis and I went to scout one of the Cornell Campus Earn-a-Buck plots in preparation for the upcoming archery season (more on Cornell Hunting Lands in a future post). One thing was clear from our scouting trip: the deer population at Cornell is out of control. This will surely come as no surprise to residents of Ithaca and Cayuga Heights. Yes, we saw and photographed plenty of the typical deer sign a hunter would look for, like rubs, tracks, and scat (below).

But the amazing part was the number of actual deer we saw on our scouting trip! In total, about eight deer came within shooting distance of us during our two hour hike (while we were making no great effort to be stealthy). Take a look at the spike buck and small herd of does in the photos below for example.

In addition, we found the ~30 acre plot of land was totally devoid of young saplings, and every mid-size sapling either had a fresh deer rub, or had been rubbed withing the past two years. This is perhaps why we found this monster and two of his bachelor buddies grazing in the adjacent soy field.

Although big bucks are the most challenging and coveted game, it's does that really need to be harvested in order to control herd size. Earn-a-Buck (where a hunter must harvest two does before he/she may harvest a buck) is the method Cornell is now employing to reduce the size of their deer herd. A side effect of Earn-a-Buck is that more bucks live to reach an age of peak maturity and size - a method of Quality Deer Management (QDM). It's hard for me to tell whether the population reduction aspect of Earn-a-Buck is working yet (I expect that it will), but I think it's pretty clear that the QDM aspect is working. We were fortunate to see several large bucks in one short scouting trip, and I'll sign off with the following links to Cornell trail-cam photos from this September as further evidence: Pic1, Pic2, Pic3, Pic4, Pic5.