All About Pocket Knives

Beautiful pics John.

I just got back from our annual pheasant hunt. This year we tried out Scattered Acres Outfitting near Palmer, KS. Had a great time with old friends. The lodge was excellent, the food was good, and the hunting was fun. We pick a different place each year, and we all agreed this was the best so far.

Bruce.. 2 miles up, 2 miles down and those pics are the smooth part of the trail!!

Thanks Wade!!

Unk.. Looks like a GREAT time was had by ALL!!! NICE!!! John

Good stuff fellas!!!

Spent the last couple days processing wood at Starkey Park to clear some of the tent sites...

Cut some, burn some, leave some!!

Volunteerism at it's finest Scott, you are leaving a lasting legacy my friend!

Tx panhandle sunset

I assume those are free range birds.

Charlie Noyes

Unk - that pheasant hunt looks like a great way to get together with friends!

Scott - A very nice way to leave a campsite.

Today I took my kayak into an unfrequented part of a swamp. The bass were not biting, so after a bit I quit fishing and just enjoyed the beauty. When I came to a good place to pull out I stopped to make coffee. That used to be a tradition in my family, but not something I ever did. So today I did it. Black coffee and strong! It does make for a nice break from paddling.

Looks like you are living the dream Mel, well played sir, I'm sure the sugarplums were dancing in your head!

Love it Mel!!! Love it!!!

My tradition with my grandsons and their friends has always been jerky and an apple.

Yesterday we made a fire and made oatmeal....they said it was the best oatmeal ever.....LOL

Mel, Your photos are very evocative for reasons too long to recount. [Ex. a kayak trip long ago in some wetlands and swamp in WI.] Must have been a wonderful day I have no doubt. Congrats.

Thanks, fellows. It was a fine day. Not many birds about, I guess they do not stir a lot on a misty still morning like today. I did see a few deer. Mostly just the tails! One thing about the area I was in today is that there are never any motorboats. There are large numbers of stumps and logs just below the surface of the water, and some places the channels are almost blocked. For that matter, I have never seen another kayaker there, either. Very solitary.

Scott, that looks like a lot of fun with those boys. I bet they remember that oatmeal for a long time!

That is a lovely shot of the slough. Reminds me of a famous slough southwest of Chicago famous as a birding spot. Scott doesn't realize the only cereal I will consume is oatmeal. I love it and the several times he has shown oatmeal prepared outdoors I begin drooling. You two fellas with cameras are provocateurs. The good kind.

RobesonsRme.com wrote:I assume those are free range birds.

Charlie Noyes

Nope Charlie, those are pen raised. The place is family run, and the son - a college student - was our guide behind a couple of brittanys. He took us down to see where the birds were raised. I know some purist hunters look down on hunting pen raised birds, but I am not one of those.

I think my tongue-in-cheek question was alluding to birds being shooed into the air from a cage just for one's shooting pleasure.

I don't care if the birds were pen raised. If they are released into a field, ID'd and pointed by a dog and then flushed into the air, the birds still have their native instincts and they can fly fast.

I have no problem with that style of hunt.

Down here, fire aunts have decimated the wild quail population.

Charlie

Charlie our wild bob white quail are nearly extinct. I was told by a friend who raises bob whites and releases them, that it's all the fescue grass that's planted around here. I don't know if l buy into that, but I believe loss of habitat is a real problem in this area, as far as I know the fire ants aren't here yet. They are something that I really miss, not the hunting but listening to them whistling.

bighomer wrote:Charlie our wild bob white quail are nearly extinct. I was told by a friend who raises bob whites and releases them, that it's all the fescue grass that's planted around here. I don't know if l buy into that, but I believe loss of habitat is a real problem in this area, as far as I know the fire ants aren't here yet. They are something that I really miss, not the hunting but listening to them whistling.

The quail here in Texas have made a comeback. I have a cousin who guides hunts out in West Texas and he is very encouraged. We tried to blame ther decline on the fire ants but I really don't think that was the problem. This same cousin has pen raised quail that he uses for training his dogs and he is convinced that once a pen raised quail is released into the wild, their lifespan is very short due to starvation. Without a mama hen to teach them what to eat, they do not last very long.

Ray

bighomer wrote:Charlie our wild bob white quail are nearly extinct. I was told by a friend who raises bob whites and releases them, that it's all the fescue grass that's planted around here. I don't know if l buy into that, but I believe loss of habitat is a real problem in this area, as far as I know the fire ants aren't here yet. They are something that I really miss, not the hunting but listening to them whistling.

Same here, just up the road from you. It's several things here. Fescue is real bad for them because it grows in clumps and makes a mat covering the ground, great for errosion control, but the birds cant walk or run trough it. Then we've lost lots of habitat because of high grain and cattle prices for the last few years, even marginal ground that we used to hunt has been turned into grain fields, or the wild cover cleaned off and planted in fescue. I miss wild quail hunting.

We flushed several covey of quail all three days in Kansas (they were wild, not pen-raised) It was very hard not to shoot.

In my youth (1970s) in North Texas, you could not walk across a field without stirring up a covey or two. It was my favorite type of hunting.

I am currently reading "A Hunter's Road" by Jim Fergus. He has some strong opinions. I agree with some, but others come across as very pompous in my opinion. Overall I recommend the book. With the increase in human population and loss of wild habitat, I think leveraging pen-raised birds for at least some of the hunting helps to not decimate the wild-bird populations.

Quail have gone from common to quite rare in this area. Lots of reasons, I think. Small fields and pastures with fence rows become huge fields with no fence rows. Fire ants no doubt. Invasive cogon grass has taken over large areas of marginal land like power line easements and road sides that were once good quail habitat. Another thing, piney woods are no longer burned off on an annual or semiannual basis in my area. When the piney woods are burned regularly that keeps the brush down and allows herbaceous plants to grow on the forest floor. Piney woods are not great quail habitat, but there was a lot of it, and I would occasionally flush a covey. Now days, it is unusual to see piney woods maintained by burning and the brush and secondary trees close off the forest floor. I do think that if my part of the world were allowed to revert to a completely natural condition, then there would be no quail at all. I think it is purely the activity of humans that created good conditions for quail, and a lot of songbirds too, in this area. Now our activity is creating another set of conditions.

I agree neighbor, a few years ago every ole farmstead had several old thickets or overgrown fence rows for them to hide in now as you say they growing grain or bush hogging the thickets or herbiciding the fence rows, and I'll admit I'm part of the problem.

Tomorrow morning is opening day of modern gun deer season here in the great Commonwealth if Kentucky. Good luck to all you Kentucky hunters. I hope you fill your tags and your freezers!

This will be my first year hunting in the new place here. I walked out to where the blind is this afternoon and jumped two 30 yards from the barn in the afternoon. Fingers crossed.

That looks like a good spot. What is the green patch in the upper left hand corner of the picture?
Hope you have a big one on the ground tomorrow mornin'!
Treefarmer

treefarmer wrote:That looks like a good spot. What is the green patch in the upper left hand corner of the picture?
Hope you have a big one on the ground tomorrow mornin'!
Treefarmer

That’s a neighbor’s pasture field. This area is mostly pasture with lots of woods and thickets in between. The deer make big circles from farm to farm usually. I have the best bedding area in this area along with a pond, and there are pastures and small thickets all around.

The magazines all say to hunt water, and food, and to stay up wind. Here we have water everywhere, food everywhere, and the wind blows from theee directions at all times. Lol. I hope to find one just waking up, or passing by.

We’ve been fairly warm of late, but it’s been cooling off all week and in the morning it’s supposed to be 29°. The rut should be in full swing and the deer moving. We’ll see.

Good luck Wade!!!

Saw this little piggy in the cabins area at Starkey Park yesterday while sharpening my axes....