My favorite time of the year

Fall is absolutely hands down my favorite time of the year. I can think of at least twenty to thirty reasons why, but here are just a few. Fall means that hunting season is upon us now. I wait & anticipate all year for hunting season. It doesn't matter what game I am pursuing, from Upland birds to Mule Deer, I am excited. As my son has gotten older, and is now tagging along in the field, it means that I get to spend some very precious time in the field with him. Fall also means to me, that on the first cold day, my wife will make us her world famous Green Chile. She is going to make it this very weekend to be exact. Thanksgiving holiday is also in the fall. This means to me that my family & dear friends will gather to celebrate and remember what we are all so thankful for, to me that is just having them around me. Fall also means to me that the blazing heat is finally over, we can turn the air conditioner off and open some windows around the house to let in the beautiful fall breezes. Along with the heat dissipating means that I don't have to water the yard nearly as much, and that also means that I can finally put the blasted mower away for one more season.

So, here's to a wonderful fall for everyone!! Get out, enjoy the weather & watch the beautiful foliage.

Little Brazille Creek

This is one of my favorite spots around Glasgow to hunt Whitetail Deer, Upland Game Birds & Doves. This is a beautiful creek to just sit by & chill waiting for Doves to come into your decoys on a warm early fall day or push the banks for Grouse & Pheasant. Later on in the fall the Whitetails use this creek & surrounding Cottonwood thickets as cover during the day & come out in the evenings to gorge themselves on the local alfalfa fields & pasture grass.

Dove Opener

I thought I would take a few minutes and give an update on my happenings. Dove season opened Sept. 1st, which was a Tuesday this year. I was out bright and early opening day and had my decoys setup on a recently harvested wheat field. The Doves were coming in strong for the waste grain that gets left behind from the combine.



I was hunting by myself this morning and after getting a few doves in my game bag the shooting really died down. I then decided to go setup on a row of dead Cottonwood trees that also bordered a newly harvested wheat field, but this field had already been swathed and baled, so there were hay bales that the Doves liked to come into to sit upon and pick grain.



I was able to get a couple more Doves from this setup, by this time it is nearing 10:30 am and the heat is rising. By the time I packed up it was 80 degrees and too warm for me to be out in long camo pants & shirt. I went home and rested up to wait for some friends to get off of work that I knew were going to meet me that afternoon for another hunt. We met up that afternoon about 5:30 pm and worked several different angles for the Doves. The best seemed to be to place a shooter in a corner of a field that had some dead trees that the Doves liked to come to rest upon. 5 of us out in the field kept the Doves flying from one cover location to another and we all did pretty good getting some Doves. We hunted until about 8 pm, when it was just getting too dark to be able identify clearly what were non game birds and which were Doves.



My son & I went out on Labor Day evening to see what we could muster up for Doves. We placed some decoys in some dead tree limbs in a grove of dead Cottonwood trees and waited, and we waited, and we waited some more. We only saw 2 shootable doves that evening. Mind you we saw plenty of Doves roosting on power lines and on somebody's clothes line that borders their garden. It seems as though this last small cold front that we got pushed alot of the Doves out that were here. I am hopeful that the season isn't done already when it should just be getting started. I will keep you updated though.

We maybe didn't see alot of Doves this evening. Jack took along his new .22 just in case we saw some gophers or other small critters that needed dispatching. It was a good evening all in all, having him along was the icing on the cake.



Here is the end result we all hope for. Some great Dove skewers and a nice Beef steak!

Jack's first .22

As I have stated in a previous post, I bought my son his first .22 for his 9th birthday. It is an inexpensive little NEF single shot .22LR with open sights. I had great hopes for this gun, as a kids first gun is a momentous occasion. We went to the range today armed with a box of .22 ammo, a big box with 3" round targets pasted to the side & a nice summer day. I gave Jack all of the prerequisite safety lectures I could think of as he was sitting down at the shooting bench until I felt I was starting to nag him too much. I showed him how to break open the barrel to insert a round into the chamber. I then had him close the barrel and engage the safety. As he sat there beading down one of the small 3" targets I had him try to pull the hammer back with his right thumb as he shoots right handed. This is where the trouble starts. The hammer is so stiff that he is unable to pull it back with just one thumb. He need to either use both thumbs or the palm of a hand. I know that he will grow into it and figure out the pressure it will take to depress the hammer. He takes his first shot and shoots high of his intended target. The second shot reports and he has hit the highest target on the box. I am thinking that was a good shot, from what I believe he has hit where he was intending on shooting. But, he looks up and says that he was still aiming for the target below the one that he had actually hit. I kind of disregarded his statement and asked him to shoot another shot at the lower target. Sure enough he hits the upper target dead on. It looks like the gun is shooting about 6" high and 1" to the right. I took the gun and and fired 2 quick shots at the lower target and for me it is shooting way high and to the right. So, I grabbed my limited supply of gun smithing tools from my truck and brought the sight down to where I thought it should be and moved it over to the left about an inch. I then fired off 2 more shots to see where it was hitting, and repeated these steps 3 more times before I got it to where I thought it should be shooting. I got Jack back over as he had been chasing Grasshoppers around for the past 1/2 hour, as I messed with his gun. He shot a couple more times and the shots were still hitting about an inch high for him. But, the damage was done and he was not going to sit around and let me fiddle with it anymore, his attention span was screaming at me! So, we left it at that, with a mental note that the gun is still shooting high at 20 yards. Jack thinks that we need to invest in a fixed power scope for his gun, he is probably right, but that will have to wait until a Christams present I think. I have posted a slide show to the side of our outing today.

Time to kill in the prairie.

I was trying to find something productive to do this last weekend. I tried to get my son to go shoot .22’s with me, but he had other plans and wanted to go see a kid’s movie. The weather was not very nice, so outside projects were off. I decided to grab my Savage .17 HMR rifle, which is in a tight race to becoming my favorite little gopher / all around gun, and head out in the prairie and see if I could scare anything up. So, I set off thinking I would head out south and see if there were any gophers around and if the grass wasn’t too tall yet to see them. The roads weren’t too bad, as it had rained pretty well the previous night. I got to my favorite gopher spot and discovered the grass was indeed too tall. I was able to see a few gophers darting between cover and was able to make a couple decent shots. I grew tired of this and my mind began to wander at what else there was to do that day. I reached behind my seat to see if my binoculars were still in there from my last hunt that seemed like eons ago. They were indeed there, so I decided a little scouting trip for Antelope was in order, as I was in the area that I have drawn an either sex antelope tag. I drove a couple more miles south and pulled off on a good ridge over looking a deep basin with a good water source in it. I got out and walked down the ridge about a half mile and sat down to look the scene over. I immediately saw 3 different herds with average bucks in them. Each herd had about 8 or 9 does with several fawns and then the 1 average buck with some smaller bucks mixed in. I sat and watched these herds for probably half an hour until I saw another herd come over the ridge probably a mile away. I couldn’t tell but I thought I could see an outstanding buck with this herd. I let them come as close as they were going to and then I climbed back over the ridge out of view of this new herd. I walked down around the ridge to where I expected the herd to be. When I topped back over the ridge they were still there. I sat with my mouth open watching this buck for another 15 minutes alone. He had great bases and was really tall. It was hard to say, as they were still 600 yards away, but I put him at about 15” tall with great shovels and ivory tips that curled around perfectly. I had never seen an Antelope this well put together. I have shot some that have either been tall but with small shovels, or with great shovels but no length. I tried getting a picture with my little digital camera, but I was just too far away for a decent picture. I backed out of there and back over the ridge with out spooking any animals. When I made it back to the truck I marked the spot as a waypoint on my GPS, so as not to forget the location. As I made my way home I had visions dancing in my head of some tasty Antelope back straps on my grill and an awesome mount on my wall. I also drove by some good Dove hunting grounds to see what their numbers looked like, and was not disappointed. There were a lot of Doves in the area, eating grains of different sorts and roosting in the old Cottonwood trees. It feels like this is going to be a great fall. I can’t wait for the Antelope season to open, as I have waited for this for a long time, now if that darned old buck will just stick around a few more few months, it will get exciting. I will continue scouting on the weekends, and maybe I will also be able to look over some different area as well.

2009 Big Game Drawings

Well folks. That does it, all the waiting & wondering in anticipation has come to an end. All of the 2009 Big Game tags have been drawn for and the results are posted on Montana FWP's website. I can now concentrate on work and my dog kennel again. Every year at this time, I drive myself and those around me absolutely crazy with childish gibberish about which tags I might draw this year. I will have to settle for my Antelope tag for region 630, which I said before, that I have been puting in for for 5 years now and finally drawn the tag. I also have to say that here in N.E. Montana we have an absolute abundance of game to be hunted. I'm pretty sure if my memory serves me right, that I can buy 6 over the counter Antlerless Whitetail Doe B tags. That alone is more meat than my family could eat in one year. I can also buy an A tag which I can shoot either species of Deer antlered or not. So, all totaled I can harvest up to 8 animals this year, along with my Elk tag. If I so chose to take the time and effort to travel to the western side of the state to hunt elk. All in all I think this will be a great season afield. I am so looking forward to the opening of Upland bird season as well.

My son's first .22

For my son Jack’s 9th birthday I bought him a New England Firearms Single Shot youth combo kit. It is a combo that comes with a youth sized stock and interchangeable .22LR & 20 guage barrels. It seems like a very well made gun for $200. The .22LR barrel comes with open sights, but the receiver is also drilled and tapped for scope mounts. Jack is excited to move up from his BB gun that just isn’t cutting it for him anymore. I wanted to choose very carefully, as I know that a kid’s first gun will always be a memory for him, whether it is a fond memory or a terrible one. I remember my first gun was a hand me down .22 pump with open sights, and I am still fighting back the horrible memories of those first missed shots. I used to hunt rabbits and miscellaneous vermin with my dad when I was Jack’s age. So, the .22 pump was a logical choice given the quarry at the time. Jack has been pretty proficient with open sights on his BB gun, sometimes downright amazing. We will see how he does now with the longer ranges that can be reached with the .22. I am thinking that the receiver will probably end up with a nice light fixed power 3x or 4x scope on it. The hunting that we do out here in the west usually involves greater distances than in the forests back east. Open sights are great when you are beeding down on a squirrel that is 20 yards away up in a tree, but not so great when you have a rabbit sitting out on a snow drifted stubble field 35+ yards away. I will keep you updated on how our adventures go.