Site Discussions

I totally agree with the contents of this article. I’ve been engaged with the same firewood tasks for many years at my Starksboro woodlot, without mechanized equipment.This physical activity nourishes my mental and physical strength. I’ll continue this task until I leave planet earth. Living easily brings on a quick and certain death.

Great article and good advice about not planting a large quantity in the first year. I planted 200 (100 norway spruce, 100 nordmann fir) the first year. Make sure the trees are at least 5 foot apart.

Does the damage done to the interior of a tree trunk (bole) have a name? I’ve found the annular rings “delaminated” as it were perhaps as a result of wind torque.

Thank you. Another reason to have a good hand lens at hand, and to get on your knees to look, look, look.

Thank you so much for this piece! I grew up in Canaan, VT, (raised by parents who worked at Ethan Allen in Beecher Falls, and went out to dance at Bear Mountain back in the day) and continue to make pilgrimages to Brousseau Mountain to overlook this region from the north, and often take the 105 corridor to visit my mom, who now lives in Island Pond. Many stories of friends who ventured out into the region to hunt back in the day. One got lost and returned with frostbite and one heck of a story.

You probably know Allan Peterson, who worked for Champion for many years. He’s the father of one of my classmates, and a mentor of mine.

I just wanted to drop a note to thank you for your very thoughtful piece, especially your observations in the final paragraphs about witnessing changes in the landscape (both internal and external), and the importance of “allowing that inner compass” to guide one’s actions. As I write this, I realize the debt I owe to Mr. Peterson and his role in my life as a mentor. 

You Champion foresters are a good lot.

Best,
Jeremy

To be completely honest I think people buy into the new color patterns because it looks cool and all the “professional” hunters wear it, I’m 16 and if I could find it nowadays I would wear nothing but old school camo and obviously orange!!!

I have a bowl made of burl wood, it looks like a fungus on the bottom.

After retiring from the Army after 34 years, I settled in to find ways to keep myself busy, so I hunt. I have an addiction to dry aged meats. This led me to buy a walk in cooler. I hunt in Texas and Oklahoma and Alabama . With generous bag limits. 4 in Texas and 6 in Oklahoma and Alabama. I limited out this year now. 16 deer. Where I differ from many is careful shot placement. I wait for a neck or head shot to save meat quality. I hang the tenderloin rib sections and hind quarters in my cooler to age up to a month. The rest goes into smoked sausage. The money spent on the cooler is worth every penny. It allows consistent temperature and humidity control with constant air circulation resulting in a finished product that is second to none.

This is a fine piece of nature writing—-full of interesting accurate information and smoothly and engagingly written. Bravo!

We are fortunate to have both red and white nuthatches. The reds are way less timid and with a bit of training will eat right out of your hand.

I will grant you, Tom, that things may have gotten a little mumbo-jumboey at the end of the essay. What I was trying to say – beyond simply telling a non-traditional hunting story that didn’t cast the hunter as the hero, and telling a cautionary tale that might be of use to other hunters – was that the ugly side of the pursuit – the mistakes, or in this case the series of mistakes – create a spiritual depth. To use a religious analogy again, if life were perfect, if people were perfect, there would be no need for church on Sunday. Pain, mistakes, loss, can be a catalysis for growth. I think a lot of the good ethics hunters have are born out of stories like this, which is both unfortunate and fortunate.

I think your criticism of the actions in the story, and the other criticisms, are fair and warranted and I’m glad people are pointing out the lapses in good judgement. I’d caution, though, against seeing it as a simple matter of the wise and the virtuous versus the incompetent everybody else. In my observations, these kinds of mistakes happen when hunters develop a degree of competence, and we’d all be wise to note that. In the same way that most chainsaw accidents happen when you lose your fear of it, not when you first pick up the saw, many of the elements in the story – from the bad shooting to the not bringing a good compass – happen after you’ve had enough success to think you’re too good for any of this.

This answered some questions for me, especially as to why the feral cats don’t want anything to do with ridding the neighborhood of this little rodent. Noticed the shrew likes the dry cat food and made at least 50 trips from the bowl to the back of the outside house I have for the stray cats.  Maybe I’ll have to put cat food in the “mouse” traps.

This is an awesome theory of maple decline. I am in full agreement. And I love the use of Manion’s decline concepts.

It may be easy to judge in review about what this hunter did, but it was apparent from the start that he didn’t have much knowledge of guns and scopes. He fell, twisted his knee, pounded his rifle on a rock so hard as to bust his stock and thought that everything would be hunkydory? Not only was his knee twisted, so was his rational thinking. When he saw that sow at the base of the tree with two cubs, right then he should’ve gave her the benefit of the doubt and let her go. If it was a mortal wound, so be it. If it wasn’t, she would live to raise another family of cubs. I won’t even get into him limping out into an impending storm with a 5 year-old, his grandfather, an inadequate, unfamiliar weapon, with darkness approaching and no compass to boot. But the next morning, he made no effort to to search again with friends or family? It might’ve been a difficult, inconvenient experience for him, but I bet it wasn’t fun for those bears either.

This is indeed a string of unfortunate decisions. However, the entire episode - doesn’t speak well for the hunter but one incident does not define hunting. One shopper in the grocery store to buy factory farmed animals doesn’t speak ill of all meat eaters. It’s not really that cut and dry.

Nature will self-regulate but it’s sometimes ugly. Over population contributes to horrible deaths by starvation, disease, animal/vehicle accidents and other issues. I personally think it’s better to harvest a bear to feed my family than allow Maine’s too-high bear population increase. 

A single drop of blood from a bear is not a reliable indicator of a poor shot. A thick layer of fat will quickly and efficiently seal a wound. The bear might bleed out and die without leaving a blood trail. This sow might have been found in a search the next morning.

I hope she’s denned up, with or without her yearling cubs that are old enough to be on their own, and healing. They’re tough creatures with incredibly strong bones. Maybe she’ll survive.

Whatever the writer was trying to say in this essay, he failed at, but I will give him points for the attempt. T was obviously not a very competent hunter, as having no compass illustrates. I could go on from there, but “Woody” has already said much of it.  As a lifelong highly successful hunter, I found this simply a portrait of an unprepared and all-too-typical one.

Thank you for this complicated story. This is my second year as a deer-hunter, the first I’ve seen a legal buck. I don’t come from a hunting tradition, so I’m learning from anyone I can. Yes, I enjoy the sunrise; no, I don’t know if I will pull the trigger. If I do, I want to be sure to kill, not wound, my quarry. So why do it? I’m compelled by some primal force to learn how to be in the woods as a huntress; I want to eat the wild landscape; ingest the land.

A good reading story.  We now have coyotes in our neck of the wood. I suppose they have been here for some years, but I was unaware of it. In the last year or so, more and more signs of them, and their nightly howls. I have now spotted a few, and their territory, the woods behind my house is being dozed down for a new housing project. The coyotes, plus the deer, squirrels and rabbits, and other wildlife and birds will have to move on or die.  It has meant so much to me and my family to watch and learn over the years of the animals that lived in and around our backyard…

Very complicated subject, hunting is

Like religion and politics, never going to change the mind of those who see the world differently than u

For me, the predator class of animals u leave be, via territorial and food and mate requirements, they self regulate their populations and help optimize the health and diversity of the rest of the plants and animals they share terrain with

My take

Rick
Meril

Let us count the ways—the succession of poor decisions/choices in this account—from continuing to hunt with a damaged rifle; to, apparently, not being sure of his shot; to then shooting (with the rifle that he thought was “off”) at one of three bears (maybe not the one he’d already wounded); to taking a five-year old on the search for the wounded bear; to not having a functional compass; to ...

This entire account does not speak well of hunting but, unfortunately, it’s far from the worst possible situation.