Have you ever had Zup's venison sticks?

Partial whitetail deer preseason to do list:

Sharpen knife. (will it split a hen hackle fiber? How about in the air after you drop it?)
Buy license. (MN regular firearm zone one area 127 with antlerless bonus tag)
Check plat book. (It was county land the last time I checked, but best act responsibly)
Make sure T-mos is cool with me using his model 94. (T-mos is always cool, but best act responsibly)
If so, make targets for sighting it. (For a clean shot. At a deer.)
Get mega road trip style plastic bottle. (Whitetails disdain human urine as much as humans do. Well, real humans anyway)
Scope the aspen cutover and set blind. (At the risk of it getting stolen, this is to make sure I don't look up at daybreak and see orange in a tree stand anywhere. Also to naturalize the thing; Blind meet popple, popple meet blind)
Load a book onto the ipod (I watched a cow moose and her calf have dinner and bed down for the night from my tree stand three years ago. Then the sun set. Five hours turned into fifteen minutes, to my suprise.
I suck at sitting still. I'll plug in when the cutover goes quiet. The DA tells me the book she wants me to hear is a scary one, so I should be able to listen comfortably with a high-powered rifle in my lap and not get frightened, out there in the woods alone)
Dig the whole thing. (Only two weeks out of fifty-two for gun season. Six days if you dirt collar like me.)

American Woodcock

Back from a winterizing stint at the cabin with Richard. Pull the dock and Bunky the pontoon boat out of the lake, et cetera. And other generalities, like Richard exacting revenge on the cribbage board.

The American Woodcock is a migratory bird. Like ducks and geese, they travel in groups, landing in favored areas overnight or for a few days. Unlike ducks or geese, they are remarkably difficult to see after they do and must know it. A common technique used by reseachers for capturing live woodcock for banding involves a good pointing dog and a net. The dog points and the bird is netted on the ground. I've been told that the bird usually flushes before the person with the net can find it.

Richard counting primary feathers. It is difficult to dead-on determine the age and sex of a woodcock. Counting from the tip of the wing, the twelfth to fifteenth primary feathers give good indications of a birds' age and sex. Take notes on tip banding and mottling symmetrics.

Post test reward!

The recipe for Woodcock Ramake:

Breast filets of woodcock are carefully cradled in onion or green pepper the way julie cuts them. Wrap in a half of strip of bacon. Fresh ground pepper, maybe seasoned salt. Everyone knows the grill works best, but the oven works too. Use medium to low cooking temps to keep the bacon from flaring.

This photo shows ramake made with woodcock and grouse. If this doesn't look good to eat, an air freshener will help with the greasy, humid mcdonalds aura in your car or house. If still no go, peta is always looking for people to strap bombs to.

Richard's yellow lab, Rowdy, shows that the old dogs know what the game is about.

If that were a rattlesnake...

If I were fifteen feet away from a bird sitting in a relatively sparse pine in full daylight and the bird is abount an inch or two shorter than a grown rooster, I always believed I'd be able to spot it in a second. Stupe knew it was there, kept her trap shut and was looking at me real funny. I stared at the bird on the branch for five minutes. Put on your watch and look at something for five minutes. Then I got closer and closer until I could see that it's neck was bent at two forty-five degree angles and the tail was skewed way off to it's right side. It looked exactly like an eight inch chunk of branch. I looked at a ruffed grouse ten feet from me for minutes nonstop and I believed that it was not a grouse. By then, Stupe was bailing nervous circles and getting stoned on scent and then the bird gave a flinch. I've never given too much of a care for disintigration so I put one over the tree and we watched where it went.

Stupe takes another one out of the popples.

The home water takes a bath.

The same waterfall as shown in an earlier post. Rowdier. I took the previous picture from where the foam line is. I'ts rained here for two weeks steady with a day or two of what you might call letup and wouldn't call indian summer.

Thanks to some camp experience with real northwest coast steelheaders, the knee length rubber boots, dry firewood and chemical logs have been stowed just in case the water around here unblows before the season ends.

New structure

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Brule, ah. Brule. So subject to adversity. And raining like hell again as I write.

Five words for a rainy month in Minnesota

Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome. Giggity.

The nature of things

Silent... (no story, DA very effective)

and beautiful. (no story, hard frosts ineffective)

Another pic and The Reason Why

A bronze banded ruffed grouse tail.

This ruffed grouses' tail displays one of the rarer color phases. The picture may not strike the viewer in the face with a hard left. However, it affords me to show the appreciative another thing on this earth that is pretty.

It also shows the log which it had chosen for it's drumming site. Crusty grouse hunters will see the proof. The drumming log is a spot where a male ruffed grouse flaps it's wings to attract mates. No bathrooms in crowded airports, just a nice secluded stand of aspen trees.

Stupe and I had just taken one (that's granola for "kill") and as I was gutting it (that's sportsman for "taking care of wild game") this bird drummed.

Stupe makes three long loops around where I heard the drumming and halfway through the fourth, zones to the center of said loops, points, and flushes the bird and after I get a precious wingshot, makes a good retrieve. Wingshots are always precious. Like Big Fish takes on a dry, the moments deform part of your brain and you can easily recall every single one.

My pop put guns in our hands when we were real young. By the time I was twelve and my younger brother ten, we learned just what a .357 magnum could do to a person who was on the safe end of the barrel and what it did to a sprite can that wasn't. Around that time there were shotguns too, and "don't you ever fuck around with these, either". But he still entrusted us to them, took us for long walks and car rides and showed us what the ruffeds were all about. Still I wonder why we never wore helmets through this.

This led to that and I met the DA. DA the dog person, who's dad, Richard, raised and trained gun dogs for years. On a fine September Saturday afternoon he asked me how my bird hunting has been. I told him I had killed four so far that season. He invited me to go with him the next morning and guaranteed I'd see twenty birds. I saw twenty two and was barely keen enough to notice which scenes his dog acted in. Will you spell s-o-l-d for me, people? Shortly after the Da and I had two dogs of our own. She conveyed the idea of dog ownership. I held my ground of little resistance. One of them turned out to be just about the best out of the box bird dog a Labrador can be. Richard sees this and says to me,

"You better hunt that dog because you'll never have one that good again in your life".

So we hunt, the season is short. And only Kings hunt birds and fish salmon.

Gigity.

The summer side of life.

Finnish marigolds.

By late July they looked like this. They got a transplant in September to a small patch of dirt near the house (for heat) in September and I took this pic this morning. Blossoms through two frosts. Year after year, they keep on rocking and rolling after the hardwood trees around here drop leaves and after the potatos and squash and beans issue their statements.

Children talk, and rivers and trees. People (never on tv) talk from time to time. These flowers are rather articulated, so I thought I'd blog'm.

Salmon in the home water

Since the weather was tops today for fishing the brand of salmon that come into the rivers near here, I went. It doesn't take long to reach the home water. And with a bit of hiking I get to look at this:

Here's the upstream boundary for all fish that move up this river. Right after I took the pic a dark king took a very nice attempt at the falls. Figures.

But this also suprised me. The local fish polititians, with bulldoggish prompting by the local sportsman groups cut funding altogether for the pacific salmon stocking in the area. The pool you're looking at hosted state record kings and thousands of fish year after year. It seems that the more native species like brook trout, steelhead and lake trout are getting into the money around here. This suits me just fine.

I took the seven weight out and landed some of the pinks that will be there this time of year and turned one king. I spotted a few old rusty-tails cruising around but after awhile found myself thinking how much cooler this river would be if the steelhead ran it like the salmon do now.

Or even better, did then.

This afternoon

Here's stupe. (A Labrador Retriever retrieving)

Gifted with a perfectly good coat and enough sense to know that a handbag will only slow her down in life, the dog likes to focus on things that are important. One of those things, she'll readily admit, is finding ruffed grouse in the woods. Another is telling you that one is nearby and a third one is flushing it into the air. When I make my feeble contribution to this lopsided team she rewards me by a fine retrieve. When I don't she just stands there and looks at me.

The verdict is in...

Some of the guys at the office had a silent survey.

'Superman or Green Lantern?' was laid to question on this wall.

I thought superman would be a ringer with the box office returns.

Here's the results. This is Lantern country.

The view from across the road

An earlier post heralded the DA as community peacekeeper and since its inception to the www, readers wanna know; any word from the neighbors? Well, I can say this: After all the bitching, loud (and friends, I mean loud) music (with a scattering of evangelism), and vehicle revving, the finn bomb left a crater destitute of any of the above. A void where unhappy life once thrived.

Think of it. The creation of peace and quiet.

Based on experience, I can tell you the DA, despite her size, won't be eating crap sammies long if there's a Big Mac nearby. But I really am impressed with this. I hope I can pick the lock to this wonderful gift. I'll be sure to share, the world needs way more of it.

Critic

So I got an email from my new ses-in-law with a link to a Mason Jennings concert, it read "YOU HAVE TO GO SEE THIS!" My brother and her got me turned on to him since they gave me the honor of playing one of his ditties for their first dance. The DA and I pondered it and finally gave it the all clear when mom called and invited us to join her and my sis. Her nickel, to boot.

Now, I'm not a folk junkie so I can't weep tears o' prayer for this guy, but I know a solid performer when I see one. He earned his keep at the show and the cash I paid to get him on my Ipod. So cheers, Mason, you did a good job. Plus, being older than college age, its was a cool experience...Til mom started jamming the Floyd Kramer on the way home.

New season

I brake for ruffed grouse.

Here's stupe. Her apparent interest indicates a certain recognizance. I was going to shoot this bird but I got caught up in the dogs' antics and shot this pic instead. The bird flushed.

Stupe at work.

Stupe and bones.

Richard gearing up bones. Bones is a pudelpointer named after the ruffed grouses' genus Bonasa.

Richard at the walleye office. I'm sitting in the cabin. Feet up.

Here's stupe. If birds hang on a barbed wire fence beside a dog and a broken down over-under in the field for too many pictures they just rot. Cut into strips and rolled in seasoned flour and pan-fried, these went good with a can of beer.

The end of another opening day at the cabin. Richard felt it best to take the last few out of a 20 year vintage bottle of Beam given to him by his brother in law. He also felt it best to point out his cribbage win. Alas, I took the rubber match.

Here's my dog.

Here's stupe. She also goes by Casey or Lady. Sometimes Caseylady. Sometimes Youstupidfucking.

She smiles when she thinks she's in trouble or wants attention. She's a bird dog so I can put her on this blog as much as I want and she won't get offended. She's cool all the time.

Door County,Wisconsin

ART BARN
COFFEE
SHOPPING

Fin, Finn style

Bass lines breaking your windows? Suspected domestic abuse? Send in a pretty finn. The better half got fed up with the party scene across the street. So she marched over and swung the hammer. Meanwhile, the young Ike and I kept the guns ready back at the fort. He was ready to go, too. Itching for territory.