Hunting Preparations..

Well, I'm posting my process of getting ready for my hunting trips this fall on an online forum called www.monstermuleys.com. They are running a special forum with prizes that they are going to give away to the folks posting some of the best stories on the entire process so I figured I might as well try my hand at it. I doubt I'll win anything, but as lucky as I was drawing my tags, maybe I'll get lucky on winning something with the hunt challenge.

Anyway, I figured I would start posting some of the same information here on my blog. Probably pretty boring, but some folks might enjoy it.

Right now I've been working on long distance scouting. I ordered some maps from www.publiclands.org and have been looking over the maps plus looking at Google Earth trying to figure out where I would be living if I was a mature bull elk.

I've been using image overlays in Google Earth where I take a pdf map and convert it to an image and then overlay it in Google Earth. You can change the transparency of the overlay from 0% to 100% and it zooms in and out with you when you so you can get as close as you want and be able to tell whether you are on national forest, wilderness, private land, etc. Still not a substitute for a good old map though, pretty hard to haul around your notebook computer on the trail with you.

Here's a screen shot from my computer.

I also finally got started on getting in shape with a run to the mailbox and back last night. Doesn't sound like much of a workout, but that's a 2 mile round trip for me. I'm starting on the elliptical tonight.

My current hunting boots are some Rocky's that are nearing the end of their useful life so I've been researching boots and asking questions on monstermuleys.com. I'm not much closer to making a decision than when I posted (maybe even farther from a decision since I was given several new options), but I think when it comes down to it, any of them should be a big step up from any boots I've had in the past.

I also went back down to the land this weekend and pounded in some T-Posts to mark the Quail CRP boundary line. Not sure if more of the native grasses are coming in, or some other invasive grasses are coming in but there is a lot of green. I think most of it is Johnson grass. I did ID some of the partridge peas that I planted coming in and some native sunflowers (that I didn't plant but I think aren't a bad thing).I ended up pounding in 48 fence posts for the markers. I had to put them every 100 feet. Got a little bit of exercise in while I was at it!

The electric golf cart is working out pretty well so far. I have a few squeaks I need to work out, but overall it is getting used more than I thought it would. It worked great for hauling the posts around. You can see my hill top hunting blind in the background. It's about 800 yards away.

I guess I'm in the wait and see, hope and pray process right now. I did see some sand burrs in the mix this time as well, but hopefully the NWSG and Switchgrass will out compete it over the next couple years.

That's it for now. Nathan

Feeling Lucky!

Well, I am behind on posting again and have a few minor projects I should probably post on, but I'll start out with the results from my New Mexico hunting applications.

New Mexico isn't like most of the other Western states that work on a bonus point system where you have very limited chances to draw some of the tags in the best units until you "build points" by applying year after year and after a while you have so many points that you are almost guaranteed a tag. In New Mexico it is a pure lottery and someone applying for the first time ever has the same chances of drawing a tag as someone who has been applying for 20 years. Since I already had my Wyoming elk tag in my pocket, I figured I should at least start the process of applying in New Mexico, and since I already had one elk tag I decided to apply for some of the hardest units to draw a tag. That way if I drew I would be willing to put in the extra effort to work that extra hunt in. I applied for 2 super premium units with my 1st and 2nd choices with less than 2% draw odds, and then just for fun threw in a premium unit that had about 10% draw odds as my 3rd choice.

I figured I would also put in for an antelope tag in New Mexico since the drawing odds were so low (about 5%) that statistically I would need to put in for about 10 years before I got to a 50/50 chance of drawing one of those tags.

I also applied for a deer tag in the same unit that I hunted last year. I figured that way I wouldn't be limited to the private property I was hunting and if I saw a monster buck hanging out on state land I could go after it. The drawing odds were about 70% on that tag but I applied for a few super premium tags that had less than 1% draw odds as my 1st and 2nd choices and the unit I hunted last year as my 3rd choice.

Well, guess what? I ended up drawing all 3 tags the first year I applied! I got my 3rd choice for elk and deer and my 2nd choice for antelope! The red "unsuccessful" is from my oryx application earlier in the year. Here's the screen shot from the online draw results page.

Needless to say I was pretty stunned to draw all 3 tags. The first thing I had to do is get a calendar out and figure out if any of the seasons actually overlapped each other or not. Thankfully everything actually fit on the calendar without overlapping and as of right now I actually think I'll be able to keep them on there.

I've never hunted elk in New Mexico and am not really familiar with the unit that I drew other than the drawing odds and harvest statistics so I'm working on getting more familiar as much as I can. I've put some overlays of public land maps onto Google Earth and have been scouting using my computer as much as possible. I've been searching for any tidbits of information I can find online and will probably make a trip over to scout in person sometime toward the end of the summer.

I'm going to have to make sure I have things taken care of at work this summer to be able to take so much time off this fall, but I think I can make it work. Of course I already had an extra week of vacation planned this summer visiting family in Kentucky so I'm going to find out how well I can organize getting everything completed on time!

Hopefully my luck will hold out and allow me to actually fill the tags this fall!

That's it for now. Nathan

Flesh eating beetle update

Well, I've had the flesh eating beetles for a few months now and thought I would post an update on them.

First off, they stink. They got banished to the barn and Cathy pretty much refuses to even go in the barn unless the doors have been open for a while. I think they don't smell that bad, but maybe my sniffer is off.

However, they do seem to be doing a pretty decent job of cleaning skulls. I added a pig skull and my bobcat skull when I first got them and it took them forever to get them clean, but they have grown as a colony now and I added the skull from the pig my friend shot when he was down here a few weeks ago and they made pretty short order of it.

Here's the skull just a day or two after I added it. Not sure what the light brown stuff on there is, maybe Beetle poo.

Here's the skull as of this morning. They have about got it cleaned up. The dark brown that you see on the skull are the beetles doing some final cleaning. It basically took them 2 weeks to clean it.
You can see my bobcat skull in the bottom of that picture and the original pig skull on the bottom right side of the picture. They are pretty much clean now, I just need to soak them in some degreasing solution (dawn dishwashing soap) and then soak them in peroxide to get them gleaming white. I am going to wait until all of them are done and then do them all at once.

I need to start finding something else for them to eat pretty soon.

Nathan

New Kiddie Pool

Well, Eli's existing kiddie pool was getting a little small and he really enjoys being out in the water so we decided to spring for a larger one this summer. We ended up buying a 12' diameter Easy Set pool that is 30" tall. It was pretty cheap (under $100) and included a filter and looked like it would be pretty easy to setup and leave up all summer instead of having to fill and empty it every time we wanted to use it.

Part of the problem with his old kiddie pool was that the dogs seemed to like it even more than he did so it got dirty pretty quick if you left it up, so we wanted to make sure we got one tall enough that the dogs couldn't get in it but short enough so that Eli could enjoy it and that's where we came up with the 30" height. The water level inside the pool is only 24" which is just over waist deep for Eli which seems about perfect. The only issue is that he can't get in and out of the pool by himself, but that may be a good thing.

Anyway, we picked out what we thought was a pretty level spot next to the house and put a tarp down and started filling the pool. Here it is when we first got the top ring inflated and started filling it. It doesn't look that big, but when it is full to the bottom of the top ring it is just over 1,300 gallons so it takes a while to fill up. Eli helped work out the wrinkles in the bottom while it was filling up. Here it is after it was full the first time. If you look in the bottom left corner of the pool, you can see I'm already starting to drain it. I gave up on the garden hose draining method pretty quick though as it would have taken all day, and pulled out a 3,000gph submersible pump I had sitting around and had it drained in less than 30 minutes. Eli got to enjoy it for about an hour before we drained it. You can't really tell it in this picture, but the pool was off level by about 4 inches.
Why mess around with a shovel when you have a tractor? I actually ended up putting 4 scoops of dirt on the low side when it was all said and done. I packed it down driving back and forth over it with the tractor and we smoothed it back out and spent a few minutes picking rocks up and moved the pool back over and started filling it back up again.
Here it is now. We could probably put another couple inches of water in there, but it is level now. We bought a cover for it, but it has already blown off twice so not sure if that is going to work out or not. Eli LOVES it. If he had his preference he would spend the entire day in it. He is going to be taking swimming lessons toward the end of the month and we are going to spend some time with my brother on his houseboat in Kentucky in July so it is probably a pretty good thing for him to get used to being in the water.

Not too bad of a view from the pool. There are definitely some disadvantages to living out in the country, but being able to sit on the back porch looking out over the canyon more than makes up for them!
That's it for now. Kind of crazy to have a blog post on setting up a kiddie pool, but it ended up being a lot bigger project than we thought it would be. I think it will be worth it though.

That's it for now. Nathan

Replaced my tractor seat.

Based on the title, that doesn't sound like much of a project, but believe me, it was.

My tractor seat has been in disrepair ever since I bought the tractor 4 years ago. It has been getting worse and worse and for the last year or so it has been more like riding a bucking bronco than riding a tractor. Cathy was helping me with a minor repair of the steering a week ago and I needed her to sit on the tractor and turn the steering wheel while I put the pitman shaft in and when she went to sit down she almost fell onto the floor of the tractor so I figured I really needed to break down and replace the seat.

My tractor had somewhat of a hard life before I got it, so I'm not sure what happened to the seat to break it in the first place, but the factory parts to repair/replace it were over $500. You can buy a complete new seat at Tractor Supply for $100 so of course that was the option I went for first.

I knew it would possibly take a little extra work and maybe even some drilling in the floor of the tractor, but the aftermarket seat even looked a little more comfortable than the stock seat so I thought it would be worth it. After getting the seat home and checking it out I found a problem. The seat was too tall.

Here's a picture of the stock seat next to the one I bought at Tractor Supply. It doesn't look like that much difference, but it was. The distance from the floor to the base of the stock seat was 5" and the distance from the floor to the base of the new seat was 9". That 9" gives plenty of room for a suspension to improve the ride, but it put my head into the canopy of the tractor and knees into the steering wheel. It was not going to work no matter how many holes I drilled.

Here's another picture of the bottom of the stock seat. I didn't do anything to bust it up or anything, just set it on the floor and you can see how bad of shape it was. I had pieced it back together before and it stayed for a while, but it was pretty much beyond repair now. I may hold onto it and practice my non existent welding skills on it sometime as there is a metal bar that is broken and missing that holds the suspension parts in place.

After looking around online, and posting on a tractor discussion board, I finally found a nearly identical seat to the one at Tractor Supply at http://www.agrisupply.com/ that was only supposed to be 4" between the base instead of 9" like the one from Tractor Supply. The stock seat was 5" so I was thinking the new seat would work perfect. Well there was a little bit of false advertising, the seat was 5.5" from the base to the bottom of the seat, but I thought it would still work. 2 hours and plenty of drilling and creative thinking later I had the seat installed. It is still a little bit higher than the factory seat when it is all said and done. I think it will work though. I have to mow the yard this weekend so I should find out for sure pretty quick. It will be interesting to see how much different it rides when there is actually a suspension in the seat vs. in the past when every bump I hit went straight up my spine (and there are lots of bumps when you are running a tractor).

Oh well, not very exciting, but not very many of my posts ever are!

Nathan

Hog Hunting

Last week we had some friends come down from Wyoming for their daughters graduation from ACU and for a change they were able to stick around and actually spend more than 1 night trying to hog hunt.

We made it down to the land and hunted the first night but it was really windy and we got in the blind kind of late and didn't see a thing. The next morning was a bust as well and we had some rain in the forecast and I had been working on getting some warm season grasses planted so I spent the afternoon planting and spraying roundup on some newly sprouted weeds while my friend checked the cameras and set out some raccoon traps.

I got everything finished with a few minutes to spare, and we got in the blind around 6:00. Sunset was set for 8:30 so we had a long wait ahead of us but hopefully we would see something and make the wait worthwhile. It was still pretty windy, but not near as bad as the night before. Around 7:00 we saw some deer moving through some trees, but it still seemed pretty dead. We had setup an special LED light over the feeder so we were prepared to be there for the long haul. The night before a boar hog showed up around 9:30 and we had left the blind around 9:00 because it was getting too dark to see, so we were prepared with the feeder light.

Around 8:30 we saw a pig moving through the trees. I stayed back in the trees about 20 yards to the north of the feeder and then moved out. Before I ever hunted over a feeder I had always heard how the animals got used to the sound of the feeder going off and would come running. Either that isn't true or I do something wrong because I don't recall ever seeing any animals come running to my feeder when it goes off. (Of course it probably doesn't create a sense of security when their buddy ends up getting shot when they do end up coming into the feeder!).

Anyway, the pig left and it was getting close to dark. We had setup the feeder light during the day and it is activated by a sensor and only comes on when it gets dark so we were hoping that we had it setup right because it looked like we were going to need it. Then about 10 minutes later the same pig comes back toward the feeder from a completely different direction. It looked like he had circled completely around the feeder to see if he could smell anything. He was very cautious, but not cautious enough!

After about 30 seconds he moved broadside and then my friend put him down with his .300 WSM. He dropped right there. Turns out we didn't need the feeder light after all.

Since I had all my farming implements including my tractor there doing my planting, I was able to just go pick him up with the front loader of the tractor. Pretty decent sized hog. The bucket on the tractor is 5' wide.

Something that I try to do whenever possible is actually weigh the animals that are taken on our land. Sometimes I am unable to, but with the tractor down there it made it easy to weigh this one. Here's a picture of him on the scale with my friend standing next to him. My friend is 5'10" and weighs 185lbs for perspective. The pig's nose is about 2" off the ground.

When I told my friend that I thought his pig was a 200 pounder he seemed a little bit disappointed. When we got him on the scale it turned out I had under estimated a little and he weighed in at 210lbs on the hoof. I told him that it was an ACTUAL 210lb pig, not someone just guessing. I told him that most people who say they shot a 300 or 400lb pig didn’t actually put it on the scale, they just guessed.

To prove my point I posted pictures of the pig on 5 different bulletin boards and asked other hunters to guess how much he weighed. Overall there were 115 guesses and the average guess was 285lbs. The highest guess was 700lbs and the lowest guess was 145-150lbs. I’m not 100% sure that the 700lbs was a legitimate guess, but the next highest guess was 470 and that was a real guess based on the comments by the poster. There were 10 guesses that it was 400lbs or bigger and 43 folks had it at 300lbs or bigger. The overall results were brought down by 2 places I posted this where people are more experienced hog hunters, otherwise the average guess was over 300lbs on the 2 general hunting forums I posted it on.

That makes guided hog hunt success number 2 now. I really think the key is being able to spend more than 1 night hunting because they can be pretty unpredictable. My friend was actually prepared to spend another night if we didn't connect on the 2nd night but it worked out pretty good. We were able to turn the pig into sausage and a started the backstraps curing into ham and they were headed back to Wyoming with time to spare.

The only negative to the hunt was that it was a boar hog that came in by itself so I didn't get a chance to try out my AR-15 to see how many little piggies I could count with it!

That's it for now. Nathan

New gun safe.

Well, after buying the AR-15 and the new turkey shotgun, and after reading about several folks getting their homes broken into and their guns stolen, I decided that I probably should buy a gun safe. Also, I ended up buying one with a 1 hour fire rating and probably the most important reason is to keep the guns locked up so Eli can't get into them unsupervised.

I ended up making a whirlwind trip to Dallas to present an audit and decided to drive the pickup and pick up the safe at Cabelas on the way home. The safe weighs 700lbs, but it really ended up being pretty easy to pick it up (3 guys helped load it in the truck) and was amazingly easy to unload and setup at the house. My brother in law came over and the 2 of us had it out of the truck and set where I wanted it in about 15 minutes.

The thing that did not go as smoothly as I was expecting was anchoring it to the cement slab. You would think that a 700lb safe wouldn't need to be anchored, but If 2 of us could unload it and move it, then it wouldn't take too many folks if they were determined enough to take the entire safe. (Of course the 700lbs is empty, I probably already have 100lbs of stuff in it!).

I ended up using up 3 masonry bits to drill the holes in the cement, and it probably took 4 hours to get the anchor bolts installed, but they are rated at 6,000lbs of horizontal force each so I really doubt that safe is moving anywhere now.

Here's Eli helping out when I was working on drilling the holes. You can see that the safe fits under the stairs in the garage VERY snugly. That should make it even harder to move if anyone ever wanted to try. Here is the finished product and most of my hunting stuff stacked up next to the safe in the nice little cubby hole that should work pretty well. It was always a pain to haul everything upstairs where I used to put it all, so hopefully this will make it easier when I get back home to get everything unloaded out of the truck and into the safe or beside it.
Here's what's inside it now. Plenty of room to grow! It says it is a 24 gun safe, but I've only got 5 in there right now and I think it would only comfortably fit about 10 or 12. I think I'm going to buy a 1 hour fire rated box that I am going to put all of our important papers in and then keep it inside the safe. That would give the important stuff at least 2 hours of fire resistance. Hopefully we will never have to find out how long it is actually good for!Oh well, not that exciting of a post, but I'm a few projects behind on getting things posted and this seemed like a good place to start.

Nathan