The Rosewood Osceola

Having a fresh turkey tale really improves my standing with others at parties, at work, or in the community at large, I feel. I enjoy the rarified air. Start to feel like a real loser when I have to dust off the photo album with pictures of gobblers past as others whip out their iPhones and entertain the crowd with recent accomplishments. Would love to bust three or four birds each year, but, you know, time is short, weather is fickle and turkeys are crazy. It looked like I’d be stuck with the 99% for a second season, but luck finally prevailed.

And, man, was this lucky.

Dad and I drove up to Rosewood, FL near Cedar Key for our annual hunt with longtime hunting buddies. They own 80-acres of game-rich Levy County property. Hogs and deer run rampant. Turkeys, too, but they generally hang on a neighbor’s land.

It’s been a long season for me, hunting the nearby Green Swamp WMA and my own little lease that is home to what I can only assume are ghost turkeys – hazy apparitions that trigger the trail cameras and leave tracks but long ago converted to dust. It’s been frustrating. The weather has been so warm for so long the gobblers just about played themselves out by the third week of the season. This was the fifth of six weekends, and I was about played out, too.

So it was with severe reluctance I even got out of bed Saturday morning. Not having to wake up to the twins, the lure of uninterrupted sleep was mighty powerful and partially responsible for how the morning progressed – might as well get up to sleep in the woods.

As I said above, this land is loaded with hogs. I needed one for the freezer and a couple buddies did, as well. The guys erected new box-blind treestands last fall with cushioned office chairs. Sure beats catnapping on an oak root. I left my shotgun and turkey vest at the cabin and grabbed Dad’s Ruger No. 1 .25-06, a facemask, gloves, and a HS Strut Split V II mouth call, just in case. I’d go camp out in the stand, hope a hog showed at the feeder, and maybe hear a distant gobble to pursue.

Sadly I never fell back to sleep. The Spring Woods are just too exciting for proper rest. A doe showed up near the feeder around sunrise, though the swine never did. Birds chirped, owls hooted, but not a single gobble on the roost, leading back to my theory of the toms having called it quits for the year. I had actually just got done texting that very thought to a friend when I heard one lone bird in the distance.

Figuring that would be my only playable lie, I slothed out of the stand and down to the border of a cypress swamp and a pasture, finally donning my facemask and gloves in semi-earnest prep for a turkey. He'd have to come a long way to visit me within the confines of the property, and really, I had no reason to believe he would. I plunked down under an oak and half-heartedly called a couple times without a response.

After 30 minutes the butt cramps were setting in, and I was getting squirmy. I pulled out my phone to check baseball scores and just happened to look up to catch a gobbler streaking like the Roadrunner into the pasture. I'm pretty sure he was the bird I had heard and could have popped him at 150 yards with that .25-06 but gave him a few soft yelps. He made a 90-degree turn and ran right at me. I lost sight of him as he trotted behind a cluster of myrtles and deadfall. Certainly he’d break around either side of that, and I’d have a clear shot.

But he never appeared. After what seemed like 10 minutes but probably wasn’t even 1, I purred twice. He let out a gobble that about crippled me. I was so busy paying attention to the edges of that brush pile that I failed to see him walking through the middle of it. And without decoys, he hung up in there, surveying the situation. With that last call, though, he emerged from the tangle and stepped into the sunlight in full strut. I carefully adjusted my aim to the base of his neck and tagged him at 20 steps. His beard taped out to ten inches even with one inch symmetrical spurs. Just a beautiful Osceola taken on what was quite possibly my lamest efforts at turkey hunting.

But that’s how it goes sometimes. After mornings and afternoons of strategies, burned boot rubber and more than a few pity parties – I actually told Carolyn that I didn’t think I’d ever shoot a turkey again – bumbling luck paid off. It’s as They say, you can’t kill them on the couch.

I did sleep in Sunday morning. Everything worked out like I planned it.

At least that’s my new story.

What Happened to Handloading?

I have a RCBS Neck Sizing die in .300 Win. Mag. If you didn’t know before, when you pull the trigger on any round the brass case expands due to the internal expanding pressure of the ignited propellant and fire-forms to the chamber of the firearm. Normally, one would use a full-length die to return the case to approximately the same dimensions of the original factory case. Using a neck sizing die, the length of the body and shoulder remain fire-formed to the chamber, but the neck is adjusted to within about 1/8” in order to securely hold the bullet. Benchrest shooters developed this method because it provides a better degree of configuration of the projectile to the bore, theoretically, at least, improving accuracy.

The problem with doing this is that these handloads can only be shot in the rifle from which they were fire-formed, lest they will not feed into the chamber of any other firearm properly. Despite bold-typed warnings in just about any reloading manual you’ll read that this process should not be used in big game hunting, I ignored this and happily developed my own special rounds for my Savage 110 Tactical.

Stoked with 180-grain Nosler Protected Point Partitions and published doses of IMR-4350, I had my very own proprietary cartridge. Extracting empty cases was tougher than normal – no question the reason they say not to use for hunting – but, man, they packed a wallop and reliably patterned 3 shots in under 1 MOA groups, more than adequate for deer or hogs, many of which tumbled to this round. Rolling my own and employing them in the field sure was satisfying.

I started reloading ammunition in my teens. In those days I shot a lot. Most non-hunting or fishing weekends, in fact. Pistols and rifles, Dad and I would empty the safe to blast away at targets and cans and bottles. The problem was, Dad worked and I did not, and scorching through hundreds of rounds each Saturday became financially restricting. For a fraction of the cost, he could buy components – especially cast lead and full metal jacket bullets – and I could reload them into the plethora of spent brass we’d acquired.

So, I spent a great deal of free time as a teen like Rosie the Riveter, assembling cartridges for the upcoming shoot. Mostly .357’s, .44 Mag’s, .45 ACP, and .40 S&W, working on an old RCBS C-Press, I had quite the production going in my bedroom many days after class – it was really a testament to why I didn’t have a girlfriend in high school. But those were generic loads constructed for the less-serious purpose of making noise and punching holes. Had any of this been caught on tape, it would have horrified CNN or Sarah Brady.

It wasn’t until I started with rifle rounds that things got more serious and specialized. The .223 was the jumping off point for higher goals. Dad had built an AR-15 with a thick stainless steel free-floating barrel. With the old military rounds, accuracy was OK. But then the Nosler Ballistic Tips became popular, and the bullets were marketed to reloaders who caught up to the potential of these projectiles faster than the factories did. Using 40-grain ballistic tips, the groups from that AR shrank to penny size. It wasn’t long before chats of western trips to plug groundhogs started springing up in otherwise sane hunting talk. As such, we had to make use of local armadillos.

Being more of a big game enthusiast than a paper-puncher or diller-killer, it wasn’t long before my attention switched to the .308 Win, .25-06, and my favorite, .300 Win Mag. We’d research a load, try out different brands of controlled-expansion rounds that I favored then and now, whip up a batch and head to the range. It was serious lab geek stuff, keeping logs with detailed notes of performance and whatnot. At its apex – which achieved the neck-sized .300 rounds detailed above – handloading had developed into quite the craft, and I don’t think I shot a head of game with a factory load between the ages of 16 and 21.

Reloading also became quite neurotic. 20 rounds of .300’s that I deemed suitable for the field would take over two hours – at least - never mind that I had accuracy on paper confused with practical accuracy on the shoulder of a deer. If you have any scrap of OCD in your veins and you’re working with increments down to the 1000th of an inch, it can touch you mentally. Eventually, I lost most of the enjoyment of handloading, though I still credit this time to any knowledge of ballistics and the dynamics of placing a bullet where you want it. This discipline is probably the reason I’ve not fully embraced bowhunting and still prefer a rifle or pistol when presented the option.

But that is not why I totally gave it up when I went to college. Aside from the fact the RA in Graham Hall would have frowned on a resident harboring cans of IMR-4350 and loose brass around the dorm – especially for a facility that treated the use of multi-plug adapters like a sin – there wasn’t much opportunity to sit down when I visited home to reload. There were people to see and hunts to go on and other college age shenanigans that interfered. Also, the ammunition world changed in a big way at the start of the 2000’s.

Factory loads prior to this time were considered pretty wimpy and bullet construction suspect, especially for magnums. Maybe they were threatened by lawsuits or tied to a lack of demand for better beef, but handloaders could easily top the stuff from the shelves by investing in materials readily available through catalogs and gun shows and putting the time in themselves. And they saved a few bucks after the initial purchase.

The beginning of the end, I believe, can be marked by the arrival of the Nosler Ballistic Tips. Once they hit Wal-Mart, average shooters suddenly realized a better world. Despite my personal loathing for use in the field, these loads were extraordinarily accurate when compared to the Remchester Core-Points available in most stores, and prices were within the same ballpark. With those pretty colored polymer points, they crashed hunting camps.

It didn’t take long, though, for common folks to realize that they weren’t ideal in the faster magnums, for quartering shots on game, or on most thick-skinned creatures, but the fire had already been lit. No, common folks realized they too wanted sexy and accurate in their hunting fodder. This primed the marketing departments in ammo manufacturers, and controlled-expansion bullets were the next projectiles to get a make-over.

Nosler Partitions and Trophy Bonded Bear Claws were loaded in premium rounds in those days but were right pricey. The hunting magazines loved them, though, and beat the drum that penetration was more purposeful than accuracy for big game hunting, for the most part. Winchester Fail-Safes and Barnes X-Bullets, among others, were soon developed that offered maximum penetration and looked dangerous sitting still. With their molybdenum coats or solid copper designs, these bullets had a pronounced effect on the terminal performance on game in even standard rounds. To complete the whole puzzle, within a couple years many were capped with those sexy polymer tips and became quite accurate, given a barrel of any quality from which to be launched. Heck, even the Ballistic Tips were given a bonded core and thicker jacket.

The velocity in factory rounds never really improved. Companies tried Extended Range loads before realizing they were stepping over the Golden Goose – just develop new rounds for new firearms. This, of course, led to the proliferation of the short mags, and ultra mags, and super short mags, some of which held on while others fizzled.

While I didn’t mean to get into the whole History of Ammunition, this last point really undermined the whole art of reloading. For hunters - not benchrest shooters with their own goals - it was all a means to improve the quality of hunting ammunition, rather it be from developing brand new rounds – wildcatting – or just delivering stronger, more accurate bullets downfield. The niches closed, and today the stores have a plethora of loads and rounds in about any caliber that the hunter should be satisfied with in the field.

The market has been fire-formed to meet the demand, if you will. Individuals will always be dazzled by different things – velocity, accuracy, bullet weight retention and penetration. Short of using explosive projectiles, bullets don’t appear to have any room for improvement. The gas pressure from ignited smokeless powder tops out around 6000fps, and when one considers friction and the weight of a bullet, most hunting rounds aren’t going to get much higher than 3800-4000fps, and even that would eat up most barrels today. And accuracy – as it applies to hunting – is a matter of practicality. If you’ve found a load that shoots well in your rifle and you shoot that rifle well...well, the cake has been made. There’s not much more you can glean from handloading, reloading or whatever you wish to call it. And that's why I've not primed brass in years, settling on Winchester XP3's in my pet Savage.

Like tying flies or making your own arrows, I’m sure there remain pockets of sportsmen out there who appreciate the esoteric pleasure of handloading. But it has been a long time since I’ve seen an article or column about it in the hunting literature, which is a shame. There is a great deal of satisfaction derived from whipping up your own loads and using them on a hunt.

Raccoon Games

“Boy, I wish I could’ve caught him doing it. I’d have given anything to catch that %!@#* doing it. It’d been worth him doing it just so I could’ve caught him doing it.” – Vincent Vega, Pulp Fiction, on someone keying his Malibu.

I purchased a Wildgame Innovations 6.5 Gallon Bucket feeder from the Wal-Mart in Sebring a month ago. I typically prefer bump feeders for ease-of-use. No battery changing or wires coming loose, and if anyone steals it, well, I'm out a bucket, essentially. But this one was on clearance, and we have a new lease in need of a few corn slingers. So I hung it in a stand of blackjack oaks to let it dust the forest floor with that magic gold, hoping deer or turkey or hogs would find it.

When I went to check it a couple weeks back, I found it hanging in the tree gutted like Drew Barrymore in the first Scream movie. The battery compartment door had been pried open, the alligator clips and all points of plastic chewed through. I knew the culprit already, but the wads of wiry white and brown fur wedged in the chain suspending the rig above the ground told the whole story.

Raccoons are a menace.

Most properties in the state I’ve hunted have a healthy raccoon population, but this lease is Ground Zero for ringtail activity. The land is bordered on two sides by orange groves and a swamp on a third. The trail cameras have worked overtime catching them at night sifting through corn piles – which makes me wonder why the Hell they’d destroy a feeder when I’m feeding them! These coons are well-organized and mobilized. And we fired the first shot.

Back in January, PJ and I set out for an evening of predator calling. PJ has a FoxPro digital call. With no luck on the coyotes or bobcats, we snuck down to the swamp right before dark and switched his call to a Fighting Raccoon noise. Basically, the sound is what you’d expect to hear if you dropped a plugged-in boombox into a bathtub, a cacophony of whistles and pops and grunts – everything but the white smoke.

I laughed when I first heard it, but it did work. Within a minute a coon rushed out of the myrtles and stood on his hind legs before PJ dusted him with a 12-gauge. Since then the Raccoon Army has grown vengeful.

I noticed it first in mid-February. I’d left my Covert Cam deployed for two weeks without checking it and couldn’t have been more excited to review the SD card to see what had arrived at my blue bump feeder. Over the course of some 800 pictures, the raccoons had managed to turn my camera 360-degrees around the small oak it hung on. A photo would reveal a tuft of whiskers, and the next would be pivoted 30-45 degrees in a counterclockwise position. No joke, this continued until they had completely spun it around the tree, tufts of fur caught between the bark and the straps of the camera. As you might guess, this ruined any useful pictures, though I did get a nice butt shot of a deer in the upper right corner of a photo that was framed around a vine twirling up an oak branch.

Thankfully they did not destroy the camera though I’m pretty sure they used it as a urinal on more than one occasion.

We fired the next salvo. PJ obtained live traps and set them near the feeders. He promptly caught and dispatched 3 coons. But then ethics took hold. There was a period of time when none of us would be able to visit the lease, and no one wanted to catch a coon and have it suffer in a trap for a week or so. Like England’s failure to control Hitler at the start of the war, we missed an opportunity to stave off further destruction. It was my new feeder that paid the price.

The thing is, raccoons are not only destructive to feeders, they are pretty rough on turkey and quail populations, as well. Notorious egg thieves, raccoons can really devastate upland bird numbers, especially in areas without healthy populations of these game birds. This land doesn’t have many roost trees and isn’t ideal turkey hunting property, but the nesting potential here is high. We’d like to improve that, as much as four guys on 150-acres are able to do. Predator control is one way to accomplish this.

We’ll probably get back into trapping them this summer when everybody is back in town from far-flung turkey exploits and can reliably check the cages. I’d like to use that predator caller and my .17 HMR and make a real hunt of it. Either way, it’s doubtful we’ll make any huge impact. As I’ve said, there are a ton of them, and raccoons are pretty sharp creatures that adjust in a hurry.

I’ve thought about just sitting in a stand by one of the feeders. Oh, it’d be so worth it for them to destroy another feeder...if I can only catch them doing it.

The Hunting Funk

I’m in the throes of a Hunting Funk. Like when your nose starts itching before a major sinus cold, I recognized the early symptoms. The first sniffle occurred when the nock of my arrow fell off the string while drawing back on a doe in January. The first sneeze was when I sailed a Rage over the back of another doe later that evening. By the end of duck season – after two hunts ended with crashing thuds – I had a full-blown case of Funk-fluenza.

My wife has noticed this affliction. Can’t say it pleases her. She’s made a lot of concessions to help me navigate through this malady. And, yes, she is correct – I’ve had opportunities to leave the house and the twins to enjoy the chirping birds and sunshine and all that crap, but she can’t quite understand the underlying issue.

The major trouble with the Funk is the associated feelings of failure. Take buck hunting. I’ve been Buck-Funked since 2008 – I know the reasons why. I shot a young six-point on my last day of hunting in Georgia that season. I recognized then the Hunting Gods would take it out on me, and I shouldn’t be surprised. Still, three seasons later, it’s like I’ve completely forgotten how to hunt deer. Never mind the odd weather patterns, weird acorn harvests, and general challenge in trophy hunting - I blame myself, mostly.

And as far as incompetence is concerned, the coyotes have sat me in a corner with a dunce cap on, once again. This new lease I’m on is LOADED with coyotes. It’s as if some strange, vindictive organization trapped them with rocket-propelled nets - like the NWTF does with turkeys – and released them on this 140-acre plot. Everyone – except me, naturally – has dozens of pictures of song dogs on their trail cameras. I spent the better part of February trying to call one in without even convincing myself a blowing shrub could be an incoming predator.

Again, it’s the feelings of incompetence and inadequacy that is the worst. And I write, now, for actual pesos. There’s a self-imposed pressure. I like to have fresh success stories to share. Furthermore, I prefer to sound like I know what I’m talking about and have actual real-time proof that I do. When I don’t, it’s sometimes a struggle to whip up something. Then, every time I have been able to arrive at a topic, I go brain-dead at the keyboard. It’d be similar to a mechanic who’d spent the better part of a week repairing a vehicle - with a great deal of difficulty - suddenly forgetting how to start the car and drive it out of the garage after he had finished. The Funk.

Heck, I conjured up this idea while turkey hunting this morning on the aforementioned lease. There aren’t many turkeys here. I think when they imported the coyotes, someone else exported the turkeys…wait, maybe I can do this math on my own…

Anyway, Dad and I scouted the land a month ago and found gobbler tracks on a road bordering a field of new-growth grass and the neighboring orange grove. Looked like a textbook set-up for strutting action. I scattered corn here and checked it last week and spied more gobbler tracks. The excitement began to build.

Obviously I didn’t hunt over the corn this morning rather set up under a stand of scrub oaks at the highest point of the property to listen for gobbles. The land doesn’t have natural roost trees, as you would normally think of, but you never know what may happen over the course of the breeding season. Plus, it hadn’t been uncommon to discover hen tracks over the last month, either. I surmised they roosted off our lease but would wander over to feed in the mid-morning.

Well, 10:30 arrived and my back was over the sit. I had not heard a thing, so I decided to sneak down to glass the corn pile. The “gobblers” were there.

I’d never considered sandhills would eat the corn. Nor had I ever taken the time to learn the distinctions between a gobbler track and that of the Almighty Crane. They are roughly the same dimensions. The sandy soil would’ve made it difficult, and it's not like Sandy's have a fifth toe to betray their hoofprints. I suppose I should have placed a trail camera nearby and saved myself a morning of personal embarrassment, but, you know, I’m just too busy trying to photograph my first coyote.

So, yeah, with that level of hunting acumen it is likely turkey season doesn’t blow me out of the doldrums. But there’s plenty of time left, and, eventually, I’ll run into a wild hog.

They are perfect slump-busters.

Let's hope.

Good Hunt

I apologize for the neglect I have shown towards my website and others. It’s been a long few weeks. Been sick. Been busy with work. The twins grow larger, my time away shrinks. Plus, I’ve not done a lick of good coyote or hog hunting when I have hit the woods.

Also, I’ve been working on a new project. I was hired by the local paper, the Lakeland Ledger, to helm the hunting section of their new website, PolkOutdoors.com. Money for writing about hunting – it’s something I’ve always wanted to do, but the wheels turn slow!

Anyway, I’m there now, but I will not abandon my baby here. I’ll still crank out the stories and whatever else jumps to mind. They prefer newsy things of local interest; not my 2000-word rants and long-form style. Nice part is, I can still write that here and link back to it.

In all honesty, there’s pressure to perform. I want this venture to be successful – and make money! The Hunting World is large tent, and no one can do it alone. It is my intentions to reciprocate the love those of you have shown me here. If there’s a topic of interest or tips or photos you’d like to share, feel free to drop me a line.

So check out the new website. I chose to title my blog "Good Hunt,” something buddies and I say after almost every hunt. Or at least I do.

Thank you again, sincerely, for all the support. I would not have achieved this without you!