Rifle Hunting 2008 edition

This is the first year ever that we didn't hunt on opening day. We decided to wait until Saturday to hunt because the weather was so bad in Friday. It turned out to be a fine decision because we had an excellent day of hunting on Saturday where we filled most of our tags. The deer were really thick in the trees and after 4 pushes we had six deer, one of them being a dandy 11 point buck. Grandpa shot an absolutely huge doe right in the neck as always. I'm pretty sure every year he shoots the biggest doe out of the group and every deer he shoots he puts it right in the neck. He is an absolute sniper with his trusty 30 30.

Nov.1 Waterfowl hunt

The old man and I went sneaking on this windy Saturday. Their weren't much ducks around but we managed to get 3 mallards and the old man shot a nice tundra swan! To top the day off we got a couple of hungarian partridge.

Oct. 25 Hunt

The old man and I decided that today would be a good day to drive around and try to sneak some ducks because they wind was blowing around 30 mph. We headed out of town and it wasn't more then 10 minutes before we spotted a flock of mallards in a really stupid spot right next to a shelter belt in a harvested sunflower field. We decided walk down the shelter belt (which was basically only one row of small trees) because the ducks were sitting in a really low spot so we should have been able to sneak right up to them without them noticing, the only problem was that their was about 20 mallard on the other side of the shelter belt from the main flock and that was the side we were walking down so they spooked and ended up taking a bunch of the mallards we were sneaking on with them. Some of the mallards stayed in the pond and we ended up getting 3 of them.
We got back on the road and headed west and we came upon a flock of geese and swans sleeping in a slough in a really dumb spot. The old man and I belly crawled for about 100 yards and we pretty much got right up to them while they were none the wiser. We made a deal that we were going to go after the geese only even though we both had swan tags so when the time came so shoot we were aiming for only the canadians and we shot 6 which was our limit. After taking some quick pics of the birds we moved on and had a quick failed attempt at some swans we spotted in a big slough we decided to head to our bow hunting spot. I didn't see much sitting in my tree stand the deer came out really late tonight, but on the plus side the old man shot a doe and he saw plenty of action from his post.

Badlands Trip

The old man and I went to the badlands this past weekend to hunt antelope and turkeys. We didnt see a single turkey on friday, but i stalked a group of antelope and got within 75 yards of them. I have a doe tag to i put my bipods down and settled the crosshairs on a big doe. I slowly squeezed the trigger.........and nothing.......eject the shell for a new one and still nothing. Finally i pulled the trigger as hard as i could and it finally fired, but i missed the antelope clean. When i got back to the truck i took my gun apart and lubed it up which was a good temporary fix to my trigger problem. We set up a bottle 200 yards away and fired a few shots at it only to realize that my scope was way off. Somewhere along the way my scope must have gotten smacked on my .243 (serves me right for not shooting it at all since last deer hunting season) so we dialed her back in to a point where i was hitting the bottle every shot or missing it by small margins. We didn't see any antelope the rest of friday, and not a turkey in sight anywhere.
Saturday started at sun up we were driving around looking for goats or turkeys when i spotted this goat about 500 yards off the road it was just walking down a hill so i grabbed my rifle and tried to catch it on the other side of the hill. As i got to the top of the hill i spotted the goat about 200 yards away walking directly away from me so i set my bipods up and hoped it would give me a broadside shot before it went over the hill it was walking up. Just as the goat reached the top of the hill she stopped and turned broadside to me and i fired 1 shot and she dropped dead right in her tracks.
After taking some pictures of the antelope we drove around for a couple more hours looking for turkeys but we didn't see any, it turns out that the turkeys left the area because it has been so dry. So we headed home and took back roads the whole way so that we could possibly shoot some pheasants, we ended up getting 4 pheasants on the way home.

Team Honker Talk

My future brother in law Dane and I met up with his buddy Perhus in carrington and attempted to hunt some honkers. We ended up getting stuck in the field on the way in and had to go to a nearby farm to get chains to get the trailor unstuck. We managed to still get set up before the birds came off the water but only had one flock of a dozen come in the decoys. We ended up getting only one goose, but we still had a good time.

Badlands

Our Badlands trip has been postponed until next weekend due to weather its supposed to be cold and rainy all weekend so im going to bow hunt instead