how to hunt snowshoe hares

First, have it be 4 months ago when there was snow everywhere.

Then find a boreal forest region.

Look up the historic range of snowshoe hares, pay attention to maps that show habitat loss due to climate change.

Get angry at climate change.

Overlay the snowshoe hare range maps with maps that show young aspen growth.

Next look for 0-5 year old aspen forest next to coniferous swamps.

Drive out in the morning and start looking for tracks and scat.

Get into the type of young aspen stands that make walking in a straight line difficult. Think walking with your shoulders dipping in and around young trees. If you’re not getting frustrated with the terrain, you’re not in snowshoe hare habitat. If it’s too easy to walk in a straight line unimpeded, you’re not in the right spot.

Hope for fresh snow that just stopped to show the freshest tracks.

Hope for snow in general.

Realize you’re looking for a white animal against a white background with vertical grey/green aspen trunks bisecting your field of view.

Again hope for fresh snow and follow tracks.

Let me backtrack before going into the woods put a compass around your neck and figure out where north is in relation to your car. Then turn on “go and track” in OnX. Start recording. If you get lost you can always follow your track back out. Also note on OnX where your car is and where the major roads and other landmarks will be before entering the super dense woods. Again if it’s not dense, you’re not in the right spot.

Another trick for OnX is to turn on the game birds layer. The areas marked for grouse often correlate with snowshoe hare habitat.

Start walking and pay attention to humps sitting on snowy hillocks. Snowshoe hares don’t burrow necessarily so they may be sitting in a slightly elevated position looking at you. Go slow and scan the immediate horizon. Don’t neglect right under your feet as well, sometimes they stay still and won’t move until you are right on top of them.

Scat, it’s going to look like an oblate spheroid, think M and M vs. marble.

Look for horizontal motion against the vertical tree trunks. This is where the dense young aspen growth, helps you. It makes it easier to see the white blur across the gray/green trunks.

Watch where they stop running, they aren’t necessarily still running and you can’t see them. They probably just stopped exactly where you last saw them. They will probably lead you in circles.

Back to looking before they move hopefully. They just sort of appear. When you look at enough snow and your eyes get used to the patterns of the snow pack, the first time you see a hare it will just look slightly off and different. Something just looks off. Pull up your gun and peep through your scope. You’ll see something hairy where there should be smooth snow. It’s a slight texture difference that you just have to see a few times and train your “game eye” You’ll also look for their black eye, against a white rounded hump.

Gun choice - Ruger .22 WMR with a scope. Check on everything that looks slightly different through your scope. Nine times out of ten I found myself looking at a piece of birch bark that looked off against the white snow. Or a black-ish knot in a downed log framed against the vertical aspen trees.

Also I should backtrack and thank my best friend, he taught me all of this. Well some I figured out on my own, or he told me and I didn’t hear him and I pretended I figured it out later.

Our choice is headshots to avoid meat waste. Makes it more sporting and ethical.

If you are lucky enough to find and harvest a snowshoe hare. Our preferred method of cleaning is to skin them, quarter them, break off the feet, cut out the backstraps and discard the rest to the coyotes.

A simple recipe for a rabbit stew will come in a future blog post.

how to think about getting into turkey hunting

First have a really successful last fall whitetail deer hunting. I shot 3 deer with a bow, and that was my first year trying. That’s like stupid lucky.

Then ride that wave of loving being in the woods into the winter and take up snowshoe hare hunting.

Have immediate success with that, because your best friend is a wizard in the woods.

More details on snowshoe hare hunting in a separate blog post.

So back to Turkey hunting, contemplating, turkey hunting.

Have a neighborhood where there are turkeys everywhere.

The turkeys are so dense in my neighborhood in the cities that traffic is regularly stopped by them.

Dogs bark their heads off as they filter through the block.

Think, well if they are this plentiful in my neighborhood they must be this easy to find out in the woods.

Know deep down it won’t be that easy, but get superficially convinced of that notion every time you have to stop in traffic because a group of turkeys are lazily walking the streets. Like not even crossing the street, just hanging out in the street. These turkeys don’t give a fuck. They just go where they want, when they want. And everyone stops for them.

While having decreasing success at snowshoe hare hunting, flush a turkey from 50 yards away.

Watch the snow disappear across your hunting areas that you can drive to within 3 hours of your house.

See more ads on instagram for turkey hunting gear.

Get excited because researching and acquiring gear is almost if not more fun than the hobbies themselves.

Realize that turkey hunting requires wearing full camo, which seems bad-ass.

Also realize that turkey hunting requires sitting perfectly still on the ground, which makes it harder.

Realize that turkey hunting on the ground in a blind while wearing full camo, is pretty much exactly what my whitetail deer hunting experience has been.

Go out one last time in a rain storm trying to find snowshoe hares. Realize boots are no longer water proof. Step in boggy marshy areas that used to be frozen and now aren’t frozen. Get water inside your boots after sinking in past your ankles. Realize it wouldn’t matter if boots were water proof when the puddles and swampy sections are deeper than your calves.

Realize that muck boots have a purpose for the first time, after thinking they were stupid.

Buy muck boots, camo muck boots, camo muck boots in a spring/early fall camo pattern.

Realize that your state is closed to all other sorts of hunting that you are interested in until September.

Realize it’s turkey hunting or nothing.

smoothie this morning

3 scoops strawberries and cream Orgain protein powder

2 scoops psyllium husks

handful of baby carrots

2 cups mixed frozen berries

1 cup frozen spinach

1 cup frozen brocoli

1 liter strawberry lemonade sparkling water

Blend

Sprinkle cocoa krispies on top and eat with a spoon

After eating 2/3

added:

1 cup brocoli

1 cup frozen cherries

2 table spoons PB2 cocoa powder

more sparkling water until carafe is filled

Blend and take to work for lunch

Have kix cereal at work to sprinkle on top of smoothie

how to get over someone who pissed you off

Pray for them.

Goddammit really?

Yes

I can waste a ton of mental energy being pissed off. I can spend all day cursing them up and down. I can call everyone I know who will answer the phone and complain about this person. I can forego work, h0bbies, family time to be upset and talk shit and rant and rave.

Or, well and, I think some of the above is healthy or at least necessary….for a little while. And then it’s time to move on.

I would rather devote precious mental real estate to other things, like the band Geese or deer hunting. So I’m going to do whatever it takes to get that person out of my head. No free rent, especially in my head.

So I pray for them. What I pray, the exact wordage, well that’s between my higher power and myself.

It works, it feels counter intuitive and dirty. But I know it works, because I’ve done it before. Weeks later that person will pop into my head and I’ll realize how much I’ve NOT been thinking of them. The absence of a negative is a positive.

Fuck that guy, seriously, but I hope and I pray he gets whatever he needs.

How to like the Band Geese

Start by being a 42 year old man trying to stay relevant by listening to the local college radio station.

Be bombarded with Geese songs for years.

Be intrigued by the singer’s voice, but don’t dig deeper.

Complain about the hype and how much the younger generation loves the band and just say that you don’t get it.

Finally trust a friend of the approximate same age as you. In my case a guy I trust in his 50’s who has great taste in music.

Decide to give the band another deep dive by going through the whole discography.

Get fascinated by Projector. Be amazed at their age when they made it.

Have your trusted older friend send you photos from the lead singer’s solo concert being filmed by Paul Thomas Anderson. Hear also that Nigel Godrich attended.

Have your friend recommend checking out the From The Basement recordings.

Again be fascinated by the voice but go no further.

Find out that Nigel Godrich is behind the From the Basement stuff. Remember your favorite band is Radiohead.

Skip through the numerous articles your trusted friend sent you, don’t read them.

Ask your other friend who shares your musical taste if he likes the band.

He hasn’t heard of them.

Continue to hear them played on the local college radio station.

Wait two months.

Forget that you already asked your friend about the band and ask him again. He still hasn’t heard of them.

Have your trusted older guy friend recommend you check out the Coachella performance.

Check out the Coachella performance live.

Feel young and hip.

Laugh at Cameron Winter’s comment about the fake palm trees. Make the fake palm trees connection to the contrived nature of Coachella. Feel superior to those attending.

Re-watch the From the Basement recording on Youtube.

Go on deep dive.

Re-listen to Getting Killed and fall in love with each and every song.

“You can make the cobras dance, but not MEEEEEEE!”

I picture someone able to manipulate others, but I see through their bullshit.

“If you want me to pay my taxes, you’re gonna have to come over with a cru-ci-fix, you’re gonna have to nail me DOWN!”

I love this part of Taxes when he sings “down” and the rest of the band pops in.

“There’s a horse on my back and maybe I’ll be stomped flat”

The way he sings or pronounces flat in that last lyric encapsulates Cameron Winter’s vocal stresses. I love the feeling of authenticity he can inject into his lyrics. Whatever he is feeling it’s great and he’s damn near spitting in my face to get his point across.

Listen to the album on repeat for several days.

Plan to attend their next show, which is unfortunately at a festival.

My trusted older friend says to focus on smaller venues where they are the headliner for maximum feeling affect. Oh well, it’s a festival or nothing.

Saddle Hunting

So you want to try saddle hunting? I was in your shoes a year ago. Here’s what I did and what I’ve learned.

First question, how hard do you want it to be? How quiet? How much do you want to carry? What are you going after?

Ask yourself all these questions. For me I wanted it to be easy, I wanted to be quiet, I didn’t want to carry a lot and I am going after whitetail deer.

I at first considered using a climbing tree stand. This was appealing at first because it’s easier than learning how to climb with saddle sticks and using a tree saddle. It’s not that much easier I would eventually learn. It is heavier and a lot bulkier to carry around a climber stand. The limiting factor that bothered me the most though about climbing tree stands is that you need a smooth tree or you need to spend a lot of time sawing off limbs that will get in your way. So that means pre scouting for the perfect tree is important. If pre-scouting wasn’t possible it meant that my hunting areas would be limited by the perfect tree.

Climbing sticks and a tree saddle greatly increase the amount of trees you can select. This freedom of choice made the decision for me. I was actually going to go with a climber tree stand and had practiced with my buddy’s stand. But after walking around the woods grouse hunting and looking at all the trees I wouldn’t be able to use with a climber and all the trees I could use with climbing sticks and a saddle. I decided it can’t be that much harder.

I at first thought it was harder because I couldn’t picture in my head how the hell to use the climbing sticks and how all the ropes would work together to keep me up in the tree. I found a good youtube video put out by Tethrd and looked at a bunch of google images of tree saddle hunting and decided it couldn’t be that hard.

I chose the Tethrd workhorse saddle, because it had good reviews and it had built-in pockets. I didn’t realize how valuable I would find those pockets until later, so I’m glad I rated that feature highly.

I also chose the Tethrd workhorse climbing sticks, because I can’t resist completing the set.

Platform, I needed a platform too. Got that, again from Tethrd.

Took the whole kit to the nearest park that had a semi-private tree in the right diameter that I could find. Semi-private because I didn’t want to make an ass of myself. Way easier than I thought. Time consuming yes, but not that hard.

Find a tree approximately the diameter of a basketball. Can be bigger, can be smaller. If it’s bigger it becomes more challenging to get the rope around the tree. Picture trying to swing a rope in your hand blind. Your hands are wrapped around the tree and if the tree is bigger than your bear hug you’re going to be swinging that rope attempting to land it into your own hand. This becomes exponentially different in the dark and cold and at height.