Well, there I was sitting at the old Mac, trying to work instead of listening to bluegrass, when I got a press release announcing that Redfield now has a scope out called the “Revenge.” I thought this was a pretty odd name to give an optical sight, but then I remembered that last year, Winchester came out with an all-copper bullet called Power Core, which has no core, so I guess the rules about product names have been relaxed.
But then, just a moment ago, I received word of a new crossbow called the Barnett Vengeance. Vengeance on what? The last time a crossbow was used in an act of vengeance was on March 25, 1199 when Richard the Lionheart, King of England, was killed by crossbow bolt to the neck that was fired by a French boy who claimed that Richard had killed his father and brothers.
Here’s me, on the set of the Gun Nuts TV show, holding my pick for the ideal youth turkey gun: a 20 gauge 870 Express Jr. with a red dot sight.
It is short, light, doesn’t kick much with the right loads, and it’s easy to hit with. My younger son shot his one and only turkey with it, and I have since taken it from him and killed turkeys with it, too. While you don’t have to put a $500 Zeiss Z-point on a kid’s gun, I think some form of red dot sight (and a lot of target practice before the season) is the best way to be sure a kid doesn’t miss.
Mostly, I am of the school of thought that it’s best to make a turkey come look for you rather than put out a decoy that might make him hang up or even walk away. Nevertheless, I always have decoys in my gamebag just in case I am staking out an open field, especially late in the season when hens are not interested in going to toms. This year I used the new Primos P.H.D. (pocket hen decoy, about $55). It’s an inflatable hen with a non-shiny cloth photoprinted skin that shows iridescent feather detail.
Today’s tip: Have a backup plan, and have a backup to your backup plan.
This morning’s Plan A was to hunt a gobbler I found earlier in the week. The season is almost over and the wildlife area I hunt has been deserted for days so I was very surprised to find the only other vehicle on 6,000 acres parked at my spot this morning. So much for Plan A.
Here’s a good reason not to be a coyote, or any other objectionable form of animal life. Mr. Eichler, who is a varmint hunter of note, has collaborated with Rock River Arms to produce a totally cool MSR with all the right bells and whistles. There are a great many specs here, so let’s get to them.
If you’d really like to depress yourself some evening, watch “Doomsday Preppers” on the National Geographic Channel. The show details the plans of normal, well adjusted people to cope with the aftermath of fiscal collapse, nuclear holocaust, the eruption of Yellowstone, solar flares, and so on.
The New York Times noted with outrage that many of these people were accumulating guns and ammunition in order to defend their 1,500 pounds of MREs and dried brown rice, but stockpiling guns is fine with me. My concern is that most of them seem pretty inexpert with guns. One prepper was counting on a Ruger Number One single-shot which, despite its many splendid qualities, is not what you’d pick to blast the mob at your door. Another managed to shoot off several fingers during a practice session. Yet a third, a resident of the Oligarchy of Bloomberg, took lessons in knife fighting because he was unable to get a gun, ignoring the fact that everyone in the Oligarchy of Bloomberg who wants a gun has one, or several, and when the pistol-waving mob comes to this fellow’s apartment I don’t think that he and his knife will last long.
The late Finn Aagaard, who was a PH for many years, claimed that elephants were the greatest of all African dangerous game, and among people who have hunted the Big Five, I doubt you’ll find much disagreement. “The Essence of Elephant Hunting” is a DVD put together by Charlton-McCallum Safaris, and after watching it I doubt you’ll disagree either.
The photography is professional (except for when the cameraman is running for his life along with everyone else) but the disc is devoid of the shuck and jive that you see in the hunting programs produced for television. As one example, mopane flies swarm in front of the camera lens, and everywhere else. The little bastards are a fact of life in Africa, and no attempt is made to hide it.
There is a small percentage of the U.S. population that hunts, and a small percentage that hates hunting. While many of us believe the general public looks on at hunters with disapproval, the truth is, most of them rarely think about hunting at all.
When they do think about it, the non-hunters I encounter believe two things:
- We are crazy for keeping the hours we do and going out in the cold.
I have written a lot of how-to turkey stories over the years, but I generally ignore my own advice. Instead my personal approach to hunting boils down to: sleep late, get lucky. This morning I actually woke up at 4:30 a.m., thought about getting out of bed, then decided against it. It’s not that I don’t like getting up in the early morning, it’s that I hate feeling wiped out later in the day when I do.
So I left the house at the crack of 6:30 a.m. As an afterthought, on my way out the door, I grabbed a new mouth call from the box where I store the calls sent to me by manufacturers to try. I had noticed yesterday the ones in my vest were starting to fall apart and thought I should add a new one.
One of the shows in this season’s Gun Nuts will be me shooting at 500 yards at the Scarborough Fish & Game Association range in Scarborough, Maine. The point I will be making is that, if you don’t practice shooting at ranges over 300 yards, don’t shoot at game beyond 300 yards. It’s not enough to buy the equipment and know the theory.
This was borne out a couple of weeks ago when I was shooting at Scarborough with Rocky Prout, who is head of the Rifle Committee, a Distinguished Rifleman, and a Highpower Competitor for 20-plus years. I was to shoot at 500 yards and we had a stiff incoming breeze on the order of 25 mph.
Conventional wisdom says that an incoming wind will lift your bullets on their way to the target, and I asked Rocky how much I should allow for it.
“Nothing,” he said. “At 500 yards this isn’t going to move a .30/06.”