It's Over

Firearm deer season, that is.  Sundown tonight ended Michigan's firearm deer season.  And boy, did it suck.

That's what I'm hearing, so it's not just based on my own dismal hunting experience this season that I make such a negative judgement.  Two straight weeks of hunting, with only one day that I didn't go out (more on that later).  No deer for me, even though I hunted twice a day on weekends and (just about) every evening during the week. No deer for DH, who hunted morning and night, every day for the entire two weeks.  No deer for DS1, who hunted a handful of times.  No deer for DH's buddy who lived with us the first week of deer season.

The only one who can claim a harvested deer to their name is K2, and she shot hers on opening morning.  It was kind of small, by our standards, only weighing in at 100 pounds dressed.  But, apparently, that is a decent size for deer where she comes from, or so we've been told.  And, since she has been the only one to put venison in the freezer this year, we can't tease her too much about taking a 'little one'.

But really, the deer were few and far between.  Where we used to see a dozen in one sitting quite easily, and herds of two or even three dozen on a really good day, this year I think six was the daily record for deer sightings.  I saw those, and they came in two groups of three, staying far enough away that I didn't have a shot at any of them.  Most days, we sat and saw nothing, heard nothing, not even shots in the neighborhood (which, around here, could be several miles away).

I sat and watched the sun come up. Which, when you are surrounded by trees, doesn't look like much.

 I sat and watched birds wake up and come out to feed.

cardinal

black-capped chickadee

northern flicker

downy woodpecker

red-bellied woodpecker

And on days when not even the birds came out, I sat and looked at evidence of where they'd been.

woodpecker holes in a tree trunk

woodpecker holes in the railing of the 'playset' blind

Other days I looked at things the birds hadn't managed to eat yet.

inchworm, incredibly still alive after a week of temps below freezing

(this photo was taken on the first warm day)

spider with a leg-span no wider than a pencil eraser

rose hips

Sometimes I watched squirrels.

gray squirrel

fox squirrel

fox squirrel

gray squirrel

One morning, there was a black squirrel who had found an apple under some leaves, and it scampered up a tree with it's prize.  However, there were two gray squirrels nearby who either had seen the apple, or could smell it.  One of them followed the black squirrel up the tree, where it proceeded to jump on the black squirrel, making it drop it's apple.  Those three squirrels spent an hour chasing each other in circles and up and down trees stealing that apple from each other.

Sometimes there were no birds or squirrels to watch, so I took pictures of fungus and mosses that appeared on warm, moist days.

yellow fungus on a stump

orange 'jelly fungus' on a living tree limb

moss on some decaying wood

Many days, it was cold, with high temperatures that did not get above freezing.  Some days it snowed.

snow collecting on the top of the door to the apple blind

One day was so bitter cold that I froze to my gun and my tree stand.  Yes, literally.  What little bit of moisture was on my gloves froze to the metal parts of my shotgun, and the bottoms of my boots froze to the metal platform of the tree stand.  I was so bundled up, only my eyes were showing.  I took a selfie, and sent it to DD1 at college.  She said it looked like I was wearing 'some kind of hunting burka'.

very unflattering selfie on a frigid day

Other days, it was warm, and there was either fog, or rain.

just a light mist

rainy evening

While waiting fruitlessly for deer to come my way, I pondered things like how far up it was into the maple tree.

And how far down it is from the platform of the maple to the ground.

And how it's my balance, alertness, and one little nylon strap (connected to a harness under my coat) around a tree limb that is keeping me safely in the tree instead of falling to certain bodily harm.

I didn't just contemplate the maple stand.  I also thought about the little deck we have at the bottom of the ladder to the double stand. How it came to us in one of those scrap lumber 'junk' piles given to us a few years ago by our friend the junk man, and makes a nice stable base for the ladder.

I also thought about things most people never get a chance to see, like a puddle in a small hollow on the top of a tree limb about fifteen feet up in the air.

And how the light reflected off the water held there.

And when I got bored with that, I looked at the mud on the toes of my boots, one warm muddy morning.

Sitting in the deer blind or tree stand in the late afternoons sometimes provided a view of a pretty sunset.

In the past two weeks, I have been in the woods at least once a day, every day, with the exception of the afternoon we were having 25 mph winds with gusts up to 45 mph.  I wimped out.  Too windy; the wind carries your scent too much, and, well, it's just plain miserable being out in that, whether you are in a tree or in an enclosed blind.

All in all, the hours I spent in the woods weren't a total waste even though they didn't result in any meat in my freezer.  For the most part, they were relaxing.  Except for the one morning when, after the sun came up, I noticed this:

my footprint from the evening before, lined in green

deer footprint over my footprint, lined in red

Those rotten deer!  They had been by the apple blind in the night, between the time I came in from it after dark, and when I returned to it just before dawn.  That morning there were deer tracks over my own footprints, right up to the door of the blind!  I sat there and stewed all morning hunt, imagining the deer thumbing their noses at me and saying "nyah-nyah nyah-nyah, you can't catch us!"  And, apparently, they were right.  Because they are in the woods somewhere and not on my dinner plate.

Challenge #41: Use Up That Turkey!

It's the day after Thanksgiving.  What's in your fridge?  Leftovers?

I'm betting more than a few of us have turkey in our fridge.  Several pounds of it.  So, what do you do?

Well, if you are like my mother in law (yes, I'm going to slam her today), you just drag it out, meal after meal, breakfast, lunch and dinner, until it's gone.  The same blasted turkey, reheated over and over and over until the last (very dried out by now) morsel is gone.

That has never been my style.  While I do eat leftovers quite willingly, I have a bit of trouble choking down leftover meat. In my opinion, it's just never as good the second time.

Which is why, when I have meat left from a meal, I plan to use it in another meal that is totally different.  So, at this little place here, we never have turkey, turkey, turkey, in the days after Thanksgiving, just drug out of the fridge and microwaved until we can't stand it any longer.

Nope.  Tonight we are having turkey noodle soup (mainly because it can simmer while I am out hunting later this afternoon, and be ready to eat when all us hunters come in from the woods.)  Another meal, not necessarily even tomorrow, will be turkey pot pie.  Turkey sandwiches for lunches for those who like that sort of thing (not me--I'm picky).   Then, if there is any turkey left after that, the rest might be put into baggies holding 2-3 cups diced turkey and stuck in the freezer for meals next month.  Or, if there's only a few cups left, and we're not totally sick of turkey by then, we might have turkey tetrazzini on Monday.

Come to think of it, Monday would be an excellent time to make turkey tetrazzini; DD2's cheer/football banquet is Monday and I am supposed to bring a dish to pass.  It's a done deal. Turkey tetrazzini on Monday.  :0)

Get creative.  Use up that turkey.  Just not exactly the same way you ate it yesterday.

Yarn Along 15: Finally!!

Joining in with Ginny for another Yarn Along.

Look!  Look!  The Athos socks are finally finished!!!  Not blocked yet, so it's really hard to see the design on the legs and tops of the feet, but they are off the needles!  Phew!

man sized socks,

way to big for K3's little feet 

close up, you can kind of see the design

I can't tell you how glad I am to have finished those socks.  Now I can finally move on to other things.  I'm a little reluctant to start any more big knitting projects at the moment (though I have yarn and a pattern for my first-ever adult sized sweater just waiting for January to get here), so I have a bunch of small projects lined up.

Last night I got half of one of them done.  I found this pattern for these cute little mitten ornaments on ravelry, and last night I tested it out.  A bit fiddly with juggling  dpns and so few stitches, especially for the thumbs, but it did knit up really quick.  I plan to knit it's mate tonight, and then do several more pair to give as gifts.

How about you?  What are you knitting currently?  Any Christmas knitting going on?

Sometimes I Can't

I did not post a challenge on Friday.  After the previous week's challenge about focusing, and doing what you need to do, it's really been bugging me that I did not blog on Friday and put up a weekly challenge.  I mean, how lame is that?  I couldn't even follow through on my own challenge.

But sometimes I can't.  Sometimes I hit the wall; there is just too much being thrown at me by life, by other people, by the weather, by the season, etc.  Sometimes it's all I can do to get up, make meals, go to work, be nice to the people I run into throughout my day.  Sometimes I really, really, just want to hibernate and pretend no one exists except for me.  But I can't, and so I slog along at bare-minimum mode for a little while.

Right now, work and hunting and eating are my three must-do items each day.  Deer season is not a recreational activity so much as it is a long two week haul of trying to get as much red meat in the freezer for the next year as possible.  Sort of like sap season in the early spring, when you make syrup or don't get any at all.  Sort of like the gardening/canning season where you plant and weed and water and harvest and preserve, or you miss out on a whole lot of good wholesome food for a little money.  Deer season is my two-week window to get lean red meat for the mere cost of a license and a shotgun shell.

Yes, I do get some quiet time in the woods during deer season, like I mentioned last week in a post or two.  But to be brutally honest, deer season is damn exhausting.  I have to do my job outside the home, I have to do my job inside the home (cooking, laundry, bill paying, being Mom, etc) AND I have to sit in the woods during as many daylight hours as possible in fifteen days.

Right now, it's the second week of deer season.  I'm whupped.  I'm ready for it to be over, yet I have no venison in my freezer.  I want venison.  I need venison, not just for the nutrition, but also for my budget (go price 60 pounds of lean beef burger, roasts, and steaks and see how much money that costs--way more than the pennies per pound one dead deer costs me).

Right now, I want to work on Christmas presents.  I want to sew.  I want to quilt.  I want to knit. I want to paint and craft.  I want to sleep in on the weekend.  I want to sit down and do a jigsaw puzzle. I want to write blog post after blog post on all the topics I've thought of while sitting in the deer blind seeing zero deer.

But I can't.  Because right now is not the season for that.  It is the season for harvesting deer, and they don't just walk up, knock on your door, and keel over conveniently on the front porch.  I have to go out to where they are (or where they're supposed to be, gosh darn it!!) and wait for them.  Only seven more hunting days left this year.

The Growling Chair

Getting up early and walking out to the deer stand before sunrise takes some dedication.  Especially when it's cold and you're tired.

Getting up early and walking out to a deer stand--in the dark--that no one has checked all summer takes some determination.

Getting up early, walking out in the dark to a deer stand that no one has checked all summer, sitting down on the chair, hearing growling under your derriere, and not jumping up and running out the door takes some guts.

Or maybe stupidity, considering that in past summers we had a raccoon take up residence in that exact deer stand.

In my defense, as I sat there, in the dark, and my brain told me that yes, I was hearing an animal growl, I immediately flicked on my little flashlight that I keep in the pocket of my hunting coat, and shone it on the floor.  I looked all around my seat (but didn't get up), and what I saw was that the growling definitely was not coming from a raccoon or opossum: the scat on the floor was too small for either of those animals.  It looked more like large mouse poop.  Therefore, not an animal that was capable of inflicting great bodily harm or subjecting myself to rabies shots. (I hope)

So I shut off the flash light and commenced to settle in to hunt.  At which point, whatever was growling quit making noise and instead seemed to be moving around inside the back of my chair!!!

Which caused me to do a quick calculation of how many layers of clothing I was wearing, approximately how thick those layers of clothing were, and how long the teeth of a mouse, mink, weasel or squirrel might be.  Because those were my suspected chair-mates based on the feces on the floor.

My calculation assured me that I was most likely bite-proof, and so I stopped worrying and started hunting.  But later in the morning, on my way out of the blind, I took a couple of pictures of holes I found in the seat and the back rest of the chair.  And once in the house, I spent a few minutes googling things like "do mice growl?" and "what noises does a mink make?" and "how small of a hole can a squirrel fit through?"

hole in the back rest of the chair (about shoulder height)

hole in the seat of the chair

Based on my research, and repeat sightings near my blind on subsequent sittings in the same deer stand over the next couple of days, I have concluded that the growling creature in my chair the other morning was most likely an eastern gray squirrel.  Not sure if it's a him or a her, but it sure is a pretty shade of silver right now.  And seems to be quite happy to stay out of the blind while I'm in there.

Yarn Along 14: Hunting and Knitting

Joining in with Ginny on this cold and snowy Wednesday.

Firearm deer season started on Saturday, so I haven't actually done much knitting in the past several days.  It's been too cold to take my knitting to the blind with me (ever try to knit while wearing big thick gloves?  Doesn't work.), so the picture below is actually a pic I took last hunting season.  The little bit of knitting I have done in the past five days has taken place in the warmth of my living room rather than in the deer blind or tree stand.

when you're 18 feet up a tree,

 hopefully it won't matter that the yarn is not camouflage patterned

I've only managed to get one pattern repeat--16 rows--done on the final Athos sock this week. 

I'm somewhat perturbed that it isn't finished yet, but then again, I've worked about 27 hours and hunted about 19 hours in the past seven days.  When I haven't been hunting or working, I've been trying like crazy to keep up with my regular household duties (you know, cooking, laundry, grocery shopping, taking care of chickens and grandchildren, etc.).  And, of course, I have to sleep sometimes too.

The one thing I have managed to do a lot of is reading.  Hunting is an excellent time to get some reading done.  After all, you need to sit quietly so as to not scare off any potential dinner--I mean, any deer--and being bored makes most people fidgety. So while I'm waiting for deer to meander my way, I do a lot of reading.  Read a page, scan the woods for deer, read a page, scan for deer, read a page. . . When you are sitting for three or fours at a stretch you can get a lot of pages read this way.

I finished The Meaning of Names, which I really enjoyed even though it was a bit heavy of subject matter (and there's a twist at the end!), then proceeded to read Comfort & Joy on Sunday (two hunting sessions), and started Homeward Bound on Monday.  Comfort & Joy was a much lighter and fast read compared to The Meaning of Names, but I do recommend both of them.  

So far I am liking Homeward Bound; it is interesting since many of the homesteading/self-sufficiency/crafty/attachment parenting types of things I have been doing since the early 1990s are now considered a movement and I'm more of a cool sage and guru than an odd-ball on the fringe now.  Having spent most of my adult life defending my out-of-step from society lifestyle, it's kind of uplifting to now be considered someone with valuable knowledge to share,  LOL.  If you aren't familiar with my journey from born-in-the-Detroit-suburbs city child to can-do-anything country dwelling earth mama, check out this old post.  It talks a little bit about the impetuous for my lifestyle, and I assure you it has nothing political, environmental, or trendy about it.

And Then a Turkey Fell From the Sky. . .

Firearm deer hunting started last Saturday.  I've been hunting hard, every morning and evening that I am not at work (so, twice each on Saturday and Sunday, once Monday, and plan to head out soon for this afternoon's hunt).  DH has the whole week off, so he's been hunting harder: twice a day every day.

Yet neither one of us has venison to show for our efforts.  The deer have been scarce, to say the least.  I have seen, in a total of 16 hours of hunting, exactly three deer.  One that never came out of the brush for me to get a shot at (she was pushed by another hunting going into the woods), and two that didn't come out until after dark.

So, I've been back to my usual hunting season activities of looking at trees, trying to take pictures of birds and squirrels, and generally enjoying the quiet and solitude that is unavailable in my home since I share it with six other people.  Seven if you count DH's friend who has a (nasty, in my opinion) habit of moving in with us during deer season (perhaps a topic for another post some other day).  Out in the blind I might be freezing my ass  nose off--we are having a January-like spell of weather currently--and not killing any deer so far, but at least no one expects me to wait on them and I'm having some uninterrupted quiet time to think!

Generally, during hunting season I think through my holiday gift list and prioritize which gifts I can make and which ones I need to purchase.  I also spend more time reading than any other time of the year.  And, of course, I observe the woods and its' inhabitants.

So far, the woodpeckers have been abundant, but camera shy.  I watched a rabbit for about half-an-hour on Sunday morning, but did not have the camera with me to take pictures with. And, I confess, as I was watching the rabbit, to mentally figuring out how much damage a 20 gauge slug would do to such a small animal, and wondering if I just shot it in the head, which I wouldn't eat anyway, if there would be enough meat left to cook for dinner; justifying the taking of the rabbit's life.  In the end, I kept my gun down and just watched the rabbit.  Perhaps I will take up rabbit hunting next year, after I buy some game load.

The strangest thing that has happened so far was when I was sitting out yesterday afternoon.  I had been out in the blind for about twenty minutes when DH walked out to go sit in the maple stand.  As he walked to the far eastern corner of the woods, I could hear crashing around between me and him.  Getting excited, guessing that he'd spooked up a deer or two, I got my gun up and started peering intently out the windows of the apple blind where I was sitting.  Surely soon I would see a deer coming my way.

Body tense with anticipation, I leaned forward, scanning to the northeast.   Looking, looking. . . watching for deer. . .

And then a turkey fell from the sky.  Right in front of me.  Literally not more than 25 feet away.  And because of the way the windows in the blind are designed as short wide slits in the wall, (about 5-6 inches high) I had not seen the turkey up in the tree that it must have been in.  Nor did I hear it at all--usually you can hear turkeys flapping and crashing when they go up to roost or come down from the treetops.

So, imagine how much I jumped when suddenly this full grown turkey hen silently falls directly in front of my blind!!

To say I was surprised would be an understatement.  As quickly as possible, I unzipped my coat and pulled out the camera (I keep it inside my coat so the cold doesn't wear the batteries down) in order to get pictures.  The turkey, meanwhile, nonchalantly walked a semi-circle through the brush, coming out to the west of my blind, where I was lucky enough to get one picture of her during the split second she was in a clearing.

I might not have any cool stories of monster bucks or harvested does to tell so far this hunting season, but I do have a story about the turkey that fell from the sky.