All revved up again!

It’s that time of year again…to quote Meatloaf, “I’m all revved up, no place to go.”

Damn the Outdoor Channel and ESPN and damn Bill Jordan and Ted Nugent and the whole Dream Season bunch. I’m ready to go hunting and nothing but varmints are in season…it’s maddening. Last year, at least, I was prepping for the boar hunt at the Bostick Plantation in South Carolina…this year, all I can do is watch TV and wait.

Well…and practice my shooting skills. I just came back in from shooting my bow for the first time since December. Not bad, not bad. I shot 30 arrows out of the Hoyt Trykon XL compound bow and the last five-arrow group was a respectable 2-1/2 inches, right in the boiler room, from a little over 30 yards on a new Glen Del deer target (son-and-heir demolished the previous, shot-out target with a sword). I bought a new crossbow for this year, too, an Excalibur Equinox, a recurve which has a bolt-drop compensating scope and flings an arrow 20 feet per second faster than even my Trykon.

Ooooh! Raw anachronistic power! The new bow is supposed to be accurate to 45-50 yards. I figure son-and-heir or the new exchange student (if he’s interested) can take full advantage of what is billed as “The World’s Most Accurate Crossbow.”

In the meantime, however, I wait, wait, wait.

Son-and-heir and I did a little scouting the other night with a spotlight…we shined the light on the 12 acre hayfield and there were deer eyes everywhere – I guess that explains where all our sweet corn is going. The acre patch we planted about 70 yards behind the house is being devoured at such a rate by the local fauna that I’m not sure we’ll even get an ear from it. It’s a good thing we also planted a couple acres of sweet corn at my father’s house – that corn has thus far been spared by the critters there. Our corn plot completes the perfect trifecta for deer palates – it’s adjacent to an old, overgrown orchard loaded with apples and cover and borders our hayfield, which is full of emerging trefoil and clover.

The way it’s going now, I’ll be able to bow hunt from the roof of the chicken coop...woo hoo, that would be some nice footage!

I bought a Cuddeback No Flash trail camera that I’m going to put out today – along with some C’Mere Deer – to start taking a census of the deer running our property. Later, I’ll move the camera to some of the other areas I hunt too…looking for clues to the whereabouts of the monsters lurking in the woods. I’ll post pictures as they become available.

I’m also considering taking S&H and my father on a boar or ram hunt in southern Ohio sometime in September. We’ve been looking at White Oak Exotic Hunting Preserve, near Cambridge, as a possibility. More on that later, too.

But for now I wait for the end of September and deer archery season to begin…and practice, practice, practice to burn off some of the fire of anticipation.