and a strong cup of coffee

I noticed the black against the white trees, "moose!" I called out to Lee .  Eating along the side of the logging road, she was spooked by our approaching truck and disappeared into thick sapplings before I could take a picture.  I took it as a good omen that today would be productive. Snow in May is not unheard of in Maine but the few inches that had fallen the night before, would not make shed hunting an easy task this morning.  I was still excited and the break from quarantine life was welcomed.  The fresh Maine air can reset anyone's state of mind. We walked down old skidder trails and split up to cover more ground.  Snow fell from the higher branches as the sun began to rise.  I had been walking for just a few minutes when Lee came to find me and had me backtrack on to the road that he had been on. "Walk right down this trail and look inside the tree line" Lee instructed me.  He had already found the first shed of the morning amid two inches...

If you had asked everyone in the room to vote right then and there, I would bet that supplemental feeding of deer would have been made illegal. The room was packed with people at the Augusta Civic Center, listening to a presentation by Dr. Krysten L. Schuler, Wildlife Disease Ecologist at Cornell Wildlife Health Lab about her research on Chronic Wasting Disease (CWD) and what is being done in the 26 states currently impacted. CWD is caused by a mutated protein that are found in prions. Deer shed prions through bodily fluids and once in the soil, CWD can stay there for months if not years.  The worst spreaders of the prions are those big, adult bucks that we all covet. CWD is fatal and in the same family as Mad Cow Disease. The Centers for Disease Control describes Chronic Wasting Disease saying, "It may take over a year before an infected animal develops symptoms, which can include drastic weight loss (wasting), stumbling, and other neurological symptoms." It also recomm...

Reason number 3,657,935 why my Dad is the best: As we were snowmobiling, we approached a bog and three eagles with about 20 crows took off.  It could only mean one thing in my book - something was dead.  We circled back and walked around in the snow but the birds had left and we couldnt find anything that would resemble a meal.  A part of me thinks that we were in the wrong piece of land and should have been on the other side of the bog but in our snowmobile gear, we were not going to cover a lot of ground.  I was disappointed that we couldn't find what the birds were eating but I was able to get some good pictures of one of the mature eagles and the immature eagle that were flying around.

I still have a few trail cameras out to see what the deer are up to.  I have gotten pictures of the big buck that is around and most recently, I got these pictures.  Normally, I wouldn't be too freaked out but now that we have a dog, it is a little unnerving.  Add that this camera is about 50 feet from our lawn and less than 100 feet from our front door... I hope that this one is just passing through. (Sidenote: I put new batteries in this camera so the date and time are wrong BUT  I walked in front of it so it would take my picture and I could figure out what the actual time and date were: 7am Saturday morning.)

The plan was to shoot does from the property.  The only out was the big buck that we had been tracking.  Hubs was the first who successfully shot a doe in the afternoon of opening day of rifle season.  Having sat through almost all types of weather conditions and some single digit temps, I shot a doe minutes before legal time at the end of the season. Dad decided to muzzle hunt since the woods would be quieter and maybe that buck would be lulled into a false sense of security.  For two weeks, Dad walked through the woods and finally, in the same the spot that I had shot my deer, he saw a big, healthy looking doe.  As the afternoon light was fading, he made his way over to the deer. There was some relief as he evaluated the animal.  We were again fortunate that we filled all of our tags and our freezer would be willed with venison for the year ahead. Dad set his jacket and gun down and prepared himself to gut the deer.  It was not a doe.  Alt...

The 4th weekend of deer season was a bust as I had to take my kiddo to a birthday party for a classmate.  I (half) jokingly told him that from now on, when he meets a new friend, he needs to ask them when their birthday is and if it is during hunting season, he can't be friends with them. Week 5 had me in the woods for up to 5 days.  I headed in on Tuesday afternoon and sat but nothing was moving. The big buck had started showing up only at 10:30pm or 3am on the cameras.  He had not been seen during the day since the third week of the season. On Wednesday, Dad and I planned to be in the woods for the full day.  We packed sandwiches and snacks and headed into the woods.  We had a strategic plan for which areas we would hunt and where I could be and where Dad would be.  Dad ended up jumped a few deer and I jumped one as a moved from stand to stand.  No shots were fired though and we planned for Thanksgiving morning and the snow that was moving in...

Welcome back! Saturday kicked off Maine's rifle season for deer hunting and I made a point of sitting in my stand for the whole day.  I packed a lunch, some water and snacks and climbed up at 6am.  It was a perfect day to be in the woods.  The sun was warm, the breeze was at a minim About an hour after legal time, this spike horn walked down the path that I had walked down.  He smelled the wind but either couldn't smell me or couldn't figure out what I was.  He wasn't spooked and he stayed around for a few minutes before continuing on his way. I basked in the sun and kept my eyes peeled for any mid-day movement. I had three large does skirt the treeline in front of me but I let them pass so that I could continue my search for the big buck that I am after.  Legal time ended at 5:53pm and I climbed down and met up with Dad and Hubs.  We had a beautiful doe that Hubs needed to tag and bring to the butcher.  We have fresh meat heading into ...