Deer hunting A-a-R (and notes on pruning)

Well, I know you are all biting your nails wondering if I connected with a deer.

Nope. Not tonight.

I got a late start. For some reason my muscles were sore and stiff. Never-the-less, I had my deer hunting property in sight by 2:30 p.m.

As I drove up to it I noticed a dead deer in the middle of the field west of the Upper Orchard. That was an oddity that merited investigation.

If it is deer season and you hope to harvest venison, it is worth your while to carry a suitable firearm while tramping about. Not carrying one is the equivalent of expecting to win the lottery but not bothering to buy a ticket.

I checked out the dead deer. And yes, Virginia, I was carrying a bang-stick. It had been dead long enough for the varmints to find it and there was snow on its eyeballs.

Michigan game laws are very clear. It is illegal to tag a deer that you did not shoot. How-some-ever, if you happen to "find" a dead deer that is unclaimed. And if there is clear evidence that the deer died of ballistic trauma. And if you stick a finger into the mouth of that deer and you determine that the temperature is below 90F and more than 10F above ambient...then it is clear that whoever shot that deer is not going to claim it. If they were, they would have found it by now.

In which case you need to decide if you are going to comply with man-made laws and let the coyotes eat the dead deer or if you are going to comply with higher moral laws and make sure that the meat ends up in somebody's freezer.

Clearly, the deer had died long enough in the past that I was not confronted with such a moral dilemma.

While walking back toward the Upper Orchard, I took a slight detour. On two separate occasions I have seen bucks bedded down in a depression north of the field. I eased into the woods that separated the depression and the field. Lo and behold, there was a deer in the depression.

Alas, it was not a buck. A single deer, all by its lonesome is usually a buck .or. an orphaned fawn. Even though I had a permit for an antlerless deer I let it walk.

My Plan

My plan was to prune trees in the orchard until 4:30 and then sit until 5:36 p.m. which was the end of "legal light".

One of my readers commented about the ambiguity of the term.

With snow on the ground and with a full moon, there is enough light to clearly identify deer all night long. Since the DNR cannot predict snow-cover any better than the professional weather-guessers, and since they cannot predict if the moonlight will be intercepted by cloudy skies...they TELL hunters when it will be "legal" based on when the sun will set.

If one were inclined, it would be pretty easy to weasel on when you dropped the hammer if you were using a bow. But you would be pretty stupid to "violate" with a firearm by more than a minute or two, maybe. It just isn't worth it.

So, at precisely 5:36 p.m. I removed the magazine and cycled the bolt to eject the round that was in the chamber.

I saw three deer while walking from the blind to my truck.

Pruning report

I pruned one mulberry tree and three pear trees in the 90 minutes I was working.

If you are a long-time reader then you know that I did a major pruning of the orchards last winter. By major, I mean that I removed about 2/3 of the crowns of many of the trees. Others I culled.

Most of the ones I left responded by producing a dense forest of 24" to 48" long whips from the scaffold-branches that I left.  "Hairs on a dog's back" is an apt description of how some of these trees look.

Those trees will overbear and produce runted, flavorless fruit if I do not reduce the bearing potential. Not only that, but they will go into alternate bearing. One year will give a gross overload of mediocre fruit. The next year will produce nothing.

So, I am thinning out the whips. If most of them are 24" long, I am removing all of the whips within 24" of the ones I decided to leave. If the whips are 48" long, then I leave 48" of space around the few I select to leave. That way the sunlight and drying breezes can penetrate the crown and every fruit will have multiple leaves collecting sun and feeding them.

It would be excruciatingly slow work except that most of those whips can be yanked out by their roots. I grab each one and give it an authoritative JERK and most of the time I can rip it right off of its mother-branch.

It took a long time...but I finally found a job where my innate ability to be a big jerk works to my advantage. I highly recommend this job for people who are like me.