Watermelon ripe? How do you tell?

[Pat]

Bird, I second the comment about shooting more but not getting more game when going from a single shot to a semi-auto. When hunting with friends I used to get at least my share of the game with my single shot bolt action and only needed a few rounds to git 'er done, not a half a box.

Hunting squirrel with my dad, I used my single shot .22 and he used a single shot 12 ga. If Mr. bushy tail wasn't traveling too fast or erratically for me then he was dispatched with a .22 short hollow point, otherwise or if I missed (not often) my dad would take him with the shotgun.

I had a cousin up near Enid that was hired to "HERD CROWS" where he would take a sack lunch and a jar of water and go sit with his .22 under a tree in the watermelon field of his employer. When crows would menace the melons he'd shoot at them. He got a bonus for dead crows.

When I was in Jr High School (grades 7 & 8) just outside Lima, Ohio there was a 25 cent bounty on crows. At that time I was not allowed to roam at large unsupervised with an ACTUAL firearm and my Red Ryder signature model Daisy BB gun didn't have sufficient range. I had a schoolmate who got a pellet rifle and by having both of us pump it up together we could get it up to pressures where we could harrass crows but not reliably drop them A great monetary dissapointment.

In recent years I have been forced to optical sights for precision shooting. Shotguns of course don't present a problem like that. I can still hit a gallon milk jug about 7-8 times out of 10 with my Walther P-22 shooting off hand with open iron sights from about 200 ft. Once you learn the "hold over" that isn't too great a range. It is fun to shoot it 4-5 times in rapid succession with the hits easily recognized buy sound and dust flying out the top (jug is dirt filled and top cut off) and then hand the pistol to a friend without mentioning holdover and watch them try in vain to hit the jug.

I recently saw some demonstration shooting on the History Chanel where the shooter was tossing standard aspirin tablets up into the air and shooting them with a .22 rifle (not shot shells.) I recall a USAF shooting instructor that taught folks how to do that with a sightless BB gun and then he would demonstrate using tossed up BB's as targets and shoot them with his BB gun. A small but finite portion of the students could get to the level where they could shoot BB's out of the air with the BB guns. The sights were removed from these BB guns before they were handed out to the class. It was all instinctive point of aim shooting where you learn to become one with gun and have it be an extensiion of your body.

I learned to shoot a bow the same way. I never got to the level of the olympic contenders with their fancy sights but at varying ranges and with moving targets I didn't lose many matchups. Of course it is like playing chess with a 10 second move rule, it transforms the game to a completely different thing not at all like what Kasparov plays.

[img]/forums/images/icons/smile.gif[/img] [img]/forums/images/icons/smile.gif[/img] Pat [img]/forums/images/icons/smile.gif[/img] [img]/forums/images/icons/smile.gif[/img]

[Bird]

Pat, you know I've been to Alaska a few times in the summer and I've been to the Texas coast many times in the winter, so I've seen lots of "flocks" of birds, but the biggest flocks I ever saw of one species of birds was the flocks of crows in the Marlow, OK, area in the mid-50s. When they'd be going from their roosting area to wherever they were feeding that day, I've seen a solid stream of crows from horizon to horizon for over an hour. I once saw one of their roosting areas; a wooded area that I would estimate to be a city block wide and 3 city blocks long and it was solid black with crow.

As for point shooting, at one time, our pistol range had a smaller than life size silhouette target that was a convex steel plate (half inch if I remember right). Grease was applied with a paint roller. The object of the exercise was to draw and fire 3 shots as rapidly as possible; two to the chest and one to the head. The convex surface of the target and the grease would cause the lead to splatter off the sides instead of ricochet in a direction that would be a problem, and of course, the grease would allow you to see where the bullets hit. Some referred to it as instinct shooting; some as point shooting. At any rate, it was fun and surprisingly easy.

[egon]

I did start out with a single shot .22 at about age eight or so.
The reapeater meant I didn't have to hold shells in my teeth.
Ammunition was hard to come by so not much was wasted. The scope really helped me as myoptic eysight always left the rear sight a blur. Peep sight would have been okay.

Now talking about flocks of birds; think geese flyways in spring and fall and living between two alkali lakes that were used for resting/fuel stops. [img]/forums/images/icons/grin.gif[/img]

The neatest to watch are a flock of jabbering Sandhill Cranes come in low, find an updraft and slowly circle getting smaller and smaller and the heading out and dissapearing in a matter of seconds.

Egon

[Adron]

I was guiding duck hunting for a couple of Chicago's finest. Had a blind set up on the SE corner of a small island on a 50,000 acre lake. Wind out of the NW and the temperature she was a droppin'.

About 1 pm, we started to have a few ducks come in, then more and then within in 20 -30 minutes there was a tornado of ducks from about 500 ft down to water level. We were all flabbergasted. If there was one duck on the water there was 500 - 700 maybe more and thousands in the air. This went on for a long time. We just sat and enjoyed the spectacle. Labrador was not happy!

[Bird]

Pat, I did stop in the local Mexican Grocery & Bakery this morning. They were quite busy so I didn't talk to any of the employees, but they had a sign on the meat counter "Whole Goat, $2.89 lb." and they had "goat intestines" in the meat counter, but I didn't see any steaks or roasts. It was an interesting place, but a little too "authentic". That is, too much like some of the markets I saw on the other side of the border; i.e., not very clean.

[Pat]

Bird, I have only been to Alaska one time but enjoyed it a lot. The only "MASS" of birds I saw there that impressed me was bald eagles. I may go back some day but there are so many neat places I haven't been to that we don't always get back to a place we have already visited.

Although I never participated, folks in some locales used to go to the crow roost site and put dynamite in the trees while the crows were gone raiding fields. Then at night when the crows were roosting the dynamite would be set off and kill crows by the thousands. More of a sure kill and much more economical than trying to shoot them.

The pecan seminar I went to down past Falconhead next to Red River had a talk and demonstration of approved crow baiting platforms used to poison crows. You buy or construct an approved platform and set it up for the state guy to inspect. If it passes he puts the bait in it.(They really keep track of poisons in ouir heightened terrorist awqreness.) The chunks are way too big for songbirds and the platform is designed to keep the food off the ground to limit collateral damage probabilities.

I have seen flocks as you describe between Ada and Shawnee 3 out of the last 5 years but they were not crows, they were blackbirds. Impressive when you can see a long band of birds stretching out of sight over the horizon in both directions. Luckily large masses of them never stopped at our place.

I have a compound bow and bow sights for it. I haven't gotten around to putting the sights on and setting up the bow... one day... I learned to shoot a bow on a one piece wooden longbow that was longer than I was tall. I had to tilt it quite a way out of the vertical to be able to shoot it. I was in the second grade and lived across the street from the Shawnee School's football field (on the outskirts of Lima, Ohio.) I could stand behind one goal post and shoot past the goal line at the other end. I moved up to a Ben Pierson recurve when I was about 10. We used to go out in the fields and shoot rats with our bows till I was about 12 and the family moved back to Oklahoma. We practiced on moving targets. At my best I could put soda cans onto branches in trees by sticking the branch in the can and then walk away, whirl, and fire with about an 80% success ratio of hitting the soda can endwise that I shot at. A follow up shot without whirling around was nearly a sure thing.

Once upon a time I had a convenient source of shooting gallery ammo (frangible .22 shorts.) That was good stuff for avoiding a ricochet but of course you werent shooting .22 in your exploits.

[img]/forums/images/icons/smile.gif[/img] Pat [img]/forums/images/icons/smile.gif[/img]

[Pat]

Relligious principles can be a good thing but if you starve over them it is hard to pass on the philosophy.

As 105F was predicted for today I am thinking I will not be out in the sun cutting up 16 inch pipe to make feeders for cattle like yesterday. Got one 12ft section sliced in half, lengthwise and some 12 inch pipe cut into 16 inch lengths.

Today seems more like it is an indoors day, eating watermelon and such.

[img]/forums/images/icons/smile.gif[/img] Pat [img]/forums/images/icons/smile.gif[/img]

[Pat]

When I was about 5-6 and we were lilving in IL, I recall several folks with rabbit traps made of scrap wood salvaged from apple crates. They hand whittled the trigger which stuck down into the chamber from the top and wqas connected to the door with a string. When the bunny went inside it wouild bump the trigger and the door would drop shut. They were getting cottontails to eat.

I'm surprised no one mentioned that when watermelon rinds dry in the sun that they curl up and have been known to trap young chickens in their embrace as the chicken is busy eating melon and don't know they are trapped until it is too late.

[img]/forums/images/icons/smile.gif[/img] Pat [img]/forums/images/icons/smile.gif[/img]

[Pat]

Bird, If you want to eat authentic Mexican food down in Mexico at resturants in small towns then it is better to NOT visit the market place during the day, especially the area around the carneceria. I can still recall the swarms of flies and stray dogs following the wheel barrow of beef being wheeled through the market place at Zihuatanejo, a fishing village/tourist town on the Pacific coast of Mexico north of Puerto Vallarta. It was not unusual or different from many other "ethnic" culinary adventures I had in Mexico.

[img]/forums/images/icons/smile.gif[/img] Pat [img]/forums/images/icons/smile.gif[/img]

[Bird]

</font><blockquote><font class="small">In reply to:</font><hr />
folks in some locales used to go to the crow roost site and put dynamite in the trees while the crows were gone raiding fields. Then at night when the crows were roosting the dynamite would be set off and kill crows by the thousands.

[/ QUOTE ]

Yep, that was done in the Marlow area in the mid-50s. Another thing I've seen done was when someone could get a crippled (wounded) crow, tie it in a tree, and hide nearby to shoot the crows that responded to the injured one's cries. A couple of times I noticed lots of dead crows under trees near the road where someone had done that and then hid in a big culvert or under a bridge.