Archery Talk

how long has the blind been there?

 

Just put it up Wednesday morning

 

Yea that’ll get the deer a bit spooky

ours get spooky when we open the box blind windows a couple weeks before season

 

A conversation that we need to have. An inconvenient truth about safety in the woods that all archery hunters should consider:


Comstock, Texas. Not me.

But I have my own story:

They are among us, close among us, and they have absolutely no fear of us.

Memorial Weekend 2013, Saturday night, about an hour after dark. I am walking around the corner of my house with my little Walmart headlight on moving my sprinklers, headlight on because snakes are thick around here in this creek bottom, and I have almost stepped on several of them moving sprinklers at night over the years. As I approach the sprinkler I pan the dim light up through the water droplets to gauge how far it is throwing so I'll know where my next sprinkler placement is. As I do my headlight illuminates two green reflectors behind my neighbor’s house, distance to which later measured at 46 yards. Right here: 30°31'55.6"N 94°26'47.3"W. That’s my shop and house just to the south. My neighbors to the north are out on their latticed-enclosed back porch with another couple and their two little dogs. Their dogs are yipping their little hearts out, much more than normal. They are having a party, the smell of charcoal burning, meat obviously on the grill...I can hear their conversation.

In milli-seconds I'm trying to reason, "Did Bill put reflectors on his bird feeder?...no, it's to the left a little bit...maybe he put them on the tree in the fairway rough…but why?...and if he did, wouldn't they not be in the same plane due to the curve of the tree trunk, and both would not be returning the same amount of light like these are?”, all this through my mind in probably less than a second. Why are they there? The reflectors were about the size of the inner concave part of the bottom of a coke can, or the bottom of an OFF! mosquito spray can, with a space of about four to five inches between them.

That's when the reflectors slowly pivoted to look at my neighbors on their porch, and then snapped back and stared me down, containing in their unblinking assuredness a cold and certain contempt for me, and telegraphing a total lack of fear of me. And I mean a total lack of fear. In that stare, at that moment I knew that I was not being viewed as a threat, but as part of the food chain. I have never been that rattled. It was the middle of the summer, hot, and I had a COLD CHILL sweep over me. I now know that is not just a saying. It really happens.

I knew instantly what was looking at me. I didn’t want to believe it, but I knew. I shouldn't have been surprised. I had been finding big cat scat from time to time in the back corner of my yard since 2006. We lost some big oaks in Hurricane Rita that year, and the sand that I spread to fill their deep root holes made a good place for them to easily squat and scrape. The scat piles were big, even after they covered them with sand, most about 4" high. I'd take a stick and dig through them. Contained inside were the hair and bone fragments you would expect to find in any predator feces. Most surprising were the claw marks it made when scraping the sand over the scat - always just three claws for some reason, as if it considered the task icky and nasty, widely splaying its digits, to soil as few toes as possible. The claws trenched gouges in the sand over an inch deep and over a quarter inch wide. Most sobering, the claw trenches they made scraping the sand over the scat were over two feet long. I have spent a lot of time in the woods. I've seen bobcat scat. Lots of times. This wasn't it. This was a big cat. It was crapping outside my bedroom, in my back yard, not twenty yards from where I lay my head at night.

And it just continued to stare at me, not moving a muscle, confident, obviously having been coming onto the golf course at will any night it wanted for a very long time, so it could hunt the deer that graze on it at night rather than back in the thicket nearby. In doing so it built confidence in being safe there, out in the open, gaining tactical hunting knowledge and awareness…and a lack of fear of humans.

This is the Big Thicket. What’s the Big Thicket? Here, some links: https://www.nps.gov/bith/index.htm https://www.bing.com/images/search?q=the+big+thicket+national+preserve&FORM=HDRSC2 Five of North America’s six ecotones converge here, and everything grows here like on steroids. We have more bio-diversity here than anywhere in the county, which means high bio-density, beyond that which most people can comprehend until they visit the Big Thicket. Three-tiered canopies are the norm, it with high over-story which elsewhere blocks out enough sun to limit growth under its canopy, thus opening up the forest floor. Not here. The ground-level plants do quite well here, long ago adapting to limited sunlight, thriving in the loamy dark soil, and the moisture and humidity which is high and constant. Think of the hedgerows of Normandy, but miles thick.

In front of my house...thick, humid forest, thicket. You can run into and through a forest. You run into and collide with this. Just a wall of green. It is that thick. You can pick your way through and walk through parts of it. Most of it though, you get down on your hands and knees and crawl through, but I don’t know why you would want to, because it is just endless, more of the same. Across the street a right of way into it for the first hundred yards or so, was to have been a cul-de-sac, then ~ 380 yards by GPS to the lone ATV trail through it, virtually impenetrable in between. Private, undeveloped property owner’s association land, unused. Nobody ventures out in it. The trees that fell in Hurricanes Rita and Ike that blocked that only trail, they were never cleared. Even when I was in my 30’s, young and headstrong, it was spooky out there. At time the hair would stand up on my neck with the feeling of being watched. As it is a long way around to get to that trail, now overgrown and unused. I had tried several times back in my 30's to hack a direct path to it. Never got more than 30 yards before giving up. Almost 1000 yards to the creek in the back, 470-acre lake to the left a half mile or so through those wood, a lake that the creek dumps into, the creek curving around hundreds of acres such that all of this across from my house is almost surrounded by water oak, cypress and palmetto bottom. Only logical entry for man or beast is across the street from my house, as lake/creek/swamp hinder easy human entry from all other sides. None of it settled or cleared, Alabama-Coushatta Indian Reservation to the right behind it, about 40 miles. This, ALL thicket.

They call it the Big Thicket because that is what it is: you can't see thirty feet into the woods across the street. And it is that way for about fifty miles, with nothing to break it up but tree farms and sparse rural settlement, a few logging roads seldom traveled except in hunting season, under-utilized Hwy 146 about thirty miles to the west, two or three farm to market roads, the Trinity river bottom, it one of the few truly wild rivers left in the US, and, finally, Hwy 59. All of it mixed southern forests, or tree farms, seldom entered. Parks and Wildlife surveys show that the carrying capacity of the Thicket, its ability to support wildlife, is almost twice that of any other area in our state. Perfect habitat for big, carnivorous cats.

The cats can't hunt effectively in that thicket, but it makes a great place to live, thrive and raise a family. By the way, unlike everywhere else in Texas, we have no feral hog problem in Wildwood. You’d think with all of these woods, and a golf course that is constantly over-fertilized that they would be rooting the heck out of the succulent greens and fairways. Nope. Has not happened once since way back in the mid-70’s. The few hogs that are here do not even go on the golf course. Want to guess why? As prolific reproducers as feral hogs are, consider: Just how many apex predators are present in these woods to be able to effectively keep the hogs beaten back to the point that they seem to not be present in a biosphere that supports twice the life of anywhere else, and where they too should proliferate? Those hogs are the smartest animals in the woods. They know the cats go on the golf course to hunt. That is why they stay off the golf course!

On the golf course the cats have room to hunt effectively. So they have been coming into the neighborhood to feed, seen from time to time for decades, and in doing so have lost all fear of humans. Very dangerous. No telling how many times I and my neighbors have been watched unknowingly from the shadows just across the street. Their familiarity with us breeds contempt, and I could tell by this one's cold, assured stare that he had absolutely no fear of me, even when I started moving (stupid me) towards it and yelling to my neighbor, asking them if they saw the large animal behind his azalea bush. I just wonder how many times humans had unknowingly gotten between him and the prey he stalked. More important, how much had he come to loathe us, and harbor ill will towards us as a result? Before I ruined it for him, and judging by the way he begrudgingly retreated upon my approach, he had been coming down the fairway rough toward three does that were feeding on the lady's tee box to the south, saw the two dogs on the porch and became interested and just stopped to observe. He was just sitting there watching my neighbors and their dogs when I showed up and intruded upon him. I think the dogs hung him up. Easier prey than deer. Damned humans. Again. One of these days…

Dogs and cats disappear in this neighborhood every week. They disappear in yours too. How many lost dog/cat signs do you see? There are always three or four “Have you seen Fee-Fee” signs with pet pictures on them posted at the post office or the little store we have out here. We know what happened to them. Seldom are they found. And now you know what happens to them in your neighborhood. Maybe not cougar, but surely fox or coyote, or bobcat.

So, like an idiot I move laterally around some potted plants we have right there. My neighbors, caught off guard by my hollering in the night, do not hear what I said the first time, only knowing that I am hollering something at them, I hear Debbie say, “What did he say”, so I repeat even louder. By this time I am around the plants and moving toward the cat. He sits tight, never blinking, not moving a muscle, and just staring me down. My light is dim, so all I see are two green eyes, big and impossibly wide the distance between them. That distance between them immediately registered on me as indication of the size of his head, and how big he must be. I only got about ten steps towards him when he turns and pads off down the rough, north, towards the #11 green.

I rush over to my neighbors and tell them. They are shocked. I run back to the house and get my StreamLight Stinger, it always in its charger, and much more powerful than the headlight. I return to my property line and pan right first, south, away from the direction he went. That’s when I see the does about 100 yards away on the ladies tee box, south and on the other side of the fairway. All the time, again, in milli-seconds, I’m trying to reason away what I saw, trying to tell myself that it was a deer, not wanting to admit to myself what I already knew. Sighting a cougar is just so improbable. So, I’m telling this to myself as I pan the StreamLight left in the direction that he went and, there he is: he’s sitting by a white oak a little over a hundred yards north, still in the fairway rough, just staring at me. I only see big green eyes, and not his form due to the dimmer light stream at that distance. At that point I’m still trying to convince myself that I didn’t see what I saw. At the same time the adventurer in me wanted to confirm that I indeed had seen a cougar, not just two green eyes. I wanted to be sure. So again, stupid me, no gun, without considering what could happen (and I make my living in risk management no less) I start walking towards him. He lets me approach, he stoic and unmoving, sure of himself, staring me down. This time he begins leaving at a greater distance between us, about sixty yards. But because of the more powerful beam I saw his profile as he turned. I could even see the tan color of his coat. And let me tell you, this was one BIG son of a bitch.

We have all seen green cat eyes at night. These were different. For one thing, they were big, real big. Most of all though was the beautiful green color, and the unbelievable amount of light that they returned. The color was like no other green cat eyes I have ever seen. It was almost intoxicating in its color, a combination of aqua marine and jade, just beautiful. And the light they returned…they almost glowed they put off so much green light. It was like green foxfire. The illumination level of the eyes bespoke an enhanced ability to gather light, necessary for a hunter of the night. Those were the most beautiful cat eyes I have ever seen.

I’ve seen him once since. Sometimes the dog I rescued, dumped and starving, deep in the Davy Crockett National Forest, he will bark in the garage where I keep him at night. He wants to go out to pee, so I get up, or risk having to mop the garage in the morning. One night last winter I put him on the leash and we are walking out in the back yard towards the fairway about 3:20am. Because I am unabashedly scared now, I have bought a 1000 lumen ZebraLight headlamp, so bright and powerful that it kicks when I turn it on. I look up as I near the property line and there he is, fully illuminated in its powerful beam. He’s about half way across the fairway, about 50-60 yards away and walking at a fast walk, but not an “I’m scared” walk. The assured walk of an apex predator, from my nine to my one, having seen us before we saw him and started his egress from behind my neighbor’s house, about the same place that I saw him the first time. He’s looking back over his right shoulder at me the whole time, not a bit worried that he might run into something, because he is fully familiar with where he is and where he is going. Both his gait and the way he looked back over his should at me reminded me exactly of that late 60’s film clip made out in the Pacific northwest, of the Bigfoot walking away and looking back at the moviemaker over his right shoulder. Unhurried. I take Puff out to pee before bed too. Sometimes he won’t even get off the concrete patio to go into the back yard to do his business. He is a German Shepherd/Cur mix, big, fearless and protective to the point of being dangerously vicious any other time. The smartest dog that ever adopted me. He seems to know when he is out there, and he won’t get off the porch.

Since the mid-70’s I and my friends have walked and hunted the forests, sloughs and river bottoms of East Texas. What we choose to hunt is all public land, available to the many. To help avoid getting shot by drunks and neophytes we have always gone in before daylight and come out after dark. A flashlight is seldom mistaken for a deer. Stay up in our tree stands during daylight for safety. To get away from the high hunter densities common on the edges of these woods we go in deeper than most, and ALWAYS earlier. This necessitates long walks in the dark, and to achieve separation between us we split up sometime after entry. Most of the walk is usually completed alone. If you wrap enough of those Hunter Specialties bread bag-type reflective twist ties about head high to the scrub as you go in to stealthy mark your trail, it is easier to find your way out in the dark than it is in the daytime…a good flashlight will light them up and at night it looks like a well-marked highway through the woods. They are hard to see and virtually useless in the daytime, so we do not risk revealing our whereabouts to others.

So probably more than eighty percent of time that I have spent walking in the woods has been at night, without fear of getting lost, normally a person’s main fear of traversing the woods at night. I have had some interesting moments during these night walks, but never anything that really scared me. Yes, it is spooky, but that just adds to the adventure element, a necessary element for me that is missing from what otherwise passes as “hunting” on a lease. With more restrictive and finite boundaries than that of public land, less space than public land, and all the hunting club rules of a lease, I just find lease hunting to be too pedestrian of an affair. I mean, if you don’t get way back in there far enough to get the crap scared out of you at least a couple of times a day, just what kind of pansy-assed campfire stories are you going to have to tell your grandchildren anyway? Periodically for convenience we stealth camp in there if we are too far in. Sometimes it is just too far to walk out, only to have to walk back in the next morning. So we are comfortable with being in the big woods at night.

Or at least I was until I saw this cougar. I have seen others, or parts of others. Once, a long tail in the 80’s, and another time a hind quarter and a long tail in 2007 in the Davy Crockett National Forest, both at dusk. Saw the hind quarter disappear behind the limbs of a bent over sweet gum, it horizontal and chest high, having been laid over previously by the natural death and felling of a larger, long rotted and now gone tree upon it. I watched its limbs get ever closer to the ground as he walked down the trunk towards the end of it, and then they all pop back up as he jumped off the end.

I was kind of’…ALERT…after both of those…and the walks out those nights were…let’s just say that I was REAL ATTENTIVE, and I felt REAL ALIVE the whole way out, REAL ALIVE! But I wasn’t scared. (Like HELL I wasn’t!) Great adventure. I didn’t go back into that neck of the woods for a long time, but it was an adventure when I did…the kind that for me makes being in the woods worthwhile, and which makes possible campfire stories that grandkids will remember and tell their grandkids.

Almost forty years of walking the big woods and wading the river bottoms, swamps and cypress sloughs at night without getting rattled. Until now.

I’ve got to tell you, even with a lifetime of being in the woods, I am now fully rattled. This is the first year since I was fourteen that I have not bought a hunting license. I can feed my family. I don’t need to hunt that bad. That cat’s big green eyes staring at me unwaveringly has got me terminally shook up. He looked at me the way a great white looks at a cage diver with those cold uncaring shark eyes. Seeing a coiled timber rattler a foot from your boot or a cougar hind quarter at dusk has got nothing on that cat’s cold stare. And with one long fearless stare he made me his cowering bitch in my own back yard. We came face to face, and he did not blink. HE NEVER BLINKED ONE TIME. He stared me down. His confidence that he projected to me in his lengthy, unblinking stare tells me that if we would have been out in the woods he would have heard me coming, I would not have seen him, he could have silently gotten behind me, and in the end, I might have been just a pile of twitching meat.

I got in on him close, during a time in his hunt when he was weighing, “Dogs, or deer tonight?” I became a third option. I believe that he weighed the odds and I was just lucky this time, maybe due to the other human presence in his close proximity. If a man gets jumped by a smaller juvenile he is going to have his hands more than full. And God help him if it is an older cat that is hungry and due to its age unable to hunt its normal quarry effectively. He’ll be bigger, will gravitate to easier hunts, and his diminished capacity notwithstanding, he will be more than a match for any man without a gun already in his hand.

Chester Moore, longtime outdoor writer in southeast Texas and past executive editor of Texas Fish and Game Magazine grew up in this area. He was the outdoor writer for the Port Arthur News for many years. As such, Chester received many reports of cougar sightings in East Texas. He wrote an article about them. Cougar sightings are constant. They are all over East Texas, some even inside city limits. There even have been verifiable cougar sightings in the salt grass marshes of the Intercostal Waterway, and around Sabine Pass, Texas, located on the shore of the Gulf of Mexico. Last summer a County Commissioner’s horse was badly mauled by a cougar in Port Arthur Texas. That is within city limits, on the edge of the salt marshes along the coast. I saw the horse on TV. It had deep gashes in its hind quarters. They looked to be almost three inches deep. Do you think a cat confident enough to try to take on a horse is going to find any challenge in taking you or me down if it chooses to try?

As I update this it is the last day of 2017. I have a buddy who has been granted permission to hunt inside the city limits of Beaumont Texas. Right here: 30.041293, -94.160771. And not for deer. That is a Holiday Inn less than 100 yards away, and Interstate 10. La Quinta. Subway. Sonic. Pappadeaux Restaurant. Cracker Barrel. Movie theatres. New developments with $500,000 homes. A school. The county is widening the drainages in this area after Hurricane Harvey’s flooding. Those woods and pastures between the Holiday Inn and the school a mile and a half to the west have unmolested city deer in them. Massive bucks. The drainage district’s equipment operators have seen them. Somebody is also telling stories of a mother cougar with one cub. That is why several well-connected people have been granted permission to hunt here, well inside city limits. The city fathers do not want a cougar to be sighted in the nearby neighborhoods. Chances are, that female cougar has been there a while. Inside city limits. Maybe for a long time. Chances are, there are others there too.

So, they are among us. In town, and out here where I live. They are among you too, lurking unseen, in the most unlikely of places…like around your house, at night. They watch you. You just haven’t seen them, and chances are you won’t.

 

Yeah it’ll take some time for them to be aquatinted with it.

I hunt public so if I’m on the ground I usually use my mirror blind I made, it works. Or just use ground cover and sit in a leafy suit. And always stick to the shade.

 

You got any pics of the mirror blind? I thought about buying a ghost blind then I thought I could just make one... looked like people used plywood paint and some mirrored tint? Thanks!

 

My boy and his friend have a you tube channel for hunting and fishing and they pushed the ghost blind.
It does work.

 

Well, even at this late date the rut is still on in Texas. That is surprising because the does have already bunched up again. I just went in to get another cup of coffee and I looked out the kitchen window and that 9-point I previously posted is over there on the other side of the fairway in the rough along with five does, three generations of the same family unit. He is trying to break off the matriarchal doe out of the family unit, harassing and pursuing her so that she will go into estrus. And he's got something like velvet (I know it is not, but it looks like that) or debris hanging off his right horn. I couldn't retrieve the binoculars out of the Taco fast enough to see what. He was chewing a limb under his scrape over there, so I know it is on. They've gone back into the block of woods that is their bedding area, led by the doe, behavior we have noticed that a doe will stick close to where she feels safe and secure as the "feeling" come upon her. (These are retirement neighborhood deer: literally they don't get up until 7:30 any morning!). Apparently he has noticed her change and is trying to help her along. They won't readily go into estrus with their children around, probably nature's way of preventing inbreeding. I'll keep you posted.

 

I’m just starting down the archery path and admittedly it’s a little reluctantly. I’ve been a rifle hunter in my short time hunting but my daughter’s been pushing to go shoot archery. Well, today was our first lesson together and seeing how fired up she was has got me going all in now too. Guess it’s time to start down yet another expensive rabbit hole, lol.

 

Its really challenging and fun!

 

After the initial it's really not that bad. Enjoy!

 

This

 

I guess outside of the actual weapon it’s great that I already have what I need. Like most hunters, I like messing with gear so it’s just another Avenue of stuff I “need.” Haha

 

She is off to the right track. Good on you!

 

I had some trial and error making my mirror blind. In the end I used plastic cardboard 1/2” thick ‘coroplast’. An entire 4’x8’ sheet and they sell it in black buy that so you don’t have to paint the white back and sides. Tapered the sides. Don’t use window mirror tint. Use good vinyl mirror wrap. I forget how high. In the R & D phase I had accidentally shot the blind when I had a nice buck come in So I cut it shorter to about 35”, and the notches down to about 32”.


Picture of version 1.


It works. Yes the ‘cardboard’ does have a slight texture if you look at it rather closely. But I’ve had deer come up less than 8 yards no problem. Just setup in the shade. Don’t silhouette yourself. Have the sun at your back if possible, it leans down, but you don’t want it glaring the animals. If I were to make another, it would have more panels so it’s narrower to run and gun. I highly suggest a low swivel chair like a helinox. They are pricey but 100% worth the investment.

Here’s a video I made of its build progress and use hunting.

https://youtu.be/blOfi0Nt2tk

 

Ah it’s a fun adventure and it’s worth it. I’ve been slowly introducing my son as well.

 

Any recommendations on first bow? Going shopping this week and looking at bow tech and Matthews

 

I have both bows, either one would be a good choice.

 

Yes, add in Hoyt, Elite, Bear, PSE. Shoot as many bows as you can. High end, mid, and entry level. Pick the bow YOU like best. The one that seems to slide into your hand like an old glove. You'll know, it will feel.....right. Like an extension of your arm. The last bow I bought was a Hoyt HyperForce in 2018. I spent four hours in Lancaster Archery shooting different bows before I settled on that particular one.

 

I went with a Matthew’s Triax and love it. My best friend is still rocking his Bowtech Insanity and loves it. Can’t go wrong with either.

just to show you what a 2010 top of the line tech vs 2018 look like lol. That’s my Matthew’s on the left and his bow tech on the right.