Beginners luck
Today was the first day of
regular deer hunting season around here.
I noticed two eating our
parsley plants around lunch time and decided to get the gun.
The biggest one took off like
a flash, but the smaller one hesitated at following what may have been
his mom for just a second when he saw me. He leaped over the garden
fence and landed in the narrow chicken pasture enclosure by the coop.
He tried a few times to jump over the second fence but couldn't get
enough of a running start to clear it. I know it wasn't very sportsmanlike
of me, but I got as close as I could, braced myself on a large stump
and killed my first deer, which turned out to be a small buck with no
antlers.
We spent the rest of the
afternoon dressing it out.
One less garden predator and
some fresh pasture fed venison to go in the freezer equals a pretty
good day in my book.
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About us: Anna Hess and Mark Hamilton spent over a decade living self-sufficiently in the mountains of Virginia before moving north to start over from scratch in the foothills of Ohio. They've experimented with permaculture, no-till gardening, trailersteading, home-based microbusinesses and much more, writing about their adventures in both blogs and books.
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Congratulations! Don't feel bad: you helped keep the herd healthy by eliminating some genes for "Slow & Dumb."
You may find this essay amusing: http://www.motherearthnews.com/the-happy-homesteader/girl-out-of-water-i-hate-bambi.aspx
First of all, CONGRATULATIONS! It's fun to hunt, although people who don't hunt never understand that the chore has only begun once you kill the buggers.
Second, sportsmanlike my ass. Deer are not very smart animals. If I could hunt out my back door like you did, I'd do it all season long. The herd is now as large as it was when the pilgrims first set step on plymouth rock. Many are killed and injured every year in car accidents. And, as you've mentioned, they like to nibble on our food. If you get an easy shot at something that's hurting your yield, I say you take it and that's the most sportsman thing you can do. Millionaires can go seek their bullshit sportsman trophies of ram sheep in the Rockies. I'll keep filling my freezer with tasty, yet dumb, bambies.
Finally, young deer will produce a smaller yield, but a much more tender type of meat. So I think your entrance into hunting is a trifecta! Again, congratulations and I hope you enjoy some venison stew very soon!
Jeff --- Each state (and each county within the state) has their own rules. In our county, the whole rifle season is either-sex deer hunting. (See http://www.dgif.virginia.gov/hunting/regulations/deer.asp for other Virginia areas.) In all of Virginia, antlerless bucks can be killed any time you could kill does:
"Button bucks or male fawns will have bumps or knobs, known as pedicels, where the antlers will grow but the bumps or knobs do not break the skin or protrude above the skin. The skin is covering the entire pedicel. These look like buttons on the deer's head thus the therm button bucks. Button bucks are considered antlerless deer and are tagged with an either-sex deer tag or an antlerless deer tag." (From http://www.dgif.virginia.gov/hunting/regulations/antlers.pdf)
So, no worries about an antlerless buck!
Anonymous --- That's exactly how I feel --- good food on the freezer is what really matters. Our region actually has considerably more deer than were here when the settlers landed, and our game and fisheries department is actively working to increase our deer population. So I say anything that lowers the numbers of deer is good. Too bad we're not good enough shots to get all 10 deer we could legally kill during rifle season. That would be a pretty long week, but would provide just about all the red meat we'd need for a year.
Ten deer? Wow! That is a lot of red meat! Definitely make some summer sausages!
Here in Japan, if you can get a licence (which is really hard to do) you can take as many as you can shoot. Deer, boar, pheasant, duck, no limits. but like I said, very few people can/want to get a licence.
I just hope that someone comes and takes care of my wild boar problem. Buggers love any kind of root crop- which means all of the fall garden...
I agree --- even if all ten deer are quite small, that would fill up a small chest freezer like ours completely!
I read about your wild boar on your blog --- terrible! It's funny how every part of the world has their own bane. In Australia, it seems to be cockatoos and a South African homesteader I read battles baboons and monkeys! Puts my deer woes in perspective.
The bane of my garden here in Australia (just south of Sydney) is bower birds. They eat anything with young and tender leaves (lettuce, silver beet, even bean leaves) and pretty much all kinds of fruit (tomatoes, nectarines, peaches, strawberries, etc). They're beautiful birds, and protected by law, so all we can do is try to net against them. They're smart enough to climb under nets, though, so it's not easy!
Cockatoos come occasionally and strip our citrus trees - they destroy whole fruits just to eat the seeds in the centre. Happily, they learn which trees have seedless fruit and leave them alone.
I used to live further down the coast, where kangaroos were a real problem. Very similar to your deer, I suspect.
I'm just glad I don't have to deal with elephants or any kind of primates. They'd be difficult!