Unless you just like slug hunting, may I suggest a Marlin 45-70 LA. Is what I use for the brush country we reside in where 100 yards is about as far as your going to be shooting.
Up here in the northlands (Minnesota and Iowa in particular), we're restricted to slug hunting in certain zones due to the flat land and the abundance of farm houses and other hunters. Rifles are vetboten (as you would say) for deer hunting except during muzzle loader season.
He'll that's coolly understandable, Damn that frigid land up there though...believe I'd be inclined to stay by the fireplace...
http://www.boone-crockett.org/news/featured_story.asp?area=news&ID=315 Potential new B&C archery world record elk taken in Montana during the 2016 season measured 430 inches. Dude did it on a solo hunt on public land with a bow. Wow.
NoleNBlue Have you ever been to the Bear factory in Gainesville? I'm going to be there for work next week and will have some time to kill between the end of my deposition and my flight home. It looks like I'm going to be over by it. Wondering if it's worth checking out.
I signed the petition, but is there any chance this is being done to nip the grazing rights thing, eg. Cliven Bundy et al, in the bud? Selling that land would make it so that it's no longer federal free-use and they'd have to either buy it or pay for their grazing rights. Just a thought.
Giving an option to sell it to them means it's not public anymore though. However you slice it you're selling off federal land for economic use/development. I'm not sure what exactly is included in Nebraska but I have hunted that public land for 2 years (or land in that general vicinity). It's amazingly beautiful and anybody can go any time they want. And this wouldn't even make the Federal government money because the government recently valued the land at $0.
I told Auburn this very thing tonight. After informing the sweet, young lady that I no longer am willing to donate to Auburn until Dr. Gogue and Jay Jacobs are memories, I only contribute to conservation and anti-Trump causes.
There isn't a large population of hunters and fisherman compared to the general public but they're active and loud and have weapons so neat.
Hoover tactical firearms has a pretty cool 3D archery range. Not cheap at $15 for about twenty arrows but gives you a variety of targets at different ranges. I usually go a couple of times leading up to hunting season.
https://www.wsj.com/articles/fragile-hunting-grounds-in-the-southeasts-quail-belt-1486048576?tesla=y Fragile Hunting Grounds in the Southeast’s ‘Quail Belt’ The expense of maintaining enormous quail-hunting plantations—many held by the same families for generations—is leading some owners to sell or donate large swaths of timberland for conservation. Spoiler Straddling the border of Georgia and Florida are 300,000 acres of pristine pines and rolling, grassy hills. Hunting parties traverse the grounds, accompanied by mule-drawn, 100-year-old wagons, trained dogs and staff on horseback in search of wild bobwhite quail. Plantation homes sit at the end of long driveways, invisible to passersby. The region is called the Red Hills, an area designated one of America’s “Last Great Places” by the Nature Conservancy. Plantation owners want to keep the wide-open spaces undeveloped, partly to preserve quail habitats for hunting, but largely to act as stewards of the land and homes that have been in their families for generations. “We want to make the world safe for bobwhite quail,” says Charles Chapin III, a retired banker who lives in Oldwick, N.J., and spends four months a year on the quail-hunting plantation in Thomasville, Ga., developed by his grandfather at the turn of the century. Mr. Chapin, 80 years old, is secretary of the 100-year-old Field Trial Club, which holds hunting-dog competitions that double as social gatherings for plantation owners. The Red Hills region straddles the border of Georgia and Florida, with over 300,000 acres of rolling hills and plantations that include wild quail-hunting operations. Photo: Betsy Hansen for The Wall Street Journal Urban sprawl, spreading north from a rapidly growing Tallahassee, Fla., and south from Atlanta, poses the biggest threat to land conservation. But landowners face another kind of trial: the financial onus of maintaining a quail-hunting plantation, which can range from hundreds of thousands to over $1 million annually. MORE FROM MANSION For History Buffs, Civil War-Era Homes for Sale Luxury-Home Developers’ Latest Pitch: Unspoiled Nature Horse Lovers Pony Up for Equestrian-Friendly Communities “We take it one year at a time,” says Howard Love, 56, a tech entrepreneur in San Francisco who grew up hunting on the 4,500-acre Loveridge Plantation, established near Miccosukee, Fla., by his grandfather, George Love, chairman of Pittsburgh based Consolidated Coal and Chrysler. He and his four siblings divvy up vacation time in the four-bedroom main house and several cottages, and selectively lease the property to acquaintances who are quail hunters to help offset operating costs. To reduce the financial burden, many plantation owners have opted to put conservation easements on their land, foregoing the right to development, in exchange for tax breaks. Oak Hill Plantation Inside Oak Hill Plantation, an 8,000-square-foot, five-bedroom house near Lamont, Fla., that sits on 1,000 acres. The property has a conservation easement that is worth an estimated $10 million, agents say.PHOTOS: BETSY HANSEN FOR THE WALL STREET JOURNAL In 1958, a non-profit called Tall Timbers Research Station was established by plantation owners to study the impact of fire management. In 1990, the organization added a conservation program, largely driven by property owners, and both parts make up what is now the Tallahassee-based Tall Timbers Research Station & Land Conservancy. While it is sometimes called the “quail belt,” the region is also home to some 64 threatened and endangered plant and animal species, and is a last vestige of longleaf pine, which some owners sustainably harvest for profit. Tall Timbers advocates managed burning of forests and lobbies to keep land holdings contiguous and undeveloped. As a result, about 40% of the Red Hills plantation acreage is now under conservation easements. More recently, Tall Timbers started purchasing easements from landowners who don’t find the tax breaks enough of an incentive. Inside Some Hunting Plantations in the Southeast Like the beloved antiques inside these homes, old traditions take a central role in hunting plantations. 1 of 21 Abby and John Irby, part of the group of investors that bought Tarva three years ago. DEBORAH WHITLAW LLEWELLYN FOR THE WALL STREET JOURNAL Hunters in the Red Hills area, which covers parts of Georgia and Florida, seek wild bobwhite quail. DEBORAH WHITLAW LLEWELLYN FOR THE WALL STREET JOURNAL Hunters in the Red Hills area, which covers parts of Georgia and Florida, seek wild bobwhite quail. DEBORAH WHITLAW LLEWELLYN FOR THE WALL STREET JOURNAL The genesis of the Red Hills quail-hunting plantations came in the 1880s, when northerners in search of warmth and fresh air vacationed in Thomasville because it was as far south as the railway went back then. The town became a winter resort for wealthy industrialists and financiers. Enamored with the area, they began buying up economically bereft antebellum cotton farms and converting them to leisure hunting entities called sporting plantations. In recent years there was a debate among real-estate brokers about whether to refer to these properties as “reserves” rather than “plantations” given the word’s association with slavery. Instead, some just dropped the word plantation or stress the history of how the ancestors of the current owners came from the North and bought them after the Civil War. An exception to this is Tarva, a 4,968-acre plantation currently for sale for $21 million that’s located in Albany, Ga., north of Thomasville. The marketing materials say the 1836 plantation provided crops to feed the Confederate Army. One of the guesthouses is an old slave cabin, says John Irby, one of several investors who bought it three years ago and restored the homes and the quail-hunting operations. Tarva, a 4,968-acre plantation in Albany, Ga., is listed for $21 million. A group of investors, including John and Abby Irby, bought the property three years ago and restored the homes and quail-hunting operations. PHOTO: DEBORAH WHITLAW LLEWELLYN FOR THE WALL STREET JOURNAL (2) Mr. Irby says he’s confident the expense of restoring the habitat for quail hunting will pay off. “It’s considerably more valuable with wild quail than it is without them,” he says. About two-thirds of the 200 plantations in the region between Tallahassee and Thomasville still belong to descendants of the original families, says Jon Kohler of Lamont, Fla.-based brokerage firm Jon Kohler & Associates and co-founder of LandLeader, a land-marketing company. Until recently, old quail-hunting plantations rarely went up for sale, Mr. Kohler says. They were either divided by families or changed hands quietly among friends and acquaintances. “It was an unspoken rule not to sell to anyone outside the circle,” says Mr. Kohler. The recession and real-estate crash in 2008 changed that, with more than a dozen plantations hitting the market over the next several years. Yet despite the increased inventory, the average price for fully improved properties has stayed right around the $5,300 an acre, says Ben McCollum, founder of plantation brokerage firm the Wright Group in Thomasville. Since December 2012, 15 plantations have sold and there are six on the market now, four of which have conservation easements on all or a portion of the property, according to the Wright Group. Mill Pond Plantation At Mill Pond Plantation, built in 1905 near Thomasville, Ga., mule-drawn wagons still accompany hunting parties. The courtyard has a retractable roof.PHOTOS: DEBORAH WHITLAW LLEWELLYN FOR THE WALL STREET JOURNAL One reason for the price stability is social pressure. Real-estate brokers steer sales to buyers who understand the concept of “land stewardship”, says Elliott Davenport, a real-estate broker who owns Chattanooga, Tenn.-based Wings Group. In recent years that’s meant the kind of uber wealthy who can afford to keep the properties intact, like hedge-fund manager Paul Tudor Jones, media mogul Ted Turner and L Brands chairman and CEO Leslie Wexner. Former chairman and CEO of the Coca-Cola Co. , Doug Ivester, owns a plantation, as does Bob Williamson, who started Horizon Software. A 6,000-acre plantation called Longpine sat on the market for about five years before Texas businessman Rick Leverich bought it in 2014, paying $28 million. The Wright Group has a $23 million listing for a 4,988-acre former cotton plantation called El Destino east of Tallahassee that’s been on the market two years, despite three offers near the $4,695-an-acre asking price. Redmond Ingalls, a 40-year-old investor who is a descendant of the Harkness and Taft families of Ohio, inherited the plantation with his siblings and cousins. “It’s important to evaluate how a sale to a developer, for instance, could impact our other landholdings,” he said. “Plantations are rare and, furthermore, each property is unique. The right individual who loves the outdoors will understand this uniqueness and it will generally be well reflected in their offer.” Greenwood Plantation, the longtime home of John Hay Whitney (1904-1982), former U.S. ambassador to Britain, was on the market in Thomasville several years before Emily “Paddy” Vanderbilt Wade—whose family owns a nearby plantation—paid just over $22 million in 2015 to purchase roughly 4,000 acres through a conservancy foundation she created. Loveridge Plantation The 4,500-acre Loveridge Plantation near Miccosukee, Fla., uses horses and bird dogs for quail hunting. The owners selectively lease the property to help offset operating costs.PHOTOS: DEBORAH WHITLAW LLEWELLYN FOR THE WALL STREET JOURNAL Greenwood’s 1830s “Gone With the Wind” style mansion and the surrounding 235 acres went a few months later for $1.3 million to a group of investors that included Max Beverly, former mayor of Thomasville. Mr. Beverly declined to say how the land will be used, but investors cleaned up the landscape, which alone costs hundreds of thousands of dollars annually to maintain, and the exterior of the house. The interior, gutted by a fire in 1933, remains unfinished. Not all the Red Hills plantation homes look like Greenwood. The house at Mill Pond Plantation, built in 1905, is a 10,000-square-foot Mediterranean-style house that has a central courtyard with a glass roof that retracts using cranks. The large steel beams supporting the roof were brought in by a team of oxen, says Ellery Sedgwick, 74, who grew up visiting his grandparents there and who now owns it with his siblings. And not all the houses are old: Ginger Wetherell, a politician turned consultant, and her husband, T.K. Wetherell, former president of Florida State University, in the 1990s built a new 8,000-square-foot, five-bedroom house near Lamont, Fla., on their 1,000-acre Oak Hill Plantation, which is surrounded by a 33,000-acre plantation owned by Ted Turner. The property has a conservation easement, worth an estimated $10 million, agents say. Architect Charles Olson, of Thomasville-based Olson Architects, says the homes are “little hidden jewels.” No matter what style the exterior, the interiors tend to have an English countryside look, says Susan Lapelle, an Atlanta-based interior designer.
Not sure if yall need this late in the season, but Midway has all their waterproof bird hunting apparel on crazy discounts. I lost all my hunting gear in the fire, so ive been looking for deals. Just got a Drake waterproof jacket for 48.89, down from 299.99
Finally getting around to cooking my bear steaks tomorrow night. Anyone have experience cooking bear before? Right now I'm planning on doing them sous vide at 146 for 2-3 hours and then finish them in a cast iron pan. Thought I'd see if anyone had any tips about internal temp before I did it though...FDA recommends 160 but most of the more recent articles say that trich can be killed instantly at 144. They've also been frozen for roughly 4 months which is supposed to render the the larvae inactive. I'm a little paranoid after Rinella's video
Yeah I may just cook it to 160 just for the peace of mind. Don't get my post wrong though, I've read about every article I can find on trichinosis and a lot say that it's killed instantly at 144. The USDA has pretty strong reputation for being overly cautious which seems to explain the 160 recommendation. I just wanted to see if anyone in here had any personal experience with it instead of relying solely on these articles.
I've had my share of bear meat over the years, almost exclusively ground and always made sure it was at least 160. Bear and moose are notorious for carrying shit.
To clarify, if it's frozen through for 20 days or more (he said 6 months), it's inert (i.e. won't affect you). There's more scientific literature on that than cooking temperature.
From the CDC; it makes no sense to me why you would have to cook wild game to 160 and domestic cuts to 145 for the same strain which is typically Trichinella Spiralis. For Whole Cuts of Meat (excluding poultry and wild game) Cook to at least 145° F (63° C) as measured with a food thermometer placed in the thickest part of the meat, then allow the meat to rest* for three minutes before carving or consuming. For Ground Meat (including wild game, excluding poultry) Cook to at least 160° F (71° C); ground meats do not require a rest* time. For All Wild Game (whole cuts and ground) Cook to at least 160° F (71° C).
Commercial meat production methods and regulations make trichinosis from its consumption almost non-existent.
If anybody is interested here's one of the better articles I found on it. Hank Shaw Spoiler ON TRICHINOSIS IN WILD GAME By Hank Shaw 56 Comments Photo by Hank Shaw I don’t think I go a month without someone asking me about food safety and wild game, and by far the most common questions are about trichinosis, notably in relation to wild boar and bear meat. I’ve studied this issue for several years, and I find no real issue — provided you know a few ground rules. Allow me to lay out what I know to hopefully put your mind at ease. Let’s start with what we’re talking about. While it is certainly possible to get food poisoning from wild game, it is actually quite rare for people to pick up E.coli 0157, salmonella, toxoplasmosis or brucellosis from game meats. And when it does happen, the cause is usually related to contamination by the hunter or whomever dresses and processes the meat. The more pressing concern is trichinosis, a condition you develop from eating still-active larvae of the trichinae parasite, which lives in the flesh of primarily carnivores and omnivores, although there are a few stray reports of it occurring in deer. Note my use of the phrase “still-active” in that last sentence; it’s important and I will explain below. As it happens, the trichinae parasite is extremely rare in wild game and it is even more rare for anyone to become sick with trichinosis from eating game. According to a Centers for Disease Control study that surveyed incidence of the disease from 2008 to 2012, there were only 84 cases of trichinosis in all of America. Of those, 43 were eating wild game. That’s 43 people in a five-year period, and 30 of those 43 were in one incident, an unfortunate party I’ll describe in detail later. Consider that number when you think of the millions of people who eat wild game every year. Photo Courtesy of the CDC Of course, if you are one of those unlucky few, trichinosis is not to be trifled with. A heavy dose of antibiotics will indeed cure the symptoms — diarrhea and nausea, muscle pain, weakness, even nervous system and heart problems — the larval cysts (pictured at right) will remain in your muscle tissue — meaning that if someone were to eat you, they’d get trich, too. Trippy, eh? Oh, and if you never seek treatment for the illness, it can be fatal. Bottom line is that trich is no fun. It is a fact that bear and cougar meat are the most prominent vectors for trichinosis in North America. Pigs, which are what most people think of when they think of trich, are actually not commonly infected. Trichinosis from domesticated pork is all-but absent these days, which is why the USDA — an organization well known to be overly cautious and is believed by many to be scientifically suspect when it comes to meat safety in the real world — dropped the “safe” cooking temperature of pork from 160°F to 145°F in 2011. Wild pigs are a bit more of an issue. Depending on what state you live in, the incidence of infection varies. One study showed a 13 percent incidence of trichinae parasites in North Carolina, which is more or less the commonly agreed on rate of infection. Interestingly, other than two freak appearances of the Eurasian Trichinae pseudospiralis, which shouldn’t actually exist in North America, Texas hogs appear to be largely free of the parasite, according to this research. And guess what? According to that CDC study I linked to above, only six cases of trichinosis were tied to eating wild pigs. Six. In five years. You have a better chance of getting struck by lighting on a boat, falling over and then being eaten face-first by a shark. Bear meat, not pork, is the real problem. (As is mountain lion meat, but only a very few people eat that.) Bears appear to be heavily infected by the parasite, so much so that you should assume the meat is infected. In that CDC study, 41 of the 84 total cases of trichinosis reported in America between 2008 and 2012 were from bear meat. That is still a tiny fraction of the thousands of people who eat bear every year, but it’s enough to warrant further discussion. Some bad news: There is not just one trichinella parasite. There are many. Here in North America we have five major species: Trichinae spiralis, which is the most common and hangs out with pigs for the most part; then T. nativa, T-6 and T. murrelli, which are almost always found in wild game — chiefly bears. There is a wide body of research covering T. spiralis, and it is this research that produced the admonition to freeze meat for a month before eating it raw or undercooked comes from. Specifically, it assumes that if you freeze wild boar or some bear meat for 20 days at 5°F or lower the parasites will be rendered inert. Note that freezing will not kill them, but it will prevent the wee beasties from attaching to you. Keep in mind that the 20 days start when the core of the meat reaches 5°F, which can actually take several days in most freezers. That’s why I freeze for at least a month with bear or wild boar I plan on making into salami, just to be sure. All of this applies to T. murrelli, too. You can also kill any trichinae parasite by heat. And the “kill temperature” is a helluva lot cooler than you might think. The origin of the odd USDA mandated internal cooking temperature of 160°F appears to be the government trying to account for inaccuracy and idiocy. (That temperature is more relevant for salmonella than trich.) The actual temperature that kills the trichinella parasite is 137°F, which happens to be medium-rare. But be forewarned: Every iota of meat must hit that temperature to kill the parasite, and cooking bear meat to medium-rare isn’t a guarantee of that. In fact, my friend Steve Rinella and his crew ate rare bear meat in Alaska recently and most of them got trichinosis. Steve did a video about the experience here. You can certainly make medium-rare bear meat safe using the sous vide method, but you’d need to hold the meat at 137°F for an hour or so to make sure — and then you’d want to sear it on the outside to kill any possible bacteria that survived that low temp. As for me? I like to sous vide bear at about 145°F for an hour or more, which is still a lovely tender and pink piece of meat, and is safe to eat that way. Unfortunately, the two trichinella species most associated with bears are immune to freezing. These are T. nativa, the Canadian and Alaskan species, and T-6, the dominant species of parasite from a line stretching from about Washington state across to Maine down to the Rockies, the Great Plains, the Midwest and the Northeast — really where all the good bear hunting is. Only southern states appear to be immune to this species. (Here is a map from a Stanford study.) The CDC survey noted one particularly nasty outbreak of trichinosis, interestingly in my home state of California, in 2008. Thirty of 38 people eating undercooked black bear got the disease. It is the first known occurrence of humans picking up trich from T. murrelli in America; this is the easily killed strain that likes our warmer states. Everyone who got the disease ate either undercooked or raw (?!) black bear meat at a party. This is an excerpt from the investigation: Interviews revealed that the bear had been legally hunted a few days before the event in a mountainous region in California about 100 miles east of Humboldt County. The bear was reportedly lying down when shot and appeared to be sick; it was butchered on a table that was later used to serve food. Raw dishes were prepared with chopped meat, and cooked bear meat dishes included stir fries, lentil-based stews, and rice/meat mixtures. Clearly there are all kinds of food safety issues going on here, and the tragedy is that they technically could have made their raw bear dishes had they frozen the meat for a month first — the strain of trichinae that attacked them can be rendered inert when frozen. Finally, let me address the making of salami and other cured meats with wild boar and bear. Photo by Holly A. Heyser Obviously these are, for the most part, not cooked. So how can they be safe? Culinary Science Professor Bob del Grosso says the exact mechanism is hazy, but this is the working theory: The literature is a bit unclear on how this works. However, it suggests that it is not the salt that kills the larvae, it is protein-digesting enzymes released by fermentation bacteria. I suspect that what happens is more complicated and looks something like this: The salt lowers the water activity of the meat, which means that less water is available to the larvae. The fermentation bacteria produce acid which also lowers the water activity while the acid wrecks the metabolism of the larvae which, like many living things needs to be close to pH 7 (neutral) to work properly. All of that, plus the enzymes, toxic oils from the herbs, etc. plus nitric oxide from the nitrate, beat the hell out of the trich. All these processes going on should prevent you from actually getting trichinosis, which is why people have been safely making salami with wild and domesticated pigs for 2000 years. But you need to be a careful curer of meats and not take shortcuts. The key figure here is at least 2 percent salt by weight of the total meat and fat. So if you make a 5-pound batch of salami, as I often do, you will need at least 45 grams of salt to be totally safe. I tend to use a bit more, like 50+ grams to get close to 2 1/2 percent by weight. (Here is the relevant study of this.) Now here’s the caveat: While there has been lots of study done on salt curing and T. spiralis, there’s been almost nothing done on salt’s effect on the other species of the parasite. So it’s all deduction when it comes to bear charcuterie. Wild boar charcuterie should follow the same guidelines as those for domesticated pork, because they have easily killed strains of the parasite. Even though may not think you need to, out of an abundance of caution, my advice is to freeze wild boar and bears shot in warm-weather states before starting your salami, and to avoid straight-up salami with bear meat in colder areas — unless the meat is cooked somehow. So that’s what I know. To sum up: Most wild pigs don’t have the parasite. But since trichinosis is no fun, it’s best to freeze your meat for 30 days to a month just to be sure — then you can eat it like domestic pork, which is to say a nice 145°F at the center. For salami, you technically don’t have to freeze wild boar, so long as your salt concentration hits 2 1/2 percent and you cure the meat for at least two weeks. But freezing isn’t a bad idea. Finally, for bear, best to cook it through no matter what you do, unless you are in the South, in which case freeze and treat as pork. Use common sense. A great many of the illnesses hunters and game processors do contract are from contact with the innards/blood/infected parts of the animals. If you have any cuts on your hands at all, wear gloves to gut and process your animals. And if you nick yourself, wash with soap and water and get a glove. And if you don’t nick yourself, wash with soap and water afterwards. I know, I shouldn’t have to say that, but several case studies I read involved people gutting a pig and then going out for a sandwich. There was stuff on their hands and they ended up eating it with their burger. No bueno. Nothing you do is without risk. Eating is no exception. I hope this allays any undue fears about getting trichinosis from wild game. Follow a few simple rules are you should be fine.
Also, I forgot to mention that I discovered Hank Shaw has a podcast now http://honest-food.net/hunt-gather-talk-podcast/