Well it is Wednesday of the first week of moose season. Big E and Chet went scouting Sunday and saw only a cow and a calf. Monday they road for almost 200 miles in Wildlife Management district 4, which is the Telos road and connecting woods roads all the way to Canada. For those who have watched the "American Loggers" on the Discovery channel, you may know the road system as the "Golden Road", named for the millions of acres of prime woodlands once owned by Great Northern Paper Company. We have taken 2 nice bulls out of the area in 03 and 09, mine and Big Es. However this is day three of the hunt and they have not even seen a bull. Mother Nature continues to screw with us as the temps have gone back to warm and muggy for the week. As most know, the fun is so over when the trigger is pulled; these are very large animals and they don't load themselves! With these temperatures they need to be taken care of quickly so not to have any spoilage of meat. I have not been going along with Big E and the Crosbys this week as there is much to do here as well. I have been going out to the bear bait sites that are out and away picking up treestands and barrels, cleaning up any debris. We have had trouble in the past with treestand thieves therefore because we have primarily purchased stands versus the wooden home made ones which weigh a ton it can get extremely costly. There is not much folks will not steal in these hard economic times, whether they try to resell them, or scrap them for the metal. I also have been trying to get the canning from the garden done bit by bit inbetween everything else going on.
Yesterday I picked up three sites that still had cameras on them, one being the site I sat out on for 2 nights only to discover from the camera directly after that it was being bogarted by a big mean porcupine! The critter held off 7 raccoons all at once and there was one picture where a bear just simply moseyed on by without any challenge. Therefore much to my surprise when we went in, the barrel was turned away from us and I thought well maybe a bear had finally come into the bait. I began taking the camera down when Jeremy jumped back and yelled. I turned to see into the barrel as he had turned in around and low and behold, my porcupine!! Well he didn't want to give up residency and was acting quite perturbed with us. Unfortunately for him, I didn't have time to just let him hold squatters rights. Might I have possibly been revengeful considering the time I spent in vain? Maybe. However it is what it is and the porcupines that we have seen this year will not be effected much by the loss of this one as we have seen more porcupines this year than in many previous years. When I checked the camera photos, no bears had come back, only this mean porcupine and the raccoons. In fact the site I sat out on the last night with great hopes that the big bear would make one more appearance was also dominated by other critters, ravens. The one other site with a camera had a bear come in once just after midnight, then 2 days later a repeat, however they didn't stay at the site. This only adds more to the frustrations we incurred as to where did all the bears go? Each site had several bear visiting and baits were getting absolutely hammered prior to the point we were baiting twice a much as we usually do to keep the sites well fed. I have continued to compile information from other guides and services, as well as just some local hunters and more experienced the same as we did with only a scattered few doing much better. However I have yet to hear of anyone having a banner year of it. Of course there are those that will lie too. Well must be off to gather more stands...work,work,work!
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