Thursday, December 28, 2006
Closing The Season Like We Opened It
It appears that the 2006 season will close in much the same fashion as it opened on Oct. 1, with more east winds.
It’s difficult to compete with an east wind. We built some ground and elevated coops that are about as wind-proof as a blind can be. These are different than the old wooden coops we used for many years. Those things would allow human scent to escape.
The new ones are made of a light-weight metal, and they are tight. A carpenter made them up for me, and the shooting window height is easily adjustable. Some have vents to allow some air to escape, and to let some air in when using a small propane heater.
There hasn’t been much call lately for my Mr. Heater portable model that operates on one-pound canisters of propane. The normal winter weather with temperatures down to the low-teens hasn’t arrived as of yet, and the only good thing to come from this long spate of warm rainy weather is it is giving my rutting bucks a good chance to regain the weight they lost during the breeding period.
My new coops are waterproof, and porcupines or rodents can’t chew on them as they did the old wood models. The air-tightness of these newer blinds are what makes them so attractive. It’s possible to sit inside, watch deer through the tinted Plexiglas, and they can’t see in.
Of course, there has to be enough deer movement to keep the animals moving, and this year’s weather patterns during the fall has left much to be desired. I wonder if we’ll every get snow and cold weather this year.
Playing the wind is such an important part of deer hunting, and we’ve had to move some stands that just were not working this year. The reason is the cursed east wind.
I suspect that we’ll continue to see more east winds in the future, and would be greatly surprised if we were to revert back to 10 years ago when very little east wind was seen and the southwest to northwest air currents were the norm during October and November, and then more northwest and north winds were noted in December.
We can’t change the weather patterns or wind directions, and if it hadn’t been for my new air-tight coops this year, I’m sure our hunting success would have been much lower.—The Whitetail Wizard