Trails End Blog

We had some great footage from the 2011 season. One of the hardest things we ran across while making this video was choosing what shots to use! Hope you enjoy a peak into what Trails End is all about!

Lately, I’ve been watching a couple different television shows that teach you survival techniques, then the other day I got in Field and Stream magazine and it had stories of survival, also this month in Outdoor Life magazine, it had a shopping list for a survival trip. Then it occurred to me that as men, we love the idea of survival. There is something buried deep into a man’s soul that wants the challenge of staying alive in the woods. I’m not so sure it’s the possibility of not eating and barely sleeping for a few days, but the challenge of testing your strength and having to rise to the occasion. Men need to get into the wild; they need adventure. For me, every time I watch Bear Grylls or Survivor Man, there’s a part of me that envies those men and secretly wishes I were stranded in the woods, trying to get out.

To help you filter through the jumbled mess of the firearms industry here are some common sense-based pointers that might help out.

Walking into a big department type store to a buy a gun is the first mistake most hunters make. Those places are big, and the customer is small. The inventory is overwhelming. If you get a chance to spend time with the staff you see ineptitude. Big name retailers at best are just places to preview a gun you are thinking about purchasing. Not to mention the prices are at retail and not a penny below. Any gun I see on the shelf there I can find elsewhere at a much better price. So if you want to hear about why you should buy an overpriced gun from someone who doesn’t know anything, shop there.

One of the best places to start looking for your new gun is in your buddy’s gun cabinet. Call up your pals that hunt, ask them what they have, what they like and don’t like, and where they buy from. The Internet is also a great place to find what’s good. Reading an open forum on a gun you’re looking at is the fastest way to learn the truth about it. And I guess if you like looking at pictures you can look at a magazine, but be careful, those writers have to make their money somehow.

Your biggest ally when making a gun purchase, or any other major purchase for that matter, is patience. If you made it through last week without owning a particular gun you can make it through the next one.

Pick a price range and stick to it. A pitfall of many hunters is they are lured into buying a gun or feature they “need”. Once you spend about $450 on a rifle it’s most likely going to shoot better than you can shoot. An average bolt action will shoot under an inch at 100yrds. That means it’ll shoot a 6” group at 600yrds. 6” is the diameter of the area on a deer’s body where the most ethical shot can be made. And if you’re having to take a 600yrd shot at a deer it’s probably time to find a new hobby.

Once you’ve found that rifle that you’ve been looking for. After you know what is a good price to pay and after you’ve been patient, buy it. Don’t put it off any longer than you have to. Find the best price, whether its shipped to your gunsmith from an online store or bought from your mom and pop outfitter, buy that gun. Even if you end up buying it from a commercialized hunting store, pull the trigger and buy that thing. Get it in your hands and get to shooting. Get good with it then go kill that buck

1. Post season offers a very unique opportunity to pattern deer or other game that you wont get during the pre-season scouting. You’ll be closer to the type of game movement that occurs during season by scouting post.
2. It seems obvious, maybe a little too simple, but finding animal tracks in the snow can show you bedding and feeding areas.
3. It will also give you the best look at where the game trails are and a clear look that you wont get any other time of year.
4. If you hold a part lease on a property, without any foliage or the chance of getting shot; you can scope out where other hunters are hanging their stands and help show you in where to hang yours.
5. Post season is trophy time; over looking food plots or feeding areas can give you a great look at the game that your trail cams may have missed. If you do spot a trophy, it’ll also give you good dreams until next season.

We got set up on this nice buck after spotting him earlier that morning.

We got set up on a nice deer and blame it on buck fever, but we missed a great opportunity. However, fate would smile on us again and before the day was over, Gus killed a buck of a lifetime.

When you think of rattling in a buck you typically think of a wide eyed buck racing in head first to the fight. Rattling however, can be used far broader than just in the plain term of calling.

Besides attracting bucks, another great use of rattling is to get bucks to expose themselves. This works best on cold days when mature bucks like to lay in the sun in low grasses. Deer are natural curious animals, so the chances of a buck bedded in a field raising his head to see the commotion is pretty high. By standing on ridge tops overlooking fields on can be a very affective method for getting bedding bucks to expose themselves. Another use we like to employ rattling in is as noise cover. We’ve all made mistakes while trying to slip into our stands or while still hunting, cracking a twig or hooking a branch. When this happens a good tactic to cover up the mistake is to use the rattling horns to imitate a buck rubbing a bush. Kneel on the spot and start lightly rubbing a nearby brush just long enough to convince a nearby deer that it’s a buck ambling along; and with a little imagination you can give your set of rattling horns an array new uses.

We just checked the trail cams we set out a bit ago and got a couple of nice bucks. However, the big ones seem to be eluding the cameras so far. We were looking around this weekend got a chance to see a couple huge bucks but just glimpses as they ran through the brush to cover. We saw plenty lots of fawns so the new crops coming up looks good for the future.

For those of you coming to hunt this year if you need to fill your freezer plan on doing it here. I would like to try and harvest about 20 to 30 does this season so all the processors will be happy.

As dry as it is we still are not as bad as some of the other regions; some of the ponds are really low. There is still plenty of water for wildlife but the fish I’m sure are stressed. If we do not get rain we probably will not get to fish much this year; It’ll stress the fish even more.

This fall it looks like the acorns are going to be spotty. We’ve seen a few good sized ones mainly on big red oaks. Persimmons are also pretty bare but better than expected. The sumac this year is very limited, and we still need rain for cool season grasses.

We had a good dove shoot this weekend on wheat field after a couple of shots many birds left and did not return but still got in some good shooting.We will send more pics when we can.