The Mythical “Deer Calendar”
By Rick, our Outdoor Blog Writer
I’ve heard for most of my life that, come deer season, all the deer try to find some new place to dwell. Furthermore, they have their own “deer” calendar tacked up on a tree somewhere to tell them when to do that. As fanciful as that notion is, it is a fact that more deer end up as roadkill during hunting season than the normal rate for the rest of the year. Maybe they should have started their trip sooner. It never ceases to amaze me that a buck can dodge a one ounce, 12 gauge slug moving at something over 1500 feet per second and stand still when they are in the way of a car whose driver is trying desperately to come to a complete stop.
One of the local parks recently held their annual program for women hunters. I applaud such work. The DNR folks (who we used to call “rabbit rangers”) work hard at expanding the sport and the effort is paying off. My wife doesn’t like shooting large bore, though. The recoil is always too much of a surprise and she always flinches. So if anybody is going to bring home the venison to this household, it will likely be me. On the subject of my wife’s shooting, however, she is extremely accurate with rim fire rifles and “red dot” sights. I set her up with a cheap import .22 autoloader and an equally cheap import red dot sight. Thankfully, the combo holds its boresight really well. I had her practicing on one inch dots at fifty yards. By the third ten round magazine, she was hitting the dot with every squeeze of the trigger. She doesn’t have the patience to sit and wait on game, however, so anything she shoots will be nuisance or agressive animals. No matter how many legs they have. With that kind of shooting skill, she can make a .22 a reliably lethal round.
The deer calendar tale always kind of reminds me of the old Bugs Bunny cartoons where Bugs happens upon a sign tacked to a tree.
It sucks to be Elmer.
I think it’s time somebody came up with a calendar with pictures of women hunting. They have women and cars, women and guns, even women and women. But I’ve never seen a calendar of women actually hunting.