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last day of the NY season

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adkmountainken

40 Cal.
Joined
Sep 11, 2004
Messages
637
Reaction score
290
Location
the great Adirondacks
well today is the last day of the NY season. i will be out for the morning trying my luck. did not hunt anywhere near the hours i wanted to this year but thats how it goes. still have a good chance today though. good luck to all!
 
What was the temp up there; fellow over-taxed New Yorker? Had two below here near Cooperstown. But we had seven below in early Dec. I refer to this season as "zip-gun" season.

TinStar
 
Ken, Where in New York are you hunting? My syllabus says Dec. 21 for the southern zone, and the northern zone is either October, 22, or December 12, depending on where you hunt. Your comment caused me to double check :grin: . Good luck
Robby
 
Hi Ken...Mike here...remember me from Trad Gang? Been a couple years. You are welcome to hunt in PA with me between Christmas and New Years with the flintlock.
 
Tuesday in the Southern Zone.

I saw about eight doe/antlerless and zero bucks for late m/l. Already had a doe in the freezer from regular so it was a non-muzzleloader year for me.

Had some good, if cold, days in the woods.
 
I managed to take a doe on the last day with my .50 white mountain flinter...65 yard shot. I used a saboted hornady 240 grain xtp hollow point. I normally shoot roundball in the late season, but wanted to try this bullet out. It did ok, but nothing stellar. I think i'm going to go back to a heavy conical next year...just need to find one that loads easy in my rifle. I used to use the conicals, and broke a stock on a Cherokee trying to reload one time. Went to roundball afte that, but have more confidence in a heavier chunk of lead....good luck to all still at it this year!
 
Congratulations on a successful hunt. Have you ever done any penetration tests using RBs, vs. Conicals? Or expansion tests? I cannot fathom why anyone would want to shoot a heavy conical at a deer, unless its " Way-over-there" beyond the normal effective range of a PRB. The Round Lead Ball gives superior expansion, and penetration on deer at normal( Under 100 yards)BP ranges. Since most deer are taken under 50 yds, the PRB is even more effective. Its not uncommon for a heavy conical to pass completely through a deer and show no expansion whatsoever. The closer the deer is to the muzzle, the more likely this will happen.

You are obviously one of the new guys coming to BP shooting sports from the many who have grown up shooting CF rifles. Most of us have already walked the path you are on. Do the testing for penetration and expansion. The medium is not all that important, as long as you use some gun, caliber, and bullet you have confidence in that will kill deer, shooting into the medium, so you have a "standard " against which to compare projectiles from MLers. I have done this with bundles or newspapers, or magazines, with sand bags, and with 1" pine boards spaced 1 inch apart. I have shot bullets into drywall, plywoods, solid wood stumps, 2 by's, water, ballistics gel, and probably many other mediums I simply don't recall off-hand. I even helped a friend fire different rounds into a "bullet-proof vest". When you see what a PRB can do in penetration and expansion in a variety of mediums, and then actually use it when hunting, I think you will stop using conicals in BP guns.

BP Hunting is all about Accurate placement of your ball in the game, for a quick, humane kill. You don't get extra shots, normally, so its not about how many rounds you can take in a magazine or "speed loader". Its a ONE-SHOT sport. If you are hunting bigger, tougher game, you get a larger bore rifle. That is what makes it so different, compared to using CF rifles to hunt.

Best wishes to you on your journey of discovery, and on your next hunt. :thumbsup:
 
Thanks for the congrats. I agree with what you've said. The problem for me lies in the very short barrel of my rifle. I simply don't get the velocity out of a 20" barrel, and so i don't get "typical" energy out of a 180 grain prb. I want a heavier bullet to maximize my kinetic energy equation, given the fixed velocity that i get. Having a bullet pass through without transferring all energy isn't ideal, but there's something to be said for 2 holes and bloodtrails.
 
Maybe something, but not much. If you place the ball right, the deer is going to die in a matter of yards. Bloodtrails are icing on the cake. Most of the time, the thick fur on a deer's hide soaks up a lot of blood before the first drops hit the ground. Lear to read and follow Deer Tracks. to find the game.

The only deer I killed that left a double bloodtrail was one I shot through both lungs, and an aorta, so that the heart continued to beat, and shove spurts of blood out of both holes. She made it about 25 yds down the side of a steep ravine, before piling up at the bottom.

A 20 inch barrel is only good for easy carrying in thick woods. Shots in such conditions will be well under 50 yards. At that range,you don't need a lot of MV to push a ball through a deer. The .50 won't be as effective as a .54 cal., but it will do the job, if you do yours. USE RBS, not conicals. Big bullets don't make any bigger holes than do the same diameter RB. RBs recoil a lot less, and expand well even at subsonic velocities. You should be able to get 1200 FPS or more out of that short .50 cal. barrel, loading 3Fg powder. If you hold shots under 50 yds, you will lose only 25% of that MV. A .50 caliber RB even at 900 fps is nothing to sneeze at. It will go through a deer shot broadside. :hatsoff:

Do the penetration testing and prove me wrong! :shocked2:
 
One of the guys I was hunting with last week was using a White Mt. .50 shooting a patched round ball with Pyrodex even and killed a nice 8pt. So it can be done. :wink:
 
Let me reiterate...i have no problem with the PRB...i practice all the time with them and have shot deer with them with favorable outcomes. I'm not a newbie when it comes to BP and have been shooting it for 18 years. I shoot 3-5 deer a year with archery, shotgun, and BP gear...no CF rifle. I've learned a few things about hunting and tracking over the last 20 years of shooting/hunting.
First..I've taken countless deer that bled out of both holes with all types of gear. I find it hard to believe that this would be hard to believe. Taking measures to provide an "easy-to-follow" bloodtrail is ethical...it's not icing on the cake. One could shoot a deer with a fieldpoint tipped arrow through both lungs, and recover it...but obviously it's not ethical or intelligent. Making recovery any more difficult or unlikely than it has to be is unethical. We cannot "count on" perfect shot placement everytime. Therefore, we owe it to the game to take other measures to improve recovery on marginal shots. That said, recovery is effected by many more factors than just bullets/shot placement etc. I do much of my hunting in a deep swamp with standing water...hoof prints aren't an option sometimes...you're often looking for bubbles from the legs moving in the water, and blood. The quicker deer go down, the better...no matter where one hunts.
A short barrel may be better for thick woods, but it's all I have. And what does it matter if you still hunt for an entire day...you will inevitably pass through an entire gammut of habitats...thickest of thick to open fields.
Going forward, there's no reason I can't practice with PRB through the summer, and then transition to conical before the season. Agreed...the recoil and cost will be less that way. I cannot deny that, in my own personal experiences, I've had equal or superior performance with heavier bullets on deer...both out of BP rifles and shotguns. I have no problem shooting deer with them...just feel that out of my particular gun there are better options. I don't see why I'm getting hammered on about it here...but feel free, i'm always up for a good, humane debate :)
 
You are not getting " Hammered". Take the chip off your shoulder. Unless you use a chronograph to know what MV you are getting out of that short barrel, you can't use any of the computer tables to factor down range velocity. If you don't do comparison penetration testing, You can't know the effectiveness of a conical vs. a RB.

Generally, its much more difficult to get the velocity out of a short barrel to move a conical fast enough to upset in the thin body of a deer. If you hit the ball of the shoulder joint, it has enough mass to at least bend the nose, but causing it to expand to any extent is pure chance, as the speeds you get using BP and conicals, in short-barreled guns. If you happen to shoot an OLD buck, with matured bones, and you hit those bones, you may see the bullet expand before it leaves the body on the other side.

By comparison, the pure lead ball does not need much velocity to expand well in soft flesh, and tender bones. The lead ball is idea for killing whitetails. I am not going to claim its perfect for taking the larger mule deer, nor Elk, Caribou, or Moose. Certainly not in the .45 and .50 caliber guns used by most whitetail hunters. These small balls will take the small antelope quite efficiently, however. The larger members of the deer family need at least a .54 cal. RB, and anything larger becomes the " Magnum" of BP hunting. The larger calibers really come into their own when taking large, heavy boned members of the deer family, and justify the time taken to learn to control heavy recoil in these guns to make sure you get full penetration and expansion in these large animals.

As to tracking in still water, animals use the same crossings over and over again. If you look where a deer enters a pond, or swamp, then look across the way, you will almost always find the beginning of a trail on the other bank where it came out.

Wild animals live with the law of Conservation of energy. Wounded or injured animals are fighting the fever they get in their heads, due to all the adrenalin rushing blood to their brains quickly. They head to water, or muddy areas, to find a place where they can cool down. They use still water to escape dog packs, and then find a place to lay down. In still water tracking, you see disturbance of pond scum on the surface, disturbance of the mud in the shallow water, and when the mud settles, obvious deer tracks in the mud under water.

Again, deer have a purpose for entering water. They don't want to be cold, or stay cold longer than necessary. Neither would you if you were being chased.

When tracking deer across moving water- stream, or river-- any disturbance of the surface or the bottom mud is washed downstream almost instantly. But, the tracks disturn the mud on the bottom, and any scum growing down there. You will see discolored "spots" where the animal( or person) walked through the shallow river or stream. Those are your tracks to follow. If the water is too deep to see the bottom, you go to the opposite bank and search the shallow water there for signs of disturbance. Again, look for game trails, or obvious signs of recently broken down grasses and brush. Then check the ground for your deer's tracks. If you have taken the smart time to measure each of the 4 tracks of your deer, back at the place where he was first hit, noting both length and width of each of the 8 toes nails we call hooves, and noting any accidental cuts, injuries, chips(deformities), in each nail, it should not be difficult picking up the deer's tracks on the other side of the stream. His body will be dragging some water up the bank, and into the woods, for you to notice, as well.

I have tracked deer in a number of situations, including deer that began bleeding immediately, others that did not leave a drop of blood for the first 25 yds. and one that didn't drop any blood for more than 100 yds. I have tracked deer hunters swore they hit, only to find the twig hit that sent their well-aimed ball off somewhere else, and used the tracks to show the hunter that his "deer" shows no sign of being injured. I have shown hunters where they walked right over a half-dollar sized spot of blood, not seeing it at all, and then showed them where the deer turned to his right( dominant side) while the hunter wandered off to the left, only because it was an easy path to follow. His deer was down less than 30 feet from that blood spot. It was the only blood along the escape route, which was less than 25 yds long, but the hunter "lost" the deer.( That's how I came to be involved in tracking down the deer for him.)

Just because a deer's tracks seem to be pointing to a water way, don't ASSUME the deer actually entered the water. My friend, Don, tracked a deer for an archer, and found it lying down next to a log on the near side of the river, next to one of two deer crossings on the property. The hunter had waded across and searched for the deer on the other side for hours, the afternoon and night before. Don saw his tracks, and how he never looked to his left( upstream) from the crossing, where the deer was lying next to that log. Don was following deer tracks, and saw where the deer turned, instead of going into the water.

The hunter tried to claim this was not his deer, because he had been to this crossing several times, and did not see it. Don had to show him his several tracks, that clearly showed he never looked where the deer was lying. They then checked the location of the wounds, and it matched perfectly the angle of the shot the archer had described he took from a treestand on the adjoining property. Because the deer had been laying in mud and shallow water in the shade of the bank of the river, the meat was not spoiled, even tho it was early in the archery season, and daytime temperatures could get into the 70s. Oh, he found a pinhead size drop of blood on the trail more than 100 yds from the site of the shot, working the river trail on his hands and knees. The ground was so beaten down, and dried out, it was too hard to take a hoof impression. There were too many broken leaves and twigs to see New disturbance, so he used the following the invisible trail approach to look for sign, and finally found the blood droplet. The location told him that the deer was headed towards the upstream ford on the property, so he proceeded on his feet, continuing to look for bruising of the hard dirt, broken twigs, and blood, and found nothing until he got to the softer dirt near the riverbank. He showed me the trail, and the ford and location where the deer had been found months later when I was with him visiting the property.

I have no doubt you have learned something about deer during your years hunting them. I have the advantage of having learned how to track field mice, rabbits, squirrel- both ground and tree-- dogs, cats, and fox, long before I ever was near any area where deer lived, and longer still before my first deer hunts. Compared to field mice, the tracks of a deer( and humans) is about like following the tire tracks of a car or bulldozer through weeds. You have much more to learn, if you will simply get about doing so. :thumbsup:
 
This post is to no one in particular.


50cal. rd. ball after a 75yd. shot. Can you follow the trail?



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