Dave Richey spent 40 years writing outdoor copy, and has written many books, 7,000-plus magazine articles and thousands of columns and features for The Detroit News, where he was the staff outdoor writer for 23 years. Today he writes a weekly column every Sunday for the Record-Eagle.
Dave Richey: Faces of a conservation officer
'The duties of a state conservation officer are 50 percent public relations, 40 percent law enforcement and 10 percent other things, such as filing paper work." That was Leelanau County conservation officer Mike Borkovich speaking. He is a great big walking contradiction to many people as he goes about enforcing the state's fish and game laws.....more>>
They are just bits of colored cloth and thread, but Department Of Natural Resources Successful Hunter or Management Cooperator patches for bear, deer and wild turkey are fun to collect but some can be costly and difficult to find. My personal passion is buying and collecting old hardcover books on fishing and hunting, but patch collecting is fun as well and prices remain reasonably steady for the hard-to-find patches.
The second firearm season is upon us, and many deer hunters are wondering where the animals have gone. What's that, you ask? The second firearm season? That's right. The DNR tells us that 75-85 percent of the deer taken during the 16-day firearm season, which runs through Nov. 30, are taken Nov. 15-17. The rest of the month is the so-called second season.
My late father, bless his soul, always had a problem understanding why I would head out to hunt deer, especially when the skies opened up and dumped a bunch of rain or snow on his No. 1 son. "It's stupid," he'd say, "to go out into a bad storm or foul weather just to hunt deer. Why not stay inside where it's warm and dry, and not get sick. It's a wonder all the deer don't die of exposure." Dad simply didn't understand deer.
Nov. 15 offers something very special. It's the only day of the year when you can hear the sun rise. Rifle shots, shotgun blasts and occasionally even the flat crack of a handgun going off becomes an audible clue that the annual firearm deer season is underway. But, all things are subject to change. That's the way it once was, years ago, in those years before bait.
The rod tips were nodding softly in the rod-holders as the small outboard motor pushed the14-foot boat slowly across the mouth of the Manistee River where it empties into Manistee Lake. The water was 10 feet deep, an ideal depth for our lures to be. I made a slow outward turn into slightly deeper water, and as we made the turn to port one of the rod tips snapped down toward the surface, and 60 feet off our stern a 10-pound steelhead seemed to hang two feet above the water before crashing back down with a heavy splash.
The rain was pouring down the other day, and one of my friends made a bad hit on a small buck. It was a scraggle-antlered six-point, with a rack that looked like it had been put together by committee. Size or beauty isn't the issue here. Wounding an animal is.
The buck was a nice animal. It was an adult two-year-old with eight points, the beginning of a really nice rack, and he wasn't rut-crazed just yet. This rack, while still thin and spindly, had an inside spread of 16 inches and good brow points. The buck came to me early Wednesday evening with plenty of shooting light, and he stood at an extreme quartering-away angle for long minutes. It was a tempting shot possibility. Did I want to shoot that buck?
I sit here at my computer, staring at a blank screen, and begin to contemplate today's topic, thinking about Wednesday's archery deer opener. Doing so gets me remembering past bow season openers. That causes a chain reaction about the past 10 openers, as well as allowing me to recall a few other Oct. 1 bow hunts.
Humans have some funny notions, and oddly enough, some people believe them. Our beliefs often are very strong about things concerning hunting, and we believe them even if they are not true. For instance: we may think we smell just dandy after a bath or shower using a liberal amount of shampoo and soap, but a whitetail deer would probably think we stink.
