Deer

Friday

J. Shane Townsend

The killer in your backyard

A perch some 20 feet up a backyard tree offers a peek into every manner of activity in the neighborhood. One guy in a uniform sets down his running leaf-blower, backs into a bush, squats and relieves himself. Another guy wearing pastel and khaki rides tight circles on his mower; his facial contortions suggest he’s singing his ass off. A woman washes dishes at her kitchen sink. A man grills on his deck and searches for me in the treeline. This is urban hunting. And it sucks. All the way around. But here’s the truth: it’s necessary – for hunters, for homeowners, for the community and our economy. New York City infamously invested $6 million in taxpayer funds to give bucks vasectomies As a hunter, the suck starts when you pull into a stranger’s driveway.

hunting killing

Sunday

Ben Clerkin

Muzzleloader season

Climbing into the Blue Ridge Mountains in Virginia with a muzzleloader slung over my shoulder was a journey back in time. This was the gun that the colony's first settlers used when they too trod the same ground 400 years ago to hunt deer and bear. It helped tame the state and then the entire country. As I pushed my way through undergrowth at the base of the mountain range by the light of the moon at 5 a.m. on a bitingly cold and bitter January morning, unseen branches and briars clawed at my face in the dark. This was the last day of the hunting season that had been extended – as hunting seasons across the US often are – for muzzleloaders. To keep this heritage weapon alive and to give the animals a sporting chance.

muzzleloader

Wednesday

Derek Turner

England in infra-red: the beauty of the country at night

From our UK edition

John Lewis-Stempel is nearly as prolific as the natural world about which he writes so well. His voice is distinctive – that of a traditional agriculturist of lyrical articulacy, an observant ecologist who finds mythopoeic magic in everyday animals, who honours his Herefordshire origins but addresses all England. Cattle in a frosty field are transfigured into witnesses of the Nativity As with his monographs on meadows and ponds, Nightwalking looks at under-appreciated aspects of the rural scene – this time, the most enigmatic of all. Like Robert Frost, poets often aspire to be ‘acquainted with the night’, and many are cited here.

Sunday

Bill McMorris

Hunting deer in the DC suburbs

I was driving along in my 2018 Honda minivan when I received a call from a member of the National Symphony Orchestra who has been on leave since March 2020: “Just bagged a doe. If you’re up for it, I’m going to gut this thing.” I regretted taking the call through the van’s speakerphone. A text message followed; thankfully the image did not project onto the dash display. I spent the rest of the drive to school explaining to my four daughters how Daddy had to dissect Bambi for work. My father took me hunting once in high school. He shook me awake at six in the morning, loaded me into the family car, a 1998 Chevy minivan, then drove it straight into a deer. I can still picture the white-spotted fawn’s body cascading across the asphalt. “Thank God it was just a baby.

deer