Benbrown

The 140 grain SSTs shot really well in my wife's .280, as did the 117 grain SSTs in my .257 AI, but we both switched to partitions because the SSTs just ruin too much meat. They kill like Thor's hammer, but you give up a lot of edible meat in the process...

In factory ammo, you are pretty much limited to Remington offerings. The best load for deer is probably the Remington 150 grain Swift Scirocco. The listed muzzle velocity is 3,450 FPS. This would be a flat-shooting load, not far behind the .257 Wby. All the other available loads are 180-200 grain bullets. If you just can't find the 150s, I would go with either the 180 grain Scirocco or the 180 Nosler Partition. Look around and call around to various outlets. One of them should have one or more of these in stock. I would steer clear of the 180 Pointed Soft Point Core-Lokt--at those velocities, I don't think that it would hold together inside 300 yds. Good hunting!

I live in one of those areas where delivery of anything takes a day or two more with USPS, FedEx or UPS. DHL has never delivered anything to me--they always drop it in the post office in El Paso or Deming and it takes from two to five days beyond that to get here. I have lived out here for about 17 years and UPS has been very good, coming five days a week to either pick up or deliver. However, in the last year or so their service has slipped badly, mostly with failing to make scheduled pick ups. I think that you will be well-satisfied with FedEx--we have switched all of our outgoing package shipping to them and have been pleased with the service.

I think that nearer buck is an old one. Notice how much whiter his muzzle is compared to the one in the background. The way his jaws close make me think that his cheek teeth are pretty well worn. Also note that the shoulder shows a good bit more bone than that of the younger one and his coat is rough. Both suggest that the energy and minerals he is putting into antler growth are taking somewhat of a toll on the rest of his body, possibly the result of very worn molars and premolars. Just my two cents worth...

The end may still be a bit away--the Game Wardens are ratcheting up the pressure on the Commission to either fire him or get his resignation. Right now, the governor seems to say that it's done and done the right way, but it is hard to find an animal more political than Richardson, so he may change his mind if the uproar doesn't die down...

Actually, my brain was a little foggy the other night after two-days of air travel coming back from Kodiak, AK. Calcium and phosphorous do need to be in the diet at a ratio of 2:1, but they only need to total 1.5% of the dry weight. Don't know how I came up with 3%--must have been, as my daughters say, a brain fart!

It depends primarily on the quality of the diet during that time period. The higher the content of digestible protein in the diet (assuming that calcium and phosphorous also comprise about 3% of the dry weight of the diet at a ratio of approximately 2:1), the more the antlers will grow. The rate of metabolism in growing antlers is pretty incredible--it's the fastest growing true bone known. Although genetics will influence the overall shape and mass, it is the availability of protein and minerals that pretty much determines the rate of growth for any given period of time.

I have never taken a turkey with a bow, but I have called in many, many Rio Grande birds in the fall. Many folks don't know it, but the Rio Grande subspecies (the one that is found throughout Texas and which has been transplanted to many of the Midwest and western states) goes through a display/gobbling period in the fall, pretty much like they do in the spring. During October and most of November, they will readily respond to a call and strut just like they do in the spring. There is really no reason to bait them. Just find a roost and set up a little ways away before daylight. When you hear them coming down off the roost, start calling and you will usually have one or more fraternal groups of gobblers come in to see what's going on. I have had them come to within 10-15 yds if I was camo'ed up and sitting still. Good luck!

I would suggest that you try it with a load that you know performs (not one of the hottest you have tried). Mike the base of several of your cartridges just in front of the web. You might also measure the length of a few resized cases from the same lot. Then, try a few groups to see if the accuracy has suffered. If not, then check again for case head expansion by remeasuring case diameter at the same point and remeasure the case length to make sure that cases are not stretching excessively. If all is well, just go ahead and resume your load development. If accuracy has deteriorated significantly (how much is "significant" is up to you), or you see more than a few .001s increase in case head diameter or case length after firing, you can take it to the 'smith who built if for corrections. Good luck!

Looks like what we used to call a "twig girdler" in south Texas--a larval form that eats the cambium in in actively growing mesquite limbs, leaving the distal portion to die and snap off in high winds. I'll try to find a more proper name...

You don't need a lot of scope for a .30-30. A fixed-power of 2.5x, 3x or 4x, at the most, will work just fine. I wouldn't go with a varaiable, myself, but if you do, a Leupold 1-5x would be my recommendation. I would stick with name brands such as Leupold, Burris, Nikon, etc., as most of the .30-30 carbines do recoil somewhat. Just my two cents worth...

I fished on a friend's boat out of San Diego last summer for marlin. They had 2 20x80 Steiners with the vibration reduction feature. I could not believe how ordinary they were. I have looked through Bushnells, Pentax, etc. that sold for less than $200 that were far sharper with less color distortion. I definitely would not spend $1,100 on one.

If the only things that have been done to it are the addition of an aftermarket synthetic stock, the muzzle brake and the scope and rings, I would say $450 max. If it was professionally bedded (I'm guessing not, the stock loolks like drop-in), has had a trigger job or the addition of an aftermarket trigger, or other work such as blueprinting the action, the value might be somewhat higher. Rifles like this are basically worth what someone is willing to pay for them. With all of the alterations, it may be worth more or less than "blue book" value, depending on who did the work and how well it was done. If it suits your needs and is sufficently accurate (and it was a gift), who cares?

I have a Ruger No. 1 to which the previous owner added a wrap-around leather cheekpiece with a cartridge holder on the off side. This year, I decided to remove it and refinish the stock. I discovered that the pad is filled out by a piece of some kind of plastic that is cemented to the stock. Looking at the little bit of adhesive that peeks out from under the plastic in a couple of places (and poking it with a variety of small, sharp instruments), I would say that it is epoxy. I can't tell if the finish was removed below the pad, but either way, that sucker is on there and I have not yet figured out how to remove it. I would recommend trying a small scrap of leather and epoxying it to a piece of wood and see how it holds. Just my $.02...

In whitetails, triplets occur once in about every 200 births. I have never seen any statistics for mule deer. By now I would think that there would be something in the literature, but I don't follow it closely anymore. Maybe Hefflefinger or one of the other active deer biologists will chime in here...

Not to spoil your fun, but technically it's a rub, not a scrape. With saplings like that, elk ride them down and shred the bark with their antlers, so the vertical span says nothing about the size of the elk except that he had hard antlers and was heavy enough to bend under his weight. It could very well have been a relatively young bull...

I have a Glock 20 and the recoil is certainly no worse than a 1911 Colt in .45 auto. Mine does not have the ported barrel, but I have shot a friend's Glock in .45 Auto and the ported barrel does reduce muzzle flip noticeably. It increases muzzle blast noticeably, as well. Hope this helps...

Scotty: The Big Hatchets are pretty much all federal and state land and virtually none of it is landlocked. The north side of Hatchet Peak is ranched by the Peterson family, while the south side is included in Hurt Cattle Company's leases. The Hurts have an outfitter/guided hunt operation, so I suspect that their side is more likely to have access issues, if there are any. The Little Hatchets are another story. Access is largely controlled by three private ranches (one of which is the Hurt operation). The other two landowners are absentee, but have on-site managers and locked gates. That said, you can still access the mountains on foot or horseback if you have a land-status map and a GPS. Hope this helps...

There are mule deer in the Pyramids and their foothills. Densities are low, probably no more than 2 or so deer per section. I have seen some good bucks taken out of that country in the past, but not every year. The country is not well watered, so livestock watering points are a good place to start you scouting. I scouted the south end last year for a friend from Texas who had drawn a tag in Unit 26, and saw at least fourteen mature bucks scattered across a ranch of approximately 20,000 acres--no toads, though. He hunted hard and finally took a mature 3x3 on the last day of his hunt.

Any of those would work for elk with the right bullet. Is the 7mm a 7x57, 7mm WSM or 7mm Rem Mag? Either of the last two would be preferable for game up to the size of elk. A 7x57 can certainly be handloaded to be a good elk cartridge, but if you don't handload, factory fodder is pretty anemic. The .308 with Hornady's Light Magnum or Speers' High Intensity factory loads will equal the .30-06 factory loads, and even exceed them with a couple of bullets. By the same token, the Light Magnum or High Intensity loads for the '06 will push some of the .300 Mag factory loads. Except in the case of the 7x57, I would go with the one that feels the best in your hands, condition being fairly equal.

If you live in a real city, you are probably better off with something that can double as a second or third car. Before I retired, we bought several of the first generation Rangers on the ranch to diminish wear and tear on our pickups. We could get three Polaris Rangers for a little about what a new pickup cost. My wife had a nice Jeep Wrangler, that we sold just before leaving the ranch. She figured we'd get another one before too long. After I retired and we moved to "town", she went out and bought a new Polaris Ranger. She got tired of riding on the back of a quad and did not like the beating that she took riding one by herself. Until you try one in rough country (or on bad washboard), you can't believe how nice they are to drive, compared to a quad or a pickup truck. I use mine to run to the store to get the paper and pick up convenience store items, to go to the post office six days a week and to run to the local farm and ranch store for odds and ends. I drive it just about every day of the week, weather permitting. I use it on my annual elk hunt in Colorado, and we use it to get into our hunting areas during the New Mexico deer season. At least once every week or two, we pile into it and drive up into the foothills near home to photograph wildlife and/or scenery and just look at the country. I put three to four gallons of gas in it each month. As near as I can figure, I get 38-40 mpg. When my wife bought it, she was told that they burn about a gallon per hour, no matter how fast or slow you drive them. We are doing a little better than that. The first ones that we bought on the ranch, five years ago, were driven about 3,000 miles per year. The other day I ran into one of the cowboys that still works there, and he told me that the newer ones are rackng up 5,000+ miles per year, hauling salt and mineral loads that average 600-800 lbs. over really rough roads and trails. The cowboys prefer them to the pickups because they are more comfortable to drive in rough country. They use them almost exclusively to check fences, as they can carry about all the gear and materials they need to patch anything that they will encounter in a day's time. This is a ranch that is over 300,000 acres with several mountain ranges and elevations ranging from 4,800 to over 8,000 ft. We like ours a lot!

I'll probably get flamed for this, but the biology shows that the more coyotes you kill, the more they breed. I was at Kansas State University when pelt prices went sky-high in the mid-1970s. The annual take for fur quadrupled over what it had been. There were a lot of determined trappers in the state who were very good at what they did, and the amateurs and anyone else who had a rifle that would kill a coyote and could use a few extra bucks joined in the fun. We wondered what this was doing to the population. We had a very good series of age and reproduction records from years of study by a professor who had just retired (I got his job when he left). The Extension Wildlife Biologist was very active with the Kansas Fur Harvesters organization, and he persuaded trappers to pull the uteri from the female kills and clip off the front of the jaw at the diastoma (gap) between the premolars and the canine teeth on both sexes. We provided materials for them to put the uteri and the jaws in a container with a formaldehyde solution. Those jaws came to my lab, where we processed and stained a canine tooth from each animal to age it, and we counted placental scars to determine in utero litter sizes. For three years of very high harvest we processed between materials from between 1,500 and 3,000 animals. The results showed that, prior to the unusually heavy harvest, females were breeding first at around three years of age and in utero litter sizes were between 2 and 3 pups. The age structure of the population was mature--may animals in the 3-5 year age class (but very few older than 5). After the first year of hammering the population, the age at first breeding dropped to approximately one (meaning that every female in the population was now breeding) and the average in utero litter size jumped to approximately 6 pups. Prior to the heavy harvest, social constraints were delaying the age of first breeding to about 3 years of age, and somehow keeping the in utero litter sizes fairly low. Since coyote packs are territorial, this means that before the increased harvest a pack (usually with only one or two females breeding) was supporting only about 2-5 pups each year. After the dramatic increase in harvest, a pack was probably supporting at least a dozen pups, and in some cases, maybe a lot more. This means that those that survived the harvest were being forced to kill a lot more food for the pups. This situation also results in a lot of pups getting kicked out of the pack and being forced to figure out how to make a living on their own. We saw a dramatic increase in coyote depredation on domestic sheep and even house pets. In normal situations (absent a prolonged drought or dramatic rodent decline), coyotes just don't take many deer, and most of the deer taken are fawns. Coyotes are very opportunistic critters and eat a wide range of things, from prickly pear fruit and mesquite beans to deer and javelina, but they are primarily small mammal predators. They do play a role in keeping deer populations within the carrying capacity of their habitats, but are certainly not the only factor that determines how many deer will perish each year. There is pretty general agreement that deer populations are resource-limited--that is, population densities are dependent on habitat quality and the availability of food. The Edwards Plateau of Texas had no coyotes for most of the first two-thirds of the 20th century, as the sheep and goat ranchers killed them with every means available to them, including poisons and aerial gunning. Their deer populations reached levels of one deer to less than ten acres in good years, with adult animals weighing around 100 lbs. A series of a few good years were inevitably followed by extensive die-offs in the few years that followed when there were way too many deer for the habitat. In addition to malnutrition, they succumbed to diseases such as bluetongue and epizootic hemorhagic disease, things that were enzootic in the population, but generally had negligible impacts until the animals became nutritionally and socially stressed. In contrast, much of the big buck country of south Texas was characterized by coyote populations that approximated 5 per sq mi and healthy deer populations with lots of really big deer at densities of one to 25-40 acres. Several studies have looked at experimentally removing most of the coyotes to see if deer densities could be increased. All of these studies show increased fawn survival into the fall, but none have been able to detect that these additional fawns are added to the hunted herd in the following year. In west Texas, attempts at so-called quality deer management have included feeding tons of high quality rations year-round to produce bigger deer and grow bigger racks. If you go out on these ranches, you find that the native vegetation is badly overused, as the primary result of increasing the nutritional plane has been to produce more deer--apparently more than can be removed by the annual culling permitted under the QDM permits. So, the bottom line is, shoot coyotes if it makes you feel good or if you regard them as suitable targets to hone your marksmanship, but don't fool yourself into thinking that you are somehow doing the deer a favor. I like to call coyotes. They are wary critters and getting one to come is still a challenge that satisfies some of my sporting urges. I use a mouth call, not an electronic call, and I do shoot as many as I can. I take maybe a half-dozen to as many as a dozen in a good year so I don't think that my efforts are doing much to hurt the local coyote population. And I don't eat them nor do I take the pelts--down here it's just not worth the effort.

On the ranch that I used to manage here in New Mexico, we shipped our calves in the fall and put the cows in the mountains for the winter. In years when we were running steers, we did the same--wintered our cattle in the mountains. The reason for this was that water was the limiting factor, not only with respect to where we could run cattle, but with respect to being able to gather them. After the monsoon rains, cattle in the mountains would be so scattered out that they were almost impossible to gather and move. Of course, our Coues deer also lived in the mountains, and I never saw any indication that the presence of cattle had any significant effect on the distribution of the deer. The deer used most of the same watering points that the cattle did. They did tend to stay higher on the slopes than the cattle, and they moved a lot more between water, daytime bedding sites and feeding areas. We had a couple of valley pastures dwon low that typically had a fair number of Coues deer resident in September and early October when we were gathering to wean and ship calves and preg test the cows. By the time that the first hunt rolled around, these deer, like the cattle, had gone back to the mountains. I will say that the ranch had large pastures, especially in the mountains--the average size was probably somewhere between ten and fifteen thousand acres. The only way that the presence of cattle might affect deer use would be due to associated disturbance from humans. If someone was riding or driving the pasture every day or so, checking the cattle and water and putting out salt and mineral, the deer might be inclined to move somewhere with less disturbance. This would especially be true in the cattle were confined in a relatively small pasture. We had a winter supplement program where we put out cubes three times a week, and the cowboys had strict instructions to distribute the feed up high, away from water, and in a different place each week. This was a lot more disturbance than the deer would have experienced under previous management, yet the deer could usually be found in the same places from year to year. I found that during the fall, when deer are laying on fat for the winter and bucks are expending a lot of energy chasing does, that the quality (and quantity) of the vegetation seemed to have more effect on where deer could be found than anything else. If deer have a favorable intersperson of food, water, and cover, it's pretty hard to get them to leave a place. They may be harder to find as disturbance increases, but they are usually still there.

I'm going to take a couple of Ruger No. 1-A's: a .338-06 and a 9.3x74R. Really want to blood the 9.x74R--I've had it over a year and haven't had a chance to kill anything with it!

I have used Bushnells, Cabelas and Pentax units in the past and gave them all away. I have been using my present mount, a Swarovski, for almost ten years and it works well with both my spotting scope and large Nikon digital SLR with telephoto lenses. It is all-metal with full rubber pads where it contacts the window, and the head is mounted on a ball and socket swivel. Now that I am retired, I don't use it as much as I used to, but it made a trip to Namibia with me a couple of years ago and I used it all day every day for the time that we were in Etosha National Park. Don't know if they still sell this one any more, but if you can find one, they are worth the money.