Rodent is Back on the Menu

I have had a somewhat frustrating day, trying to get my hunting game together. I can’t say it was without rewards, though.

First off, I tried to find a wildlife management area (WMA) near me where I could shoot hogs. A WMA is a piece of public land where they let you hunt. I have never seen a hog on my property, and I have accepted the fact that I will not be able to shoot them here, so it’s time to use public land or quit.

There is a big national forest near me, appropriately named the Ocala National Forest. The city of Ocala is in Marion County, but the national forest extends into other counties. I read that the Lake George and Lake Delancy WMA’s, in the national forest, were good places to look for hogs. I also read that a WMA called the Green Swamp was full of hogs.

I got lost trying to figure out the rules. When you shoot at home, you don’t even need a license for hogs. In a WMA, you need a license, a WMA permit, and maybe a quota permit.

I wasn’t sure about the rules, so I put some inquiries out on the web and tried to look for way to get to these WMA’s so I could walk around and see what they were like. Even that was a pain. You can find the WMA’s on the map, but information about access roads is almost entirely absent.

I did the intelligent thing. I went out back and shot squirrels.

My dad died in 2019, and I really didn’t feel like killing anything that year and during 2020, but now I am raring to go. Today I took my Marlin 60 tried my luck.

The Marlin 60 has a peep sight. I chose it for that reason. My other .22 rifles have buckhorn sights or scopes. A scope makes it hard to provide a coup de grace to a squirrel lying on the ground in front of you. Buckhorn sights work, but I like peep sights better.

Of course, I saw two squirrels near the house before I got to the pasture. They’re always around when you don’t want them. Then I made a circuit of my woods plot and saw nearly nothing.

I decided to play it smart. I took a backpack chair into the woods, sat down, and waited for the squirrels to come to me. They do that. They’re stupid.

Before too long, a squirrel climbed down a tree and posed for me, facing me head-on, around 40 feet away. I blasted him. He fell into the leaves and thrashed around. I figured he was done for, so I waited for him to stop moving so I could shoot him again. Before I knew it, he had righted himself and inserted himself in a hole in a hollow log. That was the last I saw of him.

I didn’t want him to suffer, but there was no way to get him out of the log, so I had to move on.

I plopped down in another area, and while I watched a squirrel wander around in a tree a little ways off, I heard barking. A squirrel was in the tree I was sitting next to, giving me a lecture. This is something they like to do. They cling to trees and yell at you, thinking they’re safe and failing to understand how firearms work. I waited until he was around 15 feet above me, and I fired. He acted dazed. Then he moved to the other side of the tree and disappeared.

I couldn’t believe it. Clearly, I was mistaken about the point of impact of my peep sight.

While I was in the woods, I fired a few rounds to clear that up.

I moved to a new place, and after maybe 45 minutes, a new lecturer appeared on a tree around 50 feet away. She barked and twitched her tail. She was really giving me a piece of her mind. I sat and stared at her for a very long time, waiting for her to move down the tree. She moved onto the base of a branch instead. I got up, moved closer, aimed (making allowances for the peep sight), and fired. She ran straight up the tree.

I thought it was time to quit. I could not believe I had missed. Then I saw something fall.

The squirrel fell at the base of the tree, and I shot it in the head to make sure it was done.

Now, instead of three squirrels in the fridge, I have only one.

I know I said I planned to start leaving squirrels to rot, but I have a smoker now, and I have a feeling it will turn squirrels into viable eating. I put the squirrel in a bag of baking soda brine and put it in the fridge to soak.

Cleaning the squirrel was gross, as always, and difficult. I have a policy of never using my carry knives to cut tape, and of course, I violate it all the time. When you cut tape with a knife, adhesive sticks to the blade and makes it hard to cut anything with it. And when you try to remove the glue, you usually leave some behind without realizing it, so it doesn’t work. I had to use a cleaver and a filet knife.

Cleaning warm-blooded animals is something I have to get used to. I have hacked many a fish up, and it never bothered me at all. I have cut up lots of dead, refrigerated pigs. It’s different when the guts are hot, just like yours.

If I had had a shotgun today, it would have rained squirrels. Hunting from the backpack chair is the way to go. Because I like rifles, I had to give up shots that could have sent bullets off my farm.

I think I’m going to put my Bug Buster scope on the Marlin. I thought the peep sight was a great move, but it didn’t work out well today. Maybe I’m too old to use iron sights on squirrels.

A Bug Buster is a cheapish UTG scope made for air guns. They call it a Bug Buster because it will focus at very short ranges. When you’re shooting animals that are stupid enough to come as close as 30 feet, you don’t want a scope that has a minimum focus distance of 50 yards. I should be able to hammer squirrels much more easily with the Bug Buster.

I’m still planning to do a guided hunt. I may start with hogs. I wanted to use my .204 Ruger, and I did not want to be just another trigger-happy AR-15 hunter, but it’s starting to look like the AR is the way to go. It holds 30 rounds, whereas the .204 holds 3. Hogs move a lot, I have never shot one, and it’s probably smart to take an accurate gun that will let me do follow-up shots.

I hope to get out to a WMA over the next few days.