Camera Critters: Mourning Dove

The mourning dove is a common species here in southcentral Pennsylvania, but I seldom get close enough for a good portrait of the species, as they are quite shy.  With that in mind, I erected a pop-up blind close to the bird feeding station and eventually one landed and posed long enough for me to capture two shots.

Mourning Dove

Dove Spots Me In Blind

Neither photograph is quite what I wanted, as I find the weed stem across the bottom of the tail in the first photo to be distracting.  I removed it with photoshop in the second, but I am not completely satisfied with how it turned out.  I will remove the offending object before I set up again to photograph in this spot.

Both photos taken with Canon 7D and 300mm F2.8 with 1.4 extender.

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Originally posted at Pennsylvania Wildlife Photographer by Willard Hill

As Winter Relaxes Its' Icy Grip, Wildlife Sightings Increase

There is still well over a month to go before winter officially ends, yet a change is in the air as Pennsylvania enjoys a winter thaw.  Even in years with a heavy snow cover and bitter cold, it is quite common for the situation to be much improved by late February or early March.  A period of relatively warm, beautiful weather is often followed by a heavy snow storm, but now as the sun moves further north and the days are longer, snow does not linger as long.

Wildlife sightings may dramatically increase as herds of elk and deer tend to congregate in areas where the sun has melted the snow cover away, exposing desirable food sources such as the food plot below located on a reclaimed area of SGL 311 in Elk County.

Bare Areas Appear As The Snow Cover Recedes

Bull Elk Sparring In The Early Morning Sun

Many are anxiously awaiting the shedding of the elk's antlers, and some are expecting them to fall off any day now.  While there may be a slim possibility of this, there is little likelihood of finding antlers until the end of February, and I have seen many large bulls still carrying antlers at the end of the first week in March.  In most cases, the large bulls loose their antlers first, with the smaller bulls loosing them later.  It is common to see large bulls with significant new antler growth, and raghorns still carrying last year's antlers.

Unlike elk, whitetail deer in Pennsylvania shed their antlers in a period ranging from December to April, but the great majority have lost them by early February.

Most PA Bucks Have Shed Their Antlers By Early February

Regardless of one's particular field of specific interest, be it photography, hiking, shed hunting, etc., these periods when winter relaxes its' icy grip are great times to be afield.

In Winter, Animals Prefer Sheltered Areas Exposed To The Rays Of The Sun

Soon the tempo will pick up even more as snow geese and tundra swans arrive, to be followed shortly by other species of waterfowl.


Originally posted at Pennsylvania Wildlife Photographer by Willard Hill

Pennsylvania Deer Wars: A Different Perspective-The Early Years

It seems there are almost as many points of view about whitetail deer and deer management as there are people who are interested in deer, and most are quite passionate about their point of view.  I am somewhat unusual in the sense that I have been involved with whitetail deer throughout my life and during that time have seen almost every type of situation involving deer that one can imagine.

I was born in 1950,and grew up in Fulton County, Pennsylvania, which at the time was a remote farming oriented community in the mountains of southcentral Pennsylvania, only a short distance from the Maryland border.  This was before the influx of commuters and retirees from the Baltimore, Washington, D.C. area, or the establishment of factories to provide employment, so most residents were small farmers, worked in agricultural related jobs, or at the Letterkenny Ordnance Depot, in Franklin County.  Deer and deer hunting were one of the major subjects of conversation among the men in the community, and some of my earliest recollections are of these stories.  My grandfather could recall when he saw his first deer track, and as deer season was in, he and some companions tracked the deer to a nearby mountain, where they flushed a deer or two and killed one of them.  At the time deer were so rare that few owned deer rifles, but rather hunted with shotguns and rifled slugs, which they called "pumpkin" balls.

Fulton County Deer Hunting: Circa late 1950s, early 1960s

Deer were more common by the time I became aware of them, but they were very wild and shy.  If they were feeding in a distant field, they usually ran if they saw you traveling between buildings, or even slammed a door. Most men hunted deer, there was little posted ground, and hunting pressure was intense.  There was usually heavy gunfire, when dawn broke on the first day of deer season, which was bucks only at that time. Perhaps the best deer hunter I knew said that one's best chance of killing a buck was before 10:00 am on the first day and after that the probability decreased rapidly.  There was still a fair chance of getting a buck on the second day of the season, but if one had not killed one by the end of the third day, there was little chance of bagging a buck that year.

Bucks only needed 3" spikes or longer to be legal, and the vast majority of the bucks were killed during their first year with antlers, which in most cases were small indeed.

A Legal Buck Before Antler Restrictions

A Better Than Average 6 Point For This Time Period

At times one did see respectable bucks and this was usually before season, during the rut when they would bee seen chasing does or emerge from the woods to eat in late evening.  Bucks such as the one pictured below were very rare and a serious deer hunter could only hope to take one or two of this size during a lifetime of hunting.

A Large Buck For Fulton County At This Time Period

 I realize many will say that this is not a large buck and it is not compared to those from certain areas, but it was exceptional for that area at that time. (Fulton County has always been known for small, thin antlered deer, in comparison to states such as Iowa, etc.)

Many of the locals had little to no respect for wildlife laws, and believed that the government had no right to tell one when they could shoot deer, or how many they could kill (They conveniently forgot that deer were almost eliminated from Pennsylvania because of a lack of hunting regulations).This attitude was not quite as bad as it sounds in some cases, as many persons actually acted in a fairly restrained manner and did not kill unlimited amounts of deer, but rather decided how many deer the family  "needed"  for a year's supply of deer meat.   Another method commonly used in "gang" hunting, where large numbers of hunters co-operated in driving and shooting deer, was for hunters to divide the meat among all participants at the end of the hunt regardless as to who had shot the animal.  In this type of hunting, it was also common for one hunter to shoot multiple deer if a herd was pushed past him.  Some were quite proud of how they could "pile them up", and it was common to hear stories of one person shooting four or more deer in such situations.  Often it was a doe with her twins fawns from the past spring and if the hunter shot the doe first, the fawns were basically clueless and stood around while the shooter took care of business.  Ironically I can well recall an individual who vehemently opposed  shooting deer out of season, but saw nothing wrong with putting down as many does as possible in doe season even though the limit was one deer.

I never participated in a large gang hunt of any type, but did help drive the woodlot on the family farm, where one or two people waited on stand, while one or two did the driving.  I never shot a deer while heading a drive, or while driving, and soon drifted completely away from this type of activity, preferring to hunt alone, either by sitting on watch or by still hunting.

I began reading the Pennsylvania Game News in the mid-1960s and soon learned there were, "too many" deer, which was a refrain I was doomed to hear for many years.  In a few years, I met my future father-in-law and was amazed to learn from him that the Game Commission had killed all of the deer off, the big bucks were all killed off, and people were down to killing "the little tittie suckers".  He was caretaker for an  estate, which bordered a large hunting club and he took me with him on the first day of season in 1969.  Shortly after dawn several does arrived followed by a six-point buck and I killed him.  Before we could get out of the tree stand to check on the deer another herd with two medium-sized bucks arrived and I could not believe it when he would not shoot one(he refused to shoot a small buck and would shoot one yearling doe each year to provide meat for his family).  We started down the ladder once they left and he suddenly froze and said there goes a peach of a buck (he got a glimpse of it as it ran along the top of the ridge below us).

The point in telling this is that I thought there were a lot of deer, and deer numbers were about right, while he was disillusioned and thought the deer herd was all but eradicated, and the PGC was saying there were too many deer, yet  we had both  taken part in a situation, which was by far the greatest deer hunting experience I had experienced until that point, and in fact may have equaled but never surpassed by the time I quit hunting almost thirty years later.

This then was the background that I came from, and the perspective from which I would view deer and deer management issues for the remainder of my life.

Originally posted at Pennsylvania Wildlife Photographer by Willard Hill

Camera Critters: Rare Winter Wildlife Encounters

For today we feature two photographs of winter wildlife.  The first one is of the Great Horned Owl, a species that I seldom see and have not photographed successfully until now.  I was driving a backcountry road on the way to my favorite wildlife observation spot, when I noticed the owl flying from tree to tree.  When he landed in a relatively open spot I took several photographs with the Canon 7D and the 300mm F2.8. with 2x Extender.  The image is cropped severely, and would have been better had I been closer.  I would also have preferred to not have the intervening limbs in the photograph, but from one point of view they may actually add to the photograph, as it tends to illustrate how elusive the species can be and helps create a mysterious, wild atmosphere..

Great Horned Owl

I see  Eastern Wild Turkeys frequently, but seldom have a photo opportunity such as the following.

Mature Eastern Wild Turkey Gobblers

A flock of gobblers was feeding, when a young whitetail deer that is just out of the frame to the left, jumped at the turkeys and momentarily startled one, causing it to leap high into the air.  I have observed this behavior before, and in most cases it is a young deer that gets involved with the turkeys, most likely because they are more curious and playful than the adult animals.  I have even seen deer chase turkeys  around in circles.  Turkeys are not actually afraid of deer and seldom leave the area when this happens.

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Originally posted at Pennsylvania Wildlife Photographer by Willard Hill