Tricks of the Trail
Tactics & Techniques for Enjoying Wildlife Photography Using Trail Camera Technology Full disclosure: When it comes to technology, I am the textbook definition of “absolute moron”. A sad fact to which I am certain my family will quite readily attest. My wife: “Hun, why did you just buy fifty-seven...
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Call of the Crow
He sat perched on a flat, sloping, moss-covered boulder at the edge of a cliff, overwatching the hardwood forest below him. The hunter scanned predawn silence through late October’s mid-fall morning mist. The year was 1981, more than a decade before cell phones. A time when hunters...
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Hungry Bay’s Howl
On the northern shores of Middle Saranac Lake Between Weller and Eden Rests a remote rock rimmed boulder bay Biding time’s weathered seasons Beyond lonely wail of coyote and loon Made legend by Reben Beware Hungry Bay’s windswept whitecap howl Stalking doomed souls it feasts on ********** It...
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National Hunting Blind Set-Up Day
If that’s not an official holiday, it oughta’ be! Well! This is it! Saturday is October 1st. The time of year every hunter has been waiting for. In New York State, October ushers in the opening of bow season, fall turkey and duck hunting, as well as most small...
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‘Twas the Last Day of Goose Season
Sometimes the Christmas spirit finds a hunter’s heart in its own special way ********** New York State’s early Canada goose hunting season runs from September 1-25th. At the beginning of every fall hunting season, I have always looked forward to it. Until last year. For the past ten years...
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Larceny on the Lake
The Mysterious Case of the Vanishing Duck The day dawned with a twist. A hunter’s life lesson hard learned as my Zen Boat canoe silently sliced morning mist. I jumped a pair of wood ducks along the shore to my left as my hand painted Zen Boat...
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A Wildlife Investment: The Value Hiding in Brush Piles
I honed my trail maintenance skills as a young man on a DEC Trail crew team in the Adirondack high peaks. There I learned a wide variety of valuable skills and techniques, everything from axemanship, to two-man blowdown clearing bowsaw skills, crafting freshly felled cedar trees into water...
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Hunter’s Reflections
A Season’s End Hunter’s Poem ********** Each Season’s End Harvests Hunter’s Reflections What Was What Wasn’t What Might Have Been ********** Fallen Waterfowl Feathers Fall Foliage Breeze Trail’s First Frosted Tracks Fresh Buck Rubbed Trees ********** Morning Pre-Dawn Stealth Silence Hunter’s Hart Prayers for Luck ‘Til That True Shot’s...
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When The Gales Come Early
My True Father/Son Adirondack Outlaw Duck Hunting Survival Story Author’s Note: This story appeared in the October 29, 2021 online edition of The Adirondack Almanack. “The legend lives on from the Chippewa on down Of the big lake they called Gitche Gumee’ The lake it is said, never gives...
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The Phoenix Rises
The New Bull Rush Bay lean-to,
Site 63, Middle Saranac Lake,
Fall 2021...
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