I have about had it with them!!

Dave Parks

Dave Parks

Well-known member
Here it is midnight and I'm just about to go to bed when I hear a racket on the back patio porch. I can hear a 5 gallon plastic bucket (1/2 full of wild bird seed) being rolled around and draged around. I grab a handu .357 and spot lite, throw the patio light on and quickly open the sliding glass door.....YUP!

There is a REALLY big black bear! He takes one look at me and takes off running up the hill into the trees with the buckets hadle in his mouth and the bucket is still attached! All I have time to do is call him a SOB! The .357 would have only wounded him at that range unless I was lucky.

I now have the M-2000 loaded with 3" mag 00B followed by 12 ga. slugs, enough is enough..........it's WAR from here on out!

He's going to end up like the one I shot last November, but this time I won't be sporting and use my old muzzleloader.........WAGH!
Dave
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Heh heh heh...hahahaha...somehow, the picture of you in your skivvies chasing a 400lb bear off your back porch just cracked me up.
 
I have to agree with Harker, Dave. Looks like a new bucket and sleeping with your clothes on for a while. hee hee
 
And to think that all I've had to do was chase off a few racoons with a mop (closest thing that I could grab) in my undies.

Bill G.
 
In this part of the country, you would have been concidered over dressed for killing copperheads on the back porch. Proper attire for that sport is just jungle boots. One of my wifes favorite stories.
 
I was planning on one of those ORVIS "MIXED DOUBLE" write ups and lapel pins when I sent them a shot of a Bear and a Turkey taken simultaneously......might be some argument that it wasn't a TRUE doulbe since the Turkey would likely flush on "the report" instead of already being in the air when the Bear was shot but they'll just have to ignore the subtelties in this case.....

Hold off a bit longer and I'll bring you a dozen buckets and a 100 lbs of bird seed to cover your loses during the wait....

Steve
 
I don't know Steve, when that big SOB smacked the side of kitchen wakk with that bucket last night, I though someone was trying to break in! Being a card carrying NRA Member and proud owner of a State CCW permit, I am never more than 5 feet from a loaded gun in this house, so them damn bears better watch it!

Byt, for you.........I will not shoot him, but that big brown one who tore down my trail camera from up in the tree ain't getting no stay of exicution if he passes by my tree stand. He got lucky today as I had a big excavator show up this afternon and I had to show the guy where to put it to work. That through my planned tree stand stint this afternoon out the window.

I did not get back down from the rock quarry until after 6 pm. And when I went to park the ATV in the garage I looked behind my truck and here is a noce Tom with a great beard and good hooks standing there admiring himself in the chrome bumper. He is so taken with himself that I drive right by him and he just keeps looking at himself. I pull into the garage and grab my camera off the bike. Not only do I walk up to him and take his picture from 6 feet away, the crazy bird acts like he couldn't care less as he walks back and forth chattering to himself and looking at his reflection in the bumper!

An hour later when Judy gets home, he is still looking and talking to himself as Judy walks right past him 8 feet away. This crazy Tom showed up this morning for the first time. He must have come from someone's petting zoo or something. Here he is...........See ya in a couple of weeks.
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Who says turkey hunting is hard? All you have to do is get in my truck, put it in reverse and Waa-Laa, instant Long-Beard. :^)

Dave
 
with Rat Shot.....

This is the second bird I've heard about fighting his reflection in a chrome bumper this spring....Last weekend I was with Fred Slygield up in Stevens county on his Turkey lease and as we were walking back to the truck one evening we stopped to talk to the guy in whose yard we had parked. He was telling us about a BIG doulbe bearded bird that he had seen earlier in the week that had spent over an hour fighting his reflection in the bumper of his RV....

In the first picture your bird actually looks like he's doing the same thing that the doulbe bearded bird did. Will said that he'd strut in front of the bumper, peck his reflection, then smack it with is wings, maybe spur it a little and then stick his head up under the bumper and look at the backside of the bumper looking for the bird.

When he couldn't find it on backside of the bumper he step back out to the chromed side and then act shocked that the "OTHER" Gobbler had returned....just goes to prove that even "smart" animals can do "dumb" things.

I suppose that if you have to whack that big Black one when he steps inside the door for a snack from the frig that I could be happy with the brown one....

See ya in a couple of weeks.

Steve
 
Ya sure that tom wasn't just despondent after being rejected by hens and trying to off himself with the exhaust? Not that I'd know about stuff like that...
 
Steve, I got to thinking about that Tom just after dark tonight. I stepped out onto the front porsh and gobbles, he answered me right back.....he had roosted in a group of pines in the pasture just below the house.

In the morning I am going to set up a mirror against a tree in the yard that he will see if he comes to water here at the little pond in the morning. I want to get some pictures of what he will do when he see's a real Tom close up?

BTW better bring a hen decoy with you, the night that the bear went into the pond here by the house and rolled in the new tules I planed, he also took off with my hen turkey decoy. Which makes me wonder if this house guest bear is into plastic.........kinky bear.

Hans called me last Saturday and told me he had picked up another dog like his other one in......I think he said the Dakota's? Anyway he stopped in Lewistown on his way back to look at a house there to buy as a place to go when he goes huntingin MT. Anyway, it did not work out but he's still looking. And here I thought it might be a good place to live, now here's Hans who will give the town a bad name :^).

Dave, or should I cal you "short tiner" now that you are shortly heading south? Did you see the post I made to you a few days ago with the old pic's of Lewistown?

Did you ever go to the old town of Maiden up Maiden Canyon just north of Giltedge? I found a bunch of old photo's of it going back into the 1880's. I know there is not much left of it now since the fire in 1905 pretty much burnt everything down and it was abandoned shortly after. But it might be a fun place to work over with my metal detectors, if it has not already been done a lot by others.

Dave
 
Sorry, Dave, haven't had a chance to reply to your email with the pics. Very cool! Except for bigger trees and a few fast food places, that view downhill into town hasn't changed much. That 1888 shot of the ranch has to be west of town looking south at the Snowies but I can't really place it. It's easy to forget that they removed every darned tree from the flat lands back then. The church in the circus photo is still there but I think most of the other building fronts have been redone.

I'll have to get out my maps regarding the Maiden site. I remember seeing a sign for it and was probably there at some point. There are some great old homesteads still standing in the Coffee Creek and Moccasin areas. Not all that old considering they were still giving away land there into the early 40s.

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Dave,

Maiden Canyon is not a place that you would go to, more like a place you might bump into. It's on the east side of the Judith's and about the best way to get near it is to go up to Brooks and hand a right on a pretty good road that goes east up over Gold Hill and drops down into Giltedge on the east side of the range.

The other thing that has got me fired up is recently discovering exatly where old Fort McKenzie was located. The naturalist Prince Maximillian brought Karl Bodmer with him and in 1833 they stayed for 3 monthes at Fort McKenzie collecting plants, animals and studied the Blackfeet Indians. Karl Bodmer painted in watercolars the Indians, animals and scenery. He did a couple paintings of Fort McKenzie, one with himself, Maximillion and an interpreter talking to a bunch of Blackfeet at the Fort's gate. The other painting was done looking down from the Fort in a N/E direction. It shows the Missouri making a turn to the south and the Marias coming ito the Missouri from the left (N/W) that spot today is called the Roxe Bench just a little east of Loma.

Bodmer is one of my favorite Fur Trade period painters, right in there with Catlin and Alfred Jacob Miller who were all in Montana recording history with their paint brushes during the Fur Trade era.

Maybe a 175 years have gone by, but I imaginea a guy could still make a couple of bucks along the Missouri below Fort Benton......not by cutting firewood for the Steamboats, but by leaving a few 5 gallon gas cans along the shorline at say $6 a gallong for the boaters to buy. "Good thing to know, if times get hard" from the movie Jeremiah Johnson.

Dave
 
Sorry, I had the Moccasins on the brain and you're talking about the Judiths. Yep, I've been up the Maiden Canyon Road and have done a little turkey chasing not too far from there. There are state parcels and little pieces of quality BLM land but not too much of the good stuff is accessible.

Times certainly have changed. Better make that cans of jet fuel and don't leave them unattended. I'm afraid the honor system went the way of the steamboats.
 
Maybe a 175 years have gone by, but I imaginea a guy could still make a couple of bucks along the Missouri below Fort Benton......not by cutting firewood for the Steamboats, but by leaving a few 5 gallon gas cans along the shorline at say $6 a gallong for the boaters to buy. "Good thing to know, if times get hard" from the movie Jeremiah Johnson.

Dave
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One of the greatest movies of all time!!!! "Can you skin Griz?"
 
What in the heck is wrong with the turkeys out there?! I have never heard of an eastern doing that. Those pics are really wild, Dave. Thanks for sharing!
 
Nothin' Ira, you guys just hunt them the old fashions way, with decoys 'n such. Out here we just call 'em in to are mirrors and shoot 'em. :^)

Hope all is well with you and the family.

Dave
 
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