Outdoor Adventures with Gary Lee - Vol. 129

It’s white again this morning and I had one new visitor to the feeder this morning; an American Goldfinch. I had seen a few this week while out and about as they were feeding on the yellow birch seeds which are plentiful. I also had Red Crossbills feeding on balsam cones during this week. They were giving me some calls as they were feeding away on the cone seeds. These cones must have been ripe as the Black Capped Chickadees and Red Breasted Nuthatches were feeding in the same treetop. I had a couple Hooded Mergansers on the pond, and I also saw some down behind Limekiln Campsite along the Nature Trail. There is a big flock of Canada Geese living on Old Forge Pond at nights and eating most of the day down where the North Branch of the Moose River meets the Middle Branch in Thendara. On Wednesday, while on the way to Utica, there was a beautiful Great Blue Heron feeding just above the bridge there.

We were on our way to Utica for me to get a colonoscopy by Doctor Pinkhasov at the Mohawk Valley Endoscopy Center in New Hartford. I had canceled my appointment in early 2020 when Covid was coming on strong. It took awhile to get a new appointment, as many others did the same thing. I breezed through it and had eight small polyps removed, so I need to go back in two years to have things checked again.

Karen and I got our booster Covid vaccine a couple of weeks ago now and we had no bad reaction to the shots. It’s great that kids 5-11 can now get vaccinated. I can remember when I was about twelve that Polio was going around and one of our neighbors down the road had it and he was in a wheelchair. I happened to go to their house, and we were playing with trucks and building roads around the cellar of their house one day. I came home and got a licking from my dad because I was so near the father that had Polio. A scare of the unknown, I guess that ended up on my butt. That year in school, I believe it was seventh grade, we all lined up in the cafeteria and got our Polio shots. A classmate, John Goodwin, passed out right behind me in line and I had never seen that happen before. I walked up and got my shot and luckily never got Polio. This Covid virus is much more easily spread than Polio, and even vaccinated people are catching it, but almost none of them die from the virus. There are still over one thousand people in this country dying daily just because they won’t get vaccinated, and they are taking the chance of not catching the virus. I hope parents let their children get vaccinated. Of the seventy-six million children in the U.S., just less than seven hundred have died from Covid and most of these could have been prevented now with a vaccine.

“A New York Still Hunter Arrowed This 20-Point ‘Houdini’ Buck in the Adirondacks” by Bob McNally in the Adirondack Almanack. Colt Russell of Ticonderoga hunting on a 400- acre hunting lease in Essex County took a 20- point buck with a bow. He prefers to hunt the old fashion way by stalking them. He spends lots of time in the woods, still hunting with his bow. He’s taken plenty of deer bow hunting this way, and one of two bears in recent years. He also hunts from tree stands and uses trail cameras. That’s how he knew a big 20-point buck was in the area. He had it on trail camera photos of the giant for three years.

Russell was walking out of the woods and only about 250-yards from his truck when he spotted this deer. He didn’t even have an arrow nocked. As he nocked an arrow, the deer stepped into a clear lane in the brush. “I could see the deer fine, and I had an open window to it’s chest and vitals at 50 yards, I just couldn’t see the rack well when I shot”. The buck dropped on the spot, and that’s when Russell recognized the deer he had just shot. “I just sat down, emotions really welled up in me,” he remembers. The buck is huge, with lots of mass, tall tines, and twenty countable points. It weighed 198 pounds dressed.

John and Deb Munyan had a neat experience this morning, as they looked out their back window at the new fallen snow, and what would appear, but a nice two-year old bull moose in the backyard. He got a few photos as it just walked away up the road.

The bucks are chasing does and playing stupid, but that’s another story. See ya.

Photo Above: 20 point buck by Colt Russell

moose 2
Bull moose by John Munyan