BilletHead

Just another meal from the woods here in BilletHeadVille. Squirrel aurora. Pretty easy to make and filling. Comfort food on days like today. BilletHead

Great! We have done it a couple of ways. Once with fresh raw eggs to make the mayo. If you trust your eggs it takes it up a notch or three. BilletHead

That's a loaded question. Who makes the best pickups, suv's, boats and motors. You will get so many answers. You can spend 10 to 20 dollars and up to hundreds of bucks. Same with goose calls. They are coveted and collected. So my best call is the one that puts my next meal in front of me. All el cheapos. I do have one my parents had made for me in 77 or 78 for Christmas. A Bog Pettybone out of Deerfield Missouri. It stays in the gun safe, BilletHead

Nice chief, We like to make po boy sammiches here too. A lot of it is in the romalade sauce. Did you make yours from scratch? BilletHead

Yes and mob of crows too. BilletHead

What do you mean no one talks about whites and hybrids on the fly? Where have you been tjm and do you read posts on this forum? What pound test line can they break? That just doesn't make sense. How tight are you going to have your drag set? What pound tippet are you using? For hybrids better have something stout and if you don't want your rod to break lighten up your drag. Are they in the rivers or tributaries at any time but spawning? Whites sometimes, Hybrids most defiantly! Sounds like they may be fun wading for? Again where have you been looking on this forum? Forget when thy run? Dang Tail end of walleye and just before crappie on the whites. Hybrids a bit after the whites for the best fishing although some smaller ones will be mixed in with whites. Pay attention man there is a wealth of information on here. Reports, reports, reports. I don't report like I used to. tjm you had better be paying attention or you may forget when it happens. This is just a sample of what is out there. BilletHead Oh and Wrench sounds like sour grapes to me

I will get you that info as close as I can when it warms a bit. From my Uncles toys I have info from his crony up close. BiletHead

We still have a table of Christmas candy on the table. Mrs. BilletHead went overboard and plumb crazy making it this year. Do you want more sugar Quillback? I could send you several pounds . The rum balls are and were the bomb! BilletHead

OK @nomolites and @fishinwrench, So what do you guys recommend? Keep in mind I am looking at lower end entrance rangefinder. Also i am not in to long range HP rifle shooting of for that matter if I do pick up the firearm again for deer hunting I am a close shooter. Lookie here boys this is what I am using for bow hunting . Remember this little top notch in it's time rangefinder? Dial it in until it focuses? Around 1980 or so I am guessing? I want something to squirrel and bow hunt. Light one handed operation and not break the bank. Guess I need to go to Wal Mart, BilletHead

And here he goes again, Way to go man. Gee wiz I need to go fishing. BilletHead

I think I suck at calling to Gavin but manage to take my fair share. Have you ever listened to humans talk? Good grief we are all different and some folks don't make any sense at all. So people respond to people no matter how they talk. I think animals do the same, they have to be different or how would one recognize each others voices? You are doing right by studying and listening to the real thing but no duck call is perfect like no human voice is, BilletHead

Hand rubbing it? BilletHead

More cool migrating birds of prey info, Do you all know what a group of them migrating is called? A kettle, BilletHead

Cold, windy and just plain yucky here in BilletHeadVille today. Other than a little waterfowl scouting most of my day was spent staring out the window. So I catch movement on the far side of my food plot. Two gray squirrels messing around. I grab the .25 air gun, a rangefinder and slip open the window. Range the little furry critters at 57 yards. I can't use the window sill as it is way too low just up from the floor. Have to just try to use the side of the window to brace with. Keep in mind I have never shot over 50 yards. At that 50 yard range I use one mil dot under the cross hairs. So I just guess and take a shot. Have no idea where I hit but the rats began to scurry looking around trying to find out what happened. They got farther away into a couple trees up and down round and round. Ranged again and two more guesses with two more misses trying to thread the pellet through branches and stems. Took one more reading in the tree one was in. 61 yards. Had the scope cranked all the way up to 16 power and every move with the gun, it looked bad as I tried to hold on the squirrels head. So i squeezed the trigger and to my chagrin I heard the kawhop and it tumbled out of the tree . I slipped on my rubber boots and found my prize, Turned around and shot a picture of the house, That final shot I held on the second mil dot. Since a long shot might happen again someday I suppose I should do it on paper off a rest to know exactly how to possibly repeat. Call it luck, call it skill I have no idea but it happened. I went ahead and did a complete case skin as I am needing a good gray skin for fly tying. The pellet entered the top of his head and excited the eye. No to my rangefinder story. Summer before last I went to our local farmers market. A guy sells leather craft there. He asks me hey do you hunt? Yes and then there was do you need a rangefinder? What have you got? We go to his car and out comes this old Bushnell rangefinder. The kind like a big set of binoculars. I shake my head as he says I got them in a trade and they work good to make an offer. I say how about 20 bucks. Before I get the sentence finished he says sold. Mrs. BilletHead just shook her head. Came with a case and instructions. We by a battery on the way home so I, can try them. They did work and do work but bulky for carrying. Now after this I want a better one . Something to use with one hand and take with me on walks. This one has a date on it. Manufactured 11/97. I know they are accurate and use them on my range. Pretty funny 21 years old. BilletHead

Yep! BilletHead

Hawks belong in the ecosystem, feral cat's don't. https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/feral-cats-kill-billions-of-small-critters-each-year-7814590/ Have one neighbor that has a cat they let roam free. Seen it in the yard a few times. Mainly South of their house doing what cats do just kill. One day we were talking about hunting. I told him I had been shooting squirrels with the air gun. He found it humorous and said you can have the ones my cat brings home. Sometimes three a day. Doesn't eat them just leaves them on the back porch. Just like Flysmallie said. The cat gets into the mulch around the garden and craps in it. Any dry dirt in the carport or shed is it's litter box. You want a cat keep it at home. I really don't want to share it with you. Same thing with dogs that don't get taken care of. Another family three miles away has dogs that breed and not taken care of. The dogs roam up to the pasture behind the house and beyond hunting and looking for something to eat. Running cows and deer. It all stems back to the owners not the pets but the pets sometimes pay the price for their owners. Back to the topic. Feeding stations. Wish fur was worth something. BilletHead

Just as Rick said above. I suggest something that soaks in. If you epoxy it will eventually ding and chip. If you use a penetrating oil finish it can take some dinging and still look nice. Oiling it once and awhile is all you will need. Just my opinion in what woodworking I have done. Had a canoe and I used Watco oil for reworking the wood gunnels. Water would bead up and roll off. I know you and how hard you will be using this net. Oil finishes no matter what you use are easy to maintain, BilletHead

Go with watco oil DJ. Clear or they have some with stain. Let it soak in for awhile and rub off. Repeat as many times as you can until it won't drink anymore. Looks nice buddy, BilletHead

Hey I have slept since then. I was close on it though. BilletHead

Oh man yes, Sometimes the trip down the banks go quicker than it should be. Hitting the bottom hurts more than it used to and getting wet happens. More than one place on the Bates county drainage ditch I have slid a small boat down the bank on a rope. Getting it back up attached a block roller to a tree and used the truck to pull boat into the air above the ground and pulled boat over the bank backing truck to let it down on top. Got me to places I would never got to fish. BilletHead

Reading this got me to thinking some of what I used to do with line and jig sizes. First of all you can catch some pretty big fish and small jigs and flies. Smaller jigs need to be thrown on light lines IMO. You can get deeper it just takes a bit longer. My first encounter with Taneycomo came in the early eighties. My cousin and I went both not knowing what we were doing. Bought ultralights with small reels and 2 lb. line. When we got there bought 1/80 and 1/100 oz. I think they were bassapper jigs. We launched at the main street ramp in a 12 ft. boat with a 2 horse Neptune air cooled outboard. Like an eggbeater on the back of that boat. Right off we about got swamped by a bass boat throwing a roostertail. This was a winter January trip. We had a blast and caught some mighty nice trout throwing those little jigs. Got home and found a person with a tax number and ordered a bunch of those jigs wholesale. I actually have a few left. Went back the next month and had upgraded to a four horse air cooled martin outboard . Ah the good old days. You needed 2lb to throw those jigs. No floats used and a few years before my first fly rod. So this started my fascination with ultra, ultra lights. So Cousin Mike and I began our quest for catching larger fish on smaller jigs. Lots of pond bass up to five pounds fell to those little jigs and ultralight spinning gear. We than discovered upper Truman reservoir. The Osage arm from Osceola all the way out of the lake proper towards the Kansas state line. If you could catch that arm and river clear, when I say clear I mean a couple foot visibility because you are dealing with a flow out of farm ground. So the Osage Bluff marina used to be at Osceola. We launched there and bought some roadrunners 1/16 oz. By now we were using 4lb. line. White roadrunners with a red stripe on the head and body of red chenille, white marabou tail. Went to the split of the Osage and Sac Rivers. Right after the split on the South side of the Osage was a rock steep bank. Some of you may know it. We would bounce those little roadrunners down the rock and caught all kinds of fish. My first limit of walleye came from there. Big channel cat and white bass, black bass, crappie, drum, gar you name it in Mo waters we caught it. Light line and light rigs we had a ball. Repeated this pattern up that arm to Roscoe and even towards Taberville. In March 8th of 86 we were fishing up from Roscoe. Again light gear 4 lb. and the red white roadrunners I got one on. It took forever to get the fish to where we could see it. Fought like a walleye and hoping for a walleye that is what it was. I about freaked when I saw the behemoth. Here we were, no net and a bent rod about doubled over what was I going to do? Not going to lift it out and I am not about to try to cradle it. I grabbed it like a bass and as it wriggled I felt pain as blood began to flow I got it into the boat. Got to be tough when you are stupid. Needless to say I try now to match line with lure weight and size. 9lb. 8oz. Only fish I have mounted 28 inches long. Back in 86 Bass pro would mount a fish under 30 inches for 69.99. That was a lot of money for me back then, About a six pound mono leader on nanofil is so far the lightest I have used and that was at Jigfest last year. Would try four lb. maybe. Then again I may need jig lessons from Phil . Fly rod tippet I will go low if need be but I get away with a lot on 6X. I have caught a ten lb. walleye on the Bates County drainage ditch near where the Osage breaks off close to Pappensville. I think I had graduated to 8lb mono by then. That fish got eaten. I am too old and not so agile to climb up and down muddy banks to the hot spot spawning run areas now but miss those days a bunch. BilletHead

The BilletHead's used to feed the birds many moons ago. We have an arbor with multiple feeders. Some supposedly squirrel and raccoon proof, not so much the coons would tear them up big time. During the coldest part of the winter we would go through 50 lbs. of black oil sunflower seed a week! The shelled seeds would get deep and had to be shoveled off every few days. If you didn't it would mold and make the birds sick as some of them were ground feeders digging through the stuff. We did not mix other grains, hen scratch or commercial blends because less desirable birds would show up. It got so bad I decided to trap the raccoons. This is a fact I used a live trap and caught 22 raccoons in 21 nights. One night a pair went in side by side and I got a double. We did put out suet cakes and made up some peanut butter blends with sunflower seeds and stuffed and coated pinecones. Besides the seed hulls the ground got white with bird crap. It looked like a roost. Now we do nothing but am still kind of feeding other critters . I have a place I take larger cleaned animals way out back in a pasture to be cleaned up by natures clean up crew but have a closer place North of the house for smaller hauls of game parts about fifty yards away. I would actually have this right behind the house within sight if it wasn't for Sadie dog. So i have a trail cam on this spot. I started by just dumping game carcasses. Then I tied a strong cord between a couple trees and hang from it. I have had up to 200 pictures a night. One of those nights a bobcat was there for five hours batting the squirrel hide and head around like a kitten playing with a toy. Even deer are inquisitive. There is a scrape not five yards from the bait station. Deer could care less. Five and six coons at a time. One picture i did not keep had a skunk, two coons and one possum at once. Here is just a few, BilletHead

Just another prime example of a non native invasive species reeking havoc on the natural ecosystem. Feral cats do not fill a niche. We have bobcats that do a fine job. BilletHead I have a bird feeding story for later.

Wonderful and well done man! BilletHead

Get it done, don't leave us hanging. BilletHead