Well, its been a busy couple of months between the summer activities, gardening, work, and so on. I finally have a few moments to catch up on some blogging and we will start with the opening weekend of bird hunting season.
The wife and I left the boys with Grammy & Grampy and headed North to the Western mountains of Maine. This is an area I have been hunting now for almost 10 years and has provided me with countless hours of adventure and frustration.
The last time Wen was up with me bird hunting was before our first child was born, so it has been several years and she was anxious to get out there! This was only an afternoon hunt for us because of logistics, but we were eager to make the most of it.
We arrived at the hunting covert around noon and it was a balmy 60F and partly cloudy. This may seem like great weather, but after hiking through the brush it’s easy to overheat yourself and the dog. After two-hours we still had not pushed a bird and then it began to drizzle. I have always had better luck hunting in inclement weather, so I was hopeful our luck would change and we would get into some birds. As luck would have it, the weather worsened and our hunting improved.
We pushed around a couple woodcock and one grouse before the drizzle turned to a torrential downpour and the wife and I decided we were done for the day. We managed to bag only one woodcock, but had a great time together in the woods. Later that night we enjoyed a nice dinner at the Loon Lodge in Rangeley, Maine.
The following morning we ran into a couple of wild turkeys on our way out of town as we headed South to pick up the kids.
Naturally my oldest is excited about hunting and wanted to see the lone bird we harvested. He had a blast wearing his blaze orange had and showing everyone the bird we had brought back from our hunting trip.
