Home Forums Hunting & Shooting General Big Game Do you keep count.

Only elk. I have a little bound book that I put reloading, bullet casting, etc stuff in, and it has a couple of pages in the middle for the elk that I've shot. I list the year, where I shot it, cow or bull and number of points, and rifle or arrow.


If my elk averaged 200 lbs of meat each, that would have been 3 1/2 tons of meat in my freezers.

I’ve lost track….

My best reference is my load data notebooks where I usually make a few notes.
But I’ve never made notes on my archery kills. Kinda’ wish I’d made more detailed notes for both.

no never have on animals or ammo shot either , heck i don`t even know how many knives , guns , or bows i own .

I have kept track of my elk kills as well as my partners since my first one in the early 60's. Our group has been small but very successful on elk. I no longer keep track of the deer because I have killed one almost every year since I started hunting. I posted our elk tally here once but received some very negative posts, so I will pass on that part. I have never killed a trophy bull, I just haven't felt the need. All of our elk were fair chase, on public land.

Tried to in my youth. Gave it up, too many to keep track of. I do have all the antlers and some exceptional shoulder mounts so I could count the bucks. Also have a box full of turkey beards and rattle snake rattles. For the does, landowners insisted on two to three for every buck shot. I could never guess the number of birds and small game.

One of the things I make a note on in my list of animals is the weight, whether field-dressed or butchered meat, depending on the circumstances. That's because have been living off wild game for decades, and helps to know if we have enough to last into next hunting season--including various kinds of game, since due to my wife writing game cookbooks. She prefers having a sufficient supply of various kinds of game for recipe development.

But I have also found my notes result in article ideas. One thing I heard (and read) for years was that boattail cup-and-core bullets tend to separate jacket from core more often than flat-based cup-and-cores. Eventually decided to analyze my collection of recovered bullets--and it turned out exactly the same number of boattail and flatbase C&Cs had separated....

No.

No idea of how many of anything I've killed over time.


There is a basket of horns in Dad's garage, from both of us.
It was his idea to keep them, I would have threw them out with the heads and hides.
Very few pictures.
I hunt for meat and the experience.


Where hunting is concerned, IMHO.
Now matters.
Tomorrow? Not much.
Yesterday is over.



Thinking it over.
I wish I had written stuff down.
Not that anyone else would or should GAS.
But it would be interesting to have.

86 elk, 79 pronghorn, 131 deer, 4 moose, 2 bighorns, 1 desert sheep, 1 dall sheep, 5 black bears, 1 muskox, 2 lions, 1 oryx, 1 mountain goat, several dozen exotics and hogs in Texas, bunch of javelina, trapped a bunch of furbearers.

I've slowed down quite a bit on deer and pronghorn. I get tags for both usually end up throwing away all the antlerless tags. Still shoot bucks and whitetail does once in a while. Pretty tough on elk, we have a pile of them.

I've helped more friends and family on hunts than what I've personally shot.

I am the patriarch of our deer/turkey camp. As such, I keep a log of everyone's kill, and I include not only the weapon, but the round and weather conditions as well. I keep all that in an Excel worksheet, and I can mine the data. The data goes back to 1991.

For these and everything else, I usually make an entry in my weblog and give the story of how it all happened. If Moose wants to see how he did on squirrels in 2018, he's got a pretty good idea from those entries. For all the interesting stuff, there's also a set of pics to go along with it. For deer, I usually take a shot of the kill when and how it was found as well as the usual meatpole photos. For turkey, I try to include a pic of the turkey on the scales and the legs and beard alongside a tape measure.

Texas Parks & Wildlife requires us to do a survey of the # of deer on the ranch each year a submit it, then they tell us how many deer we need to take off each year and keep a record of all Whitetail deer taken off the ranch, Age, Sex, Weight, Bucks Score no matter the size, we have records going back forever on Whitetails, Pigs, Predators, Exotics, we keep track of how many and what we kill, but are not required to by TP&W. Rio7

I keep basic records on the coues wt and elk my hunting friends and I have taken. Not so for javelina, coyotes or even coatis.

I keep meticulous records on mearns quail and tie it in with the rainfall we had that year. I refer to previous years as a reference to figure where to go on future mearns hunts.

I keep records for bass at my favorite lake, Roosevelt Lake, Az. Number released, water temp, weather, which part of the lake and what lure did well .

Speaking of squirrel records, while I never kept records, I remember one memorable time on Wall Creek Elk Refuge, near the Madison River in Mt, where I killed 180 ground squirrels in 3 hours with a 10-22. That's an average of one a minute.

I am willing to bet many who don't keep records on their hunting or fishing keep records on their vehicles maintenance. Just saying.....

Yes, you are the supreme hunter, just ask yourself. What are you hunting in this torpedo?

No journal.I have few pictures, and know I didn't get skunked elk hunting many times. I have kept all my hunting licenses and there is big pile. Many do not have carcass tags attached. It isn't so much the killing as it is about the hunt, which I remember more of. Probably the most rounds have been fired at prairie dogs. I probably have 4-500 pieces of brass for each rifle I own. Most of it is used in working up a load or sighting in or checking zero.

I have nine big game mounts hanging on my wall here. Quite few elk and deer antlers hanging on the barn, garage and more up in the rafters. But nothing written down anywhere. Except on another forum where I was asked to tell about some of my old hunts from the 60's and 70's

This thread reminded me of a job I have to do. I've got gobs of antler mounts from the past 20 years, but none of them have the dates recorded on mount. I need to at least get out a marker and put it on the back of the mounting board.

I used to keep very detailed notes on both fishing and hunting. It always helped me keep track of when the crappie were on the beds and what level the river needed to be at to get into what duck hole, when the bucks were really chasing, etc…. Anymore about the most I do is if a cartridge made a kill I place it back in the 50 or 100 round box neck up…. It’s always fun to get my old journals out and read them. Brings back a lot of great memories. I also used to keep track of what bullet was used and how well it performed…. But long since gave up on that. It ain’t what you hit them with but where you hit them…. Within reason. When my boys get old enough and if I’m lucky enough to have them share my love of the outdoors…. I’ll probably start back with the journals. I do keep track of all the stuff that gets killed out of my box blinds. I keep a pen or pencil in all of them. If a shot gets fired it gets recorded. Makes for great reading on days the deer aren’t moving!

I don’t but I wished I had on coyotes. The farm I lived on for 11 years was a coyote Mecca and I have no idea how many I killed and most were shot off the kitchen counter. The bay windows had no screens and one run right before I went to Alaska for the summer was 11 dogs in 14 days.

I've killed more stuff with factory ammo than with handloads.

geedubya, thanks, for starting a good tread. I used to keep all kinds of notes. I got past 60 somewhat and a few things are not that important as they once were.

I surely don't need to come on the Net and start making trouble like some others.

i did till i was 26yo or so. then i just figured it didn't matter. nowadays i shoot deer mostly with cast bullets and a variety of different calibers and rifles. its mostly about the meat.

Kept count when we were young and thought it mattered. Quit at some point when I was over 100 animals with a bow. Actually have a buck knife with mini notches in the handle to count em all. Somewhere it is I suppose.

I did rough score 2 deer just out of curiosity. Had one animal scored for an exotic records book at the time. It was a pistol nilgai. Got about nothing out of that feeling.

We just kind of realized it really doesn't matter to us and we are the only ones it matters for so to speak.

I could kind of tell you about the wifes creedmoor as we load an MTM box of 100 at a time. But even with plinking here and there at 1000 and beyond that isn't at 200 rounds yet.

Heck I have to talk hard to myself to make sure I record when I change vehicle parts, oil changes, fluid changes etc.... though I find myself more often putting bought dates on things these days. In case I stumble across the stuff later I know how old it is. So its not like the one azzhole bosss that put used but good on boxes of parts.