Home Forums Hunting & Shooting Hunter's Campfire Critters you killed but don’t eat

Dwayne,

Happy Fathers Day to you too my Friend!

These are all Jacks.

Cottontails would be worth eating unlike nasty old jacks, and I lay into the Jacks. I normally give the little Cottontails a free pass unless I am going to eat one. There are but a fraction of them as compared to the desert jacks, which are just vermin, so we let the little Cottontails go and hope they survive.

When I do shoot a cottontail I only take what I need for a meal, no more.




The old Flattop is what I call my "Taffin" gun in honor of writer John Taffin. Many years ago I traveled over to Boise to go to a gun show with a friend who is the co owner of Milt Sparks. He built the holster for the gun:





Anyways Jim and I had breakfast with J.T. and I told John that I was looking for a shorter barrel and some grips for the gun as it came with a 6.5" barrel originally. Long story short, John invited me over to his house, and gave me both a grip frame and shorter barrel. He showed me how to swap frames on the gun and we swapped the frames in his kitchen. So since then I have referred to the gun as my Taffin gun. It was a very rough old thing when I got it, and appears to have been in the bottom of someone's truck box for a long time, but internally it is solid and shoots straight, as the rabbits will attest.

I never worry about taking it out in crappy weather or getting a bit of rust on it.

I bet they are fun to shoot!

yep.......a good dog town can keep ya busy

Barrel warms up fast.....thus the 'Sham Wow' soaked in cold ice water

Keeps mirage waves out of scope too

Spare rifle or two also a good idea

Friend of mine owns a huge ranch in the Owyhees, and also runs on several adjacent BLM allotments. It is in incredibly desolate country. He has 4-5 of those cabins and has the same kind of sign. Has a "guest" logbook for one of them too, as it is a fairly popular ATV area. I stay at one occasionally when hunting Mountain lions.

Pahsimeroi Valley

Takes a lot of ammo, be buying bulk bullets

I often take out of state friends up that same drive - a great day trip.

The pasture just past the cabin on the left always has a few ground squirrels to shoot on the way up the creek.

Ducks, give them away. Divers and sea ducks, puddle ducks are edible.

Same with snow geese. Tough and chewy.
Never shot any more. Won't shoot any critter I don't plan on eating, other than pests, like agressive coons and the aforementioned feral cats.

Snow geese can live 20 years, Canada geese even longer. Indeed the old adults are not very good to eat!

However, if you only shoot the dingy-looking or "dirty" snow geese they are the young-of-the-year birds and they are MUCH better table fare!

When I was an impoverished graduate student, I lived at one of the great snow migration sites.

To save money, pretty much all of the meat I ate was from snow geese, ducks (mallards and canvasbacks mostly), sandhill cranes or whitetail deer.

Oh, and to add flavor, some bacon to wrap the above-listed critters in while cooking.

John

Another time I took some geese to a friend that owned a Chinese restaurant. All variants he cooked turned out delicious and his family joined us at our table. Wouldn't hesitate doing it again.