Inside Out Outdoors

As November continued on, the "fun" was just beginning to for me.  The weekend after my small unloaded gun failure, Paul and I found ourselves perched 25-feet up a pine tree on section of Alcoa gamelands in Rowan County, NC.  Muzzleloaders in hand and me running the camera as well, we sat that still morning hearing duck hunters break the silence as daylight slowly crept over the trees.  The occasional muzzleloader shot rang out as well, putting that feeling that "it could happen any time now" in us.  And it did, just as heavy fog rolled in.

The first two full weeks of North Carolina's Archery season are in the books and we have been fortunate enough to spend a couple days in the woods.  No deer yet but lots of valuable information has been gained on this particular piece of public land we are hunting. 

Labor Day morning, Cory and I headed over to the Alcoa gameland for the opening day of the North Carolina Dove season.  We have been scouting this area for deer hunting quite a bit during the off season so we decided to setup at first light near the power line clear cut to see if we could catch the morning flight of doves.  Not long after we had setup we had a dove fly over us that caught us by total surprise.  We saw a few others on the power lines but nothing that flew to us and decided to take a walk around and see if we could jump any on the new logging roads; we did but no shots were taken.  On our way back to where we had our gear set I flushed one dove out ahead of us and took a shot but did not connect.  Although we did not leave with any doves for dinner we used a good part of the day to scout for deer and are now very comfortable in the area and we do believe we will take some deer as the season progresses.  All in all it was a great day out and it beat sitting in the office!  Now hopefully our scouting endeavors pay off in the coming weeks.  Be sure to keep an eye out for many new posts coming!

P.S. - We would love to hear from our readers how they did on dove this year, so feel free to share your stories with us!

-Paul Nicolucci

The last few weekends have either been spent getting gear cleaned, organized and stored for the upcoming hunting season(s) or hitting the woods to do a little scouting of old and new places.  Since I'll be hunting South Carolina for the first time in 10 years, I've been driving down an hour and a half from my house on Sundays to scout with my father and grandfather.  They've driven me by places I used to hunt when in my teens and we have walked new places I have never been to before.  Let's just say the amount of deer sign we have been finding has me pumped for the October 1st muzzleloader opener down there in the Upstate!  I foresee a stocked freezer of SC deer just due to the number of good places we have to hunt, long season and liberal bag limits.  Not to be forgotten, I've also been checking out a spot on Alcoa where Paul was blessed to take a mature doe last December on a hunt with me.  We planned to cover the whole parcel of land one Friday, but a boot blowout back at the truck after making our way through one half of the area didn't let that happen.  But we did a test run with my boat (a 10 minute boat ride saves us a mile to mile and a half walk!) last Saturday with our friend Seth, the cool morning making us all ready for deer season to get here.  Parking the boat near just a 100 yards from a tree we had picked out for Seth, we were able to make a quick and quiet approach to said tree, validating the use of the boat come hunting season.  But the day was just not for a test run, we let Seth practice using a climbing stand, got a video setup picked out and bushwhacked our way through head high weeds and briars to see where the deer that accompanied Paul's December doe had went to.  Outside of a few Sundays in September scouting in South Carolina, my pre-season scouting will end on Monday morning at Alcoa after hunting the North Carolina dove season opener with Paul; I've got to get a tree picked out for next Saturday afternoon (that's right, bow season opens here in North Carolina a week from today!) so I can watch some oak trees from afar in order to pick out an ambush spot for the following weekend's hunt with Paul.  From then on out it's in-season scouting, checking out spots on the walk out after morning hunts, during midday and on the walk in during afternoons.

-C.B.