Have you tagged your spring turkey? Do you see months of doldrums until the fall hunting seasons arrive? You may be one of many experiencing hunting withdrawals. I would suggest that if it troubles you mentally to consider professional help, but first, try hunting varmints. It's spring and that means lots of little varmints popping out of holes here and there across the continent.
Hunting varmints has several benefits to you and landowners. First, you can provide landowners with a service by trimming the varmint population on their fields. Rodents, big or small, dig holes and can trim pasture ground or even crops. By plunking a few of these varmints you can help manage their numbers and do a good deed for a thankful landowner.
Second, hunting varmints gives you real-world shooting practice. Sure the shooting range has wind, rain or bright sunshine, but when you're stalking a rotund ground hog by belly crawling up a knoll, you're experiencing the reality of a true hunt.
Finally, varmint hunting gets you out and about. You have the chance to reacquaint yourself with landowners, scout and maybe even combine a varmint trip with some summer hunting chores such as setting up treestands.
Three biggies in the varmint world include ground hogs for Eastern hunters, prairie dogs for Westerners and the California ground squirrels for West Coast hunters. Don't let the absence of hunting season fool you into staying out of the field. Give varmints a try and enjoy the benefits. Now I have run. There's a prairie dog sticking its head out of snow bank across the road.
GLOBAL WARMING UPDATE
Just in case you can't sleep at night due to your worries over global warming; rest easy. I wasn't kidding about prairie dogs sticking their heads out of the snow. We had a raging blizzard yesterday. It shut down travel and school. We even had to leave my wife's car in town and I picked up her and the kids in my old truck.check out the photo. At this point of the spring I'm beginning to think "ice age," not global warming. I guess it's snow camouflage for turkeys this weekend.
