Season of Painted Leaves

COOLER MORNINGS…

In the air you can feel a change, almost taste it. The “Season of the Painted Leaves” is upon us!

If you do not love September and October, I truly feel sorry for you. With September comes dove season in Texas, the first hunt of the fall for most of us. Like many of you, I will be looking to add a few of these tasty flying morsels to our larder.

While hunting doves, I will also scout for whitetails; checking for fresh rubs and scrapes, looking for tracks, and clearing shooting lanes around my ground blinds. While others are sitting on a field or around a waterhole waiting for doves, I’ll slip way to a place where there is little shooting to scout for deer.

September is the ideal time to start getting ready for the coming hunting season in terms of bows and arrows, crossbows and the firearms you and I will use once we get into the deer seasons.

As many of you are aware I am not a bowhunter, although years ago I was and took my fair share of deer and other game with arrows. Only recently I have started hunting with a crossbow. Not being a dyed-in-the-wool archery hunter, I appreciate being able to hunt during the archery season (here in Texas) with a crossbow. During the Texas archery season, I can take an antlerless deer or doe without special permits on my property west of Houston. While hunting a doe I can also look for that special buck. What that special buck will be, as I write this in early July, I am not yet certain. It will all depend upon what shows up in my scouting, or on my daughter’s and son-in-law’s trail cameras. We left several near legal and some legal bucks last season on on the property I own and lease for hunting. This year, they should be pretty nice deer The property is in a one-buck county with antler restrictions. I might add that antler restrictions have done a great job of getting some bucks into older age classes.

In October, many properties under the Texas Parks & Wildlife Department’s Manage Lands Deer Permit system become available to be hunted with firearms. I have several short trips set up to hunt during this special season. I dearly love this because deer taken on these properties do not require a tag from one’s license, and they do not count against your annual deer bag limit.

Over the years I have done a fair amount of hunting with handguns. This fall I plan once again to hunt with a handgun. Back during the late summer, I procured a Taurus Raging Hunter revolver chambered in .454 Casull, a nicely powerful and accurate handgun round.

My Taurus is topped with a Trijicon SRO red-dot sight and shoots extremely well with Hornady’s 200-grain Mono-Flex Handgun Hunter ammo. I plan to use this combination on several hunts.

Hunting with a handgun means I’ll limit my shots to essentially 100-yards or less. To me, a big part of hunting means trying to get as close to the animal as possible before pulling the trigger.

Take a bit of time in September to be sure you are dialed in with your archery equipment or firearms. Take care of what remains on your “honey-do” list and then get ready for whitetail season. Do not forget to invite those in your household and maybe even a neighbor to head to the deer woods with you this fall.

 

Email Larry Weishuhn at ContactUs@fishgame.com

 

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