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Squirrel Doggin' 2017: The Chronicles of Lefty and Slick, Chapter II

Dude, I'm totally making this. thank you, Jesse! it'll be simple with canned squirrel meat and chant's. I'll report back on results.

I stayed in today, watched college football, and made a 3 gallon pot of chili with venison, fresh parmesan sausage, bacon ends, home canned tomatoes, frozen home grown Salsa peppers ( hot green chili's) and, yessirree, canned Chantarelle's. Nancy baked some home made bread bowls. lousy day for hunting, perfect day for venison chili. Slick and I will brave the cold tomorrow and try to find some rats.
 
Jamie said:
Dude, I'm totally making this. thank you, Jesse! it'll be simple with canned squirrel meat and chant's. I'll report back on results.

I stayed in today, watched college football, and made a 3 gallon pot of chili with venison, fresh parmesan sausage, bacon ends, home canned tomatoes, frozen home grown Salsa peppers ( hot green chili's) and, yessirree, canned Chantarelle's. Nancy baked some home made bread bowls. lousy day for hunting, perfect day for venison chili. Slick and I will brave the cold tomorrow and try to find some rats.
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Please do cause it sounds fantastic!

Have you ever canned chili? I'd like to do this, but don't know of anyone who has done so and am curious of the results.
 
yes, I did once. I pressure canned it, of course, and it was ok. only problem was that everything in it got cooked more, a little overcooked, imo. beans and stuff got pretty mushy. I freeze in gallon Ziploc freezer bags instead. easy.
 
Jamie said:
yes, I did once. I pressure canned it, of course, and it was ok. only problem was that everything in it got cooked more, a little overcooked, imo. beans and stuff got pretty mushy. I freeze in gallon Ziploc freezer bags instead. easy.
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Much better idea. Thanks!
 
I've frozen every kind of soup I ever make, and they all freeze well. I mean texture is largely unaffected by freezing, thawing, reheating. sure is an easy dinner a month or 6 from now. can freeze it out on the porch in this godforsaken weather.

I opened the door on my big chest freezer yesterday to let some of the heat out. :p
 
Slick and me getting our game face on to brave the cold for a few hours this afternoon.

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and cold it was. with the sun out and not much air moving in the woods it was bearable without busting out the goose down. didn't stand still too long though, lol.
Slick hunted his little balls off for me today. he tried so hard to find squirrels it was almost comical. and find some he did, along with about a dozen obvious active dens. saw three, kilt two. I'm pretty sure he saw rat number one and sight chased it up a tree as he just started barking serious "treed" and never let up until the rifle barked, too. rat number two was a bit of a surprise as it took Slick a while to figure it out. I could see him from about a 130 yards out and he worked it out and settled on a tree. I double timed it over to the smallish tree he was on, and to my pleasant surprise there was actually a squirrel up there. I snuck to a nice rest only to find that from that position I could only see the squirrels back half. if I stepped away from the tree I had a shot at about 3/4 of the squirrels head. after a brief deliberation I decided to take the off-hand shot. Slick was hot on the tree and I really wanted to give him this one because he did a nice job figuring out the track and committing 100%. I spread my stance out and waved the crosshairs around on the squirrels head a couple of times trying to get the timing right and squeezed one off. rat fell to the ground without so much as a twitch. another damn good shot without a rest for the likes of me. two in the bag, Slick and I both so pleased with ourselves that we must have forgotten how cold we were for another 20 minutes or so until Slick found another tree he like a lot. I plodded along through the snow for the 200+ yards it took me to get to him. He was really hot on this tree, too, but it was not a huge tree. I looked long and hard and almost made it 360* around the tree, and just about ready to give up before I saw a faint outline of squirrel hair. Seeing that he had one caused me to shift gears as I was about to call him off the tree and move him on. I moved slowly around the tree again, then in reverse. This little fucker would not show himself. I got to a place where I knew I had a clear shot, found a short, fat stick, chambered a round, launched the stick as far as I could toward the other side of the tree and got the scope on what I could see of the squirrel. It made him shift enough that I had about 1/4 of the squirrels silhouette to shoot at. head not visible, but I had a body shot if I could hit a 1/4" target. I sprayed him with tree bark and he leapt to another tree and into a hole poste haste. dang it. Slick stayed on it hard, and even followed to the hole tree. it's hard to get them by yourself sometimes. I am extremely pleased with what Slick did today. hunted his ass off, scoured the woods like a pro in tough conditions, but a few came out when the sun shined this afternoon, and he found them. I got about half frozen skinning two squirrels, so I decided to call it a day. Safe to say we had both had as much fun as we could stand for one dick shriveling cold afternoon.

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Jamie said:
I've frozen every kind of soup I ever make, and they all freeze well. I mean texture is largely unaffected by freezing, thawing, reheating. sure is an easy dinner a month or 6 from now. can freeze it out on the porch in this godforsaken weather.

I opened the door on my big chest freezer yesterday to let some of the heat out. :p
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I'll do a turkey fryer full of chicken noodle soup and freeze it in quart containers. Nothing better.
 
Something else I’ve noticed...weather has different effects on the different squirrels. I’ve only seen 3 grays today and 8 fox. I would think the opposite as the grays seem to be more active and quicker. I’d think they’d have to get moving and eat. What I’m seeing says different though, maybe it’s just my location?
 
maybe greys are smarter and have better food caches than those dopey fox squirrels? maybe fox squirrels just need to eat more because they are bigger? on the other hand, there is no rhyme or reason to anything else squirrels ever do, so perhaps it's just coincidence.

I'd say about 75-80% of the squirrels we shoot have a full belly. I mean really full. the two I got sunday barely had any food in their stomachs. one thing is for sure, they do have to come out once in a while for food and to stretch their legs no matter how bad the weather is since they do not hibernate.
 
yes, that brings them out in droves, too, and I've seen as many as a dozen squirrels in one tree. it's pandemonium when you start shooting. rats running everywhere, lol. that is a sight...
 
Nancy and I headed out early this morning to make a day of squirrelin' with the dogs. will be my last hunt until after ML season, unfortunately, perhaps Nancy's last for the season period. it was pretty brutal when the wind picked up about 10 this morning, but it did warm up a smidge and the wind was less of a bother after lunch. still pretty lousy conditions, but ya gotta hunt when you can. We started at about 9:30, loaded up the mutts at about 4:30 and hunted the whole time besides driving from spot to spot and skinning rats. Slick ran circles around Lefty today, but Lefty did actually hunt and didn't interfere with Slick enough to bother me. Slick treed 7 and Lefty got one. We wound up treeing 8, brought home 7. The last tree was a double and one fled to a nest before we could shoot. Nancy was light out today, making 4 good head shots even though she hasn't pulled that trigger since last January. bitch. ;) I bugeyed the other three. we's all whooped. time for some supper and an adult beverage.

sure is nice to have a helper to handle the dogs for me a little. :biggrin:

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one of our better outings this year. squirrel hunting is so damn fun.

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