Sometimes you do something that is so spectacularly silly and stupid that you have to tell on yourself. So here goes.

Friday night I took a friend to the deer lease for some pig and deer hunting. We didn’t see much. No one there did. One pig was hit; another was missed. Only two of the four guys hunting even saw deer. He and I took took some meat off the pig that was hit and dumped the carcass. And here’s where it gets interesting.

My friend is an even bigger gear queer than I am. He’d brought his generation 1 night vision monocular. After we dumped the pig carcass we decided to walk around with it and see what we could see. There’s pigs around this property, but they seem to have all gone nocturnal recently. And we really wanted to shoot some.

I don’t know much about night vision equipment and had never used it before, but this monocular is pretty neat. It’s a 2.5x power with an infrared illuminator. The image was surprisingly clear. I was expecting some kind of green fuzz, but stuff was actually pretty clear.

So we went walking around in a river bottom area. After a time, my friend abruptly stopped and focused on something. He thought it might be a pig. I took a look and it sure looked like a pig bedded about ten yards inside the tree line. But then he noted it wasn’t moving. I studied it some more. It did seem awfully still. Not even breathing. But it was big and black and lying on the ground so we pushed on.

After carefully and stealthily stalking about 50 yards in the moonlight we got to within about 20 yards. Still unable to see even its outline with the naked eye we again glassed it with the monocular. It was still there. Big, black, lying down, not moving. We’re going to get it! I got ready on the gun, and we lit it up with a flashlight. Only to find an old tire that someone had chunked in the trees.

Oops. Well, it was fun. I’d never stalked a tire before. Nor had I used night vision before. That we couldn’t discern any movement at all from its breathing mighta shoulda been our sign. But it was fun.

LWD

Good story LDW. I have forgotten some of mine on purpose.

There are some strange 'optical conclusions' out there .Once I was sure I saw another hunter dressed in hunter orange . I was the only one that should have been there so I checked it out .Bizarre as it sounds it turned out to be a mass of orange mushrooms on a tree with the sun directly on them. I was so sure as I had never seen mushrooms like that.

..sounds like Polyporous sulfurous ..... eminently edible......

........at least it was a low pressure hunt.......

Once upon a time I was spot and stalk black bear hunting in Montana. I was sneaking along in heavy cover on a rainy cloudy day when I spotted a BIG bear below and about 30 yards ahead, of me

So I began my "sneak". I was quiet and got real close, checking with my binos every few feet.

I will not say how close I got.... Before I discovered I was stalking a fallen "bear tree".

For me it was a burnt stump on bear....or oh yeah the rancher's Angus calf laying down!

Well, no matter what, when you look back at 2011, you can always say you had a "Good Year" hunting...

I love the virtual honesty, it's what makes the story truly funny because we all do stupid stuff sometimes.
My favorite stalking oops was someone elses duck decoys when I was a kid. Somebody left their decoys out during mid day and I got to about 20 yds through the rushes before "DOES NOT COMPUTE" came up on the screen.

It was definitely an experience I won't forget or live down very soon. And y'all were even nice too me and didn't make fun of me! It did make me want some night vision gear though. That stuff was really fun.

LWD

I know that there is a PH in Africa who had a full bodied mount of a hyena done by the taxidermist. They "punk" the occassional hunter by having them make a stalk on the hyena or punching a hole in the hyena standing in the brush. I can only imagine the hunter's reaction when after he shoots, nothing happens, he shoots again thinking maybe he missed, still nothing, then at some point he realizes what is going on. Has to be good fun for the trackers.

at a lease I used to be on we had a 3D Boar target that, somehow, we got in the habit of hiding in the woods for people to stalk. It got moved a lot.

In the course of a year I stalked it not one, not two but three times, and actually shot it once.

The last time I saw it I put it back in the lease owners campsite and covered it with Sow in Heat. lol