Wildlife in Your Life

I'm not sure it's the first.

Where in MD, gunga?

In the area about halfway between DC and Baltimore. Hunting with bows can be done in areas in which you couldn't even think about hunting with firearms.

You may be near my brother. I gotta check a map.

Saw that nice 'wildlife' from our toilet window five minutes ago :wink:

If that's what it looks like you need to spray the whole house with DDT and whatever else you can get your hands on. That could kill somebody.

a) it's outside (photo taken through the window)
b) I don't spray, not with illegal DDT or any other chemical stuff.

Then you might want to buy a couple hundred thousand preying mantises and turn them loose in the yard. That spider has the general outline of a black widow, and having those anywhere around humans is not cool.

Here is a friend from my new place in Michigan.

Man, these spiders look like they're the size of house cats. Walter, yours definitely does look like a black widow. Did it have a red hourglass marking?

Oy gunga what kind of an outfit do you shoot?

Do you know ozbow. I dont shoot but I have supplied wood (Osage) for a few selfbows.

sublime great photo, Looks like one of our golden orb weavers.

Silhouette about the same as a blackwidow but you're not likely to see one of those outside your bathroom window. You'd need a color picture.

This does not look like a Black Widow to me. The body form is slightly wrong, especially the back legs. Also the spider is hanging face down, and widows tend to hang body down. Also, widows are cobweb builders. If that's a shaped web, then it's not a widow.

Last time I touched a longbow was so long ago I'd have to relearn how to use it.

My two most recent bows are HighCountry with carbonfibre risers and heat-treated limbs, very light and strong, IBO idea of 5 gr/lb thing meaningless to them, one is set at about 83 lbs and shoots a 280 gr arrow which would destroy other manufacturers bows, doesn't hurt it or even make much noise.

HCA arrows do not harm other bows set below 70 lbs, all they do is make the bows shoot 50 fps faster. The other thing which is recent which I use are the Aftershock mechanicals, which are an innovation as big as the compound bow itself.

I completely agree. It looks more like the orb weaver in one of the following posts.

The Aftershock mechanical flies like a target point as do most mechanicals, but there all similarity ends. Unlike other mechanicals, the Aftershock uses no energy getting past hide, ribs, and/or gristle layers in the case of hogs, and opens to a 2" cutting edge inside the animal:



Their website shows a girl with a 45-lb bow and a 450-lb boar hog she killed with it and they claim to be getting ten second kills on cape buffalo. I had a really big deer which I shot with one of their 80-gr points last fall take three steps and collapse as if he'd had a massive stroke or a heart attack, I mean way cleaner than your typical 30-caliber deer kill, much less the typical bow kill.

What sort of animal is that -- I can't tell as the head is turned.

Like I noted above, it's a 450-lb wild boar which the girl killed with a 45-lb bow and one of the 100 or 125 grain Aftershock mechanical broadheads. Any other kind of mechanical broadhead, and the arrow basically bounces off and the hog walks away. Hogs have a thick gristle layer which protects the area you aim at for heart/lung shots with bows and the old style mechanicals would use a lot of energy trying to open against that. Common knowledge was that you needed at least 65 lbs of draw weight to even use mechanicals on deer and you simply didn't use them on hogs or larger game.

The basic rationale of mechanical broadheads was to prevent the planing which you started getting with normal broadheads after you started shooting at around 260 feet per second and beyond. You never had that problem with longbows or the first one or generations of compound bows but somewhere around the mid 1990s that barrier was exceeded.

I left out some sort of a url for Aftershock...

http://www.aftershockarchery.com

Like I say, as the compound bows became more efficient and carbonfibre arrows became lighter and faster, you reached a point at which an ordinary broadhead would plane and overcontrol the arrow, particularly since common practice until that time had been to set arrows to fly an eighth of an inch or so nock high. What you ended up with looked like a sinker ball in baseball; the arrow would go out ten or twelve yards from the bow and then it appeared as if the hand of God had taken it and even at 20 yards it would end up a foot down and six or eight inches to the left of the point that same arrow would hit with a target point. You could try to tune most of that out of bows by shooting arrows through paper until nothing appeared off center but it was very difficult to tune all of it out. Mechanical broadheads which opened on impact were an attempt to resolve the problem, but it's only with the Aftershock that anybody has gotten it really right.

gunga goes hunting with a compound. Talk about "aftershock".

aftershock

That sort of problem would arise from being stupid enough to get commercial deer scent on yourself and then be on the ground when Bambi shows up. I've never had the problem myself;