With the opening of firearms deer season this weekend, the Indiana State Police is warning hunters to avoid touching and moving items they find in the woods that may be associated with clandestine methamphetamine production.

Kline says he has no doubt the animals were puma concolor. He said they had long tails, were about three feet in length and definitely were not bobcats, wolves or coyotes.

The hunters said they phoned a third friend for assistance so that two men could drag the deer while a third could watch for the mountain lions, with a ready rifle, just in case.

“The chunks they tore off that doe were huge. The claw marks were huge,” Kline told the newspaper.

He estimated the cougars ate about a third of the deer meat in the time span between shooting and recovery, around 30 minutes.

Cougar sightings are not uncommon in far-northern Minnesota, though it is quite unusual to see two lions together in any natural setting, as they are mostly solitary hunters.

John Erb, a forest wildlife biologist for the Minnesota Department of Natural Resources, said his department receives about 200 reports of cougar sightings each year, but confirmations—from photos, tracks or scat—are uncommon.

“We had two confirmed last year, including one near Floodwood…but they are very, very rare,” Erb told the News-Tribune. “And for there to be two cougars together in one spot, that would be the first time in Minnesota probably in 75 years.”

Aren’t today’s modern digital trail cameras great? Other than their obvious use for identifying game and other animals in the field, we’ve heard of them being used for things like verifying the existence of mountain lions in Louisiana and Missouri and for fingering burglars and other nefarious characters.

But this is the first time we’ve heard of a trailcam being used to provide evidence for charges in a hunter harassment case.

The Northwest Florida Daily News reports today that an unnamed Bay County man has been charged with hunter harassment and trespassing after a strategically placed trailcam captured digital images of him spraying his neighbor’s deer feeder with a substance that turned out to be animal repellant.

Can you say ‘caught in the act?’ 

The owner of the feeder had complained to Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission officers that he suspected someone was interfering with his bait site because deer had stopped coming in to feed. So he placed a motion-activated camera at the location and, sure enough, snapped a shot of his no-good neighbor, with spray bottle in hand.

A conservation officer investigating the case said that when confronted with the photo evidence, the neighbor admitted spraying the area with animal repellant.

An Escambia County, Fla. boater stopped by a Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission officer for a routine safety equipment inspection found himself in an awkward parental predicament this past weekend.

Asked by the officer if he’d been fishing, the unnamed boater replied that he had not; instead he was just trying out a new watercraft he had recently purchased.

When the officer asked if he could look in the man’s cooler, the boater’s tale took a sharp twist, according to a story in the Northwest Florida News.

“Oh, I was just kidding. Here are four red snapper,” the man allegedly told the officer, explaining that he and his accompanying daughter had each caught their two-fish limit.

That’s when the man’s 7-year-old little girl—who obviously knew the difference between right and wrong—chimed in.

“Daddy lied,” she politely informed the officer.

The newspaper reports that the man was subsequently cited for two fish over the limit.

Here at the Newshound, we can only assume that instead of having fish for dinner that night, Daddy dined on an adult portion of crow. 

You gotta admire the folks from Wisconsin. They love their beer and brats, Packer football and deer hunting.

And not necessarily in that order.

“3-pound rainbow trout, age 3, of Low-Water Bridge Hole, succumbed Saturday after mistaking a metal spinner for real food. Born in January of 1994 at the Reed Creek Hatchery in Pendleton County, Mrs. Rainbow was the daughter of the late Mr. And Mrs. Brood Trout. Surviving are thousands of siblings in such waters as Lost River, Thorn Creek and the North Fork of the South Branch of the Potomac. Mrs. Rainbow was best known for her ability to capture and ingest sculpin from between rocks at the bottom of the river. A memorial photograph of Mrs. Rainbow will be placed on the wall of the angler who caught her.”

You’ve probably heard all the jokes about what happens in the kitchens at certain exotic cuisine restaurants and the innuendo about where the cooks obtain the meat used in their East Asian stir-fry dishes.

Well, one oriental food establishment achieved the dubious distinction of living up to those tongue-in-cheek expectations last week when health inspectors found a whitetail deer carcass in the process of being skinned in the kitchen of the China King Restaurant in Hamburg, NY.

A report in today’s Buffalo (NY) Times confirms that Erie County Health Department officials acting on a tip Friday found the dead deer inside the business, prompting them to immediately close the dining establishment until further notice.

A hearing on the matter is scheduled for later this week.

Officials investigating the health code violation said it was unknown whether the deer originated as roadkill or was killed by a hunter and brought to the China King for processing. 

Here at the Outdoor Life Newshound, we can only assume the health inspectors didn’t think to check the hide for tire-tread marks.

“From our standpoint, it doesn’t matter,” said Health Commissioner Dr. Anthony J. Billittier IV. “In general, you can’t have a dead animal in a food services establishment.”

Billittier told the Buffalo newspaper there was no reason to believe that the meat from the deer was going to be served at China King.

“What were they going to do with the meat? I don’t think we’ll ever really know the answer to that,” said Billittier.

A message on the restaurant’s answering machine Monday said it was closed because of “family emergencies.”

There was no mention whether a “Gone Hunting” sign is currently posted at the establishment.

That’s what we would’ve done.

You know what they say about dark clouds and silver linings.

A new report that looks at trends in hunting license sales concludes that during tough times and economic downturns, more sportsmen may actually purchase hunting licenses and spend more time in the fields and forests than during a normal season.

Could current economic hard times translate into good times for the hunting industry?

Though he points out that the impact is not the same in all 50 states, well-known outdoor data-cruncher Mark Damian Duda says that when the housing market is hard hit by economic woes, it often translates into more hunters afield. That’s because such a large percentage of hunters and sportsmen are employed in the building and construction trades.

Author and researcher Duda serves as the executive director of the Virginia-based Responsive Management, an internationally recognized public opinion and attitude survey research firm specializing in natural resource and outdoor recreation issues.

Duda told the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review in a recent interview that nearly one-quarter, or 22 percent, of all active American hunters are employed in the construction, carpentry, plumbing, electrical and craftsman trades. No other profession or group of professions produces as many hunters.

“There’s a very important statistical relationship between housing starts and license sales in states that saw an increase,” Duda said. “There’s something going on there.”

Simply put, a slow housing market provides potential hunters more time to spend in the woods hunting.

“Past surveys have shown that the number one reason people give for not hunting is lack of time, so if they’re not working, maybe they have that time,” Duda surmised.

"Outside of a dog, a book is a man's best friend. Inside of a dog, it's too dark to read.

- Groucho Marx (1890-1977)

For generations, Southern practitioners of “worm-grunting” or “worm-fiddling” have coaxed large fishing worms above ground by making vibrating sounds rubbing steel bars on wooden stakes that are driven into the earth.

Most never questioned why the system worked. They just were glad it did.

New research reveals that for decades, backwoods worm-grunters have actually been tricking the lowly earthworm into thinking it was being chased by its primary predator, and that’s why they appear above the ground--almost like magic.

After extensive research performed in northern Florida earlier this year, Vanderbilt University biological sciences professor Ken Catania concluded that the vibrations made by the “grunters” who rub steel bars over wood stakes actually mimic the sound produced by digging moles. In reaction, the worms quickly crawl from their burrows to escape their approaching natural predators.

Practiced historically and passed down among generations of worm-gatherers in the South, the custom is colloquially referred to as “grunting” because the of sound made by rubbing metal on wood, or “fiddling,” in reference to the physical motion that resembles pulling a bow over the strings of a violin.

Despite a lot of speculation, generations of worm grunters were never really certain exactly why the technique works—just that it brings the very large (and desirable) earthworm Dipocardia mississippiensis to the surface by the hundreds so they can be collected and used (or sold) as bait.

Biologist Catania, whose specialty is studying moles, first thought that the explanation behind the phenomenon was contained in a theory put forth by geneticist Charles Darwin, who once said, “If the ground is beaten or otherwise made to tremble, worms will believe that they are pursued by a mole and leave their burrows.” To investigate Darwin’s concept, Catania traveled to the Florida Panhandle this spring and enlisted the help of noted worm grunters Gary and Audrey Revell.

During his study, Catania actually recorded the vibrating sounds made by burrowing moles and compared them to the sounds produced by the worm grunters. Analyzing geophone recordings of the two types of sound, he found that the worm grunting vibrations were more uniform and concentrated near 80- hertz, whereas the moles produce a wider range of vibrations that peak at around 200-hertz.

“The moles are quite noisy,” Catania said. “Often you can hear the sounds of a mole digging in the wild from a few feet away,” he said.

Whether it’s called fiddling, grunting (or even snoring or charming), the technique is still used in certain parts of the southeastern U.S. today, though it probably reached its peak during the 1960’s in Florida’s Apalachicola National Forest. At that time, hundreds of commercial gatherers grunted for worms before the U.S. Forest Service began requiring permits for the previously unregulated practice out of concern that the industry was impacting the native worm population.

“This is a fascinating biology story and a fascinating sociology story,” said Catania, whose extensive study and findings were recently published in the scientific journal PLoS ONE. “The biology story is the question of why the worms behave as they do and the sociology story is the fact that hundreds of people once made their livelihood by collecting worms in this unique fashion.”