New Hampshire Nature Notes
by Eric Orff

Yee-ha the roller coaster of a fall is in a free fall today, and I'm staring at the bottom. It's snowing!

Friday 12/08/2006

What a difference a week can make in good old New Hampshire. Last Friday afternoon I headed out for what would be my last deer hunt of the year. I headed an hour southeast of my house to WMU-M because I held an antler-less permit and had not tagged a deer with my regular tag, so could kill any deer I saw.

I arrived in the early afternoon to temperatures there close to 70 degrees with a threat of rain in the air pumping the humidity up to just about 100 percent. I put on minimal cloths with my hunter orange vest over the top and headed into the woods. Despite creeping along and studying the terrain for the flick of a deer's ear I was soaked with sweat in short order. It really felt and smelled like I was hunting in a jungle not a northern hardwood oak forest.

At 3:17 I could hear off in the distance the roar of the cold front and within that minute it hit my face. The air was instantly ten to twenty degrees cooler and dry as could be. I was pretty deep into this new piece of woods but had great deer sign around me with a narrow lane of hemlocks that I figured deer would move through at dusk to get back out under the oaks to eat the nuts.

So I stayed there past sunset. Then very rapidly it grew very dark and the skies opened with a torrent of freezing rain. There was only 10 minutes left to legally hunt so I headed back toward my truck about a half hour away. Within that 10 minutes I was soaked to the bone and my hands were already so cold they were not moving well. My lightweight polar fleece quickly acted like a sponge and now grew very heavy with the ice cold rain. Then I realized that things were not looking right in the woods. I just couldn't recognize where I was. I really wasn't worried to be lost as it is really not that big of a tract, but I got thinking how quickly someone COULD get in trouble in this type of situation. I just glanced at my compass a couple times and was back on track quickly. Luckily I had a change of dry cloths in my truck and quickly shed my weighty ones. On the way home, mind you this was December first, there were several frogs in the road as I made the hour trek home.

This week we had several days of that cooler air and cold enough at night to form skim ice over all the local small ponds. Not the lakes or rivers, just the farm pond type waters.

Yesterday morning my son-in-law Derek and I headed down to Great Bay to set up his newly purchased, but used, goose decoys. I took him to a corn field right next to the Bay where I knew hundreds of geese would be floating. And as it got light they floated by as the tide went out and a little while later floated back by as the tide came in. But they were several hundred yards away safely floating on the Bay. Still great fun to hear them calling and Derek practicing his calling to them. He definitely is NOT a pied piper of geese. But we saw and heard plenty of geese. And as all hunters do, hoped a couple of dumb ones would come our way so we could improve the flock's gene pool by removing them. Alas we were the ones wading in the shallow end of the gene pool yesterday, all by ourselves.

Last night the snow started trickling out of the clouds. I hooked up with my neighbor Rick to enjoy the first of the year snowfall. We watched the dirt road turn white between 10:00 and 11:30 as we plied the road and sat enjoying the burbling brook in the dark. The dark night turned lighter by the minute as snow coated every thing. And this morning it continues to flurry with only a couple of inches on the ground. Perfect for deer hunting. If only this were last Friday I can't help but think. The ground is so warm that it will soon melt, plus it is supposed to be back into the 50's by the weekend. Soon we'll be heading back up hill on the coaster.