Presidents Letter September, 1998

Hi neighbor;

Are you ready for some football? Whoops! Right season wrong sport, I meant deer hunting. I haven't pulled my bow back nearly enough and I hope it isn’t a fatal error, but I am still looking forward to some fun filled deer hunts. I have at least 700 fruit bearing apple trees scattered on my hunting property (planted years back by grazing cattle). I believe they have made it to maturity due to the fact that there were considerably fewer deer then and the cattle were removed during the cold seasons. I bought this land in 1974. Through the years I have noticed that the deer literally live in them during the first several weeks of the apples dropping. Throughout the summer I have spent some time observing deer on this property and I don’t think I have seen more than six deer in any one evening and maybe seen a total of six different bucks, all 1½ year olds. Well the apples started to fall early this year and on August 23rd I climbed into my favorite apple viewing blind and observed a happening. From 6:30 p.m. till 8:00 I saw 23 different fawns 25 does and 10 bucks 4 of which I estimate to be at least 2½ years old. Two of these were quite nice and no spikes. Looking good! Now you don’t have to go out and plant 700 apple trees, unless you think you’ll be around thirty years from now. I have yet to find a worm in any of these apples. I was told years ago to expect this in wild growing apples. It seems the larvae over winter in the fallen apples and if the wild animals consume them all, this breaks the cycle.

I enjoyed the seminar and the joint Whitetails Unlimited banquet (thank you Mr. George Rice and your courteous staff). All of the speakers were well received. I counted 63 in the audience during Dr. Jacobson’s program. This is about 1/3 of what I expected to attend. We had intended to use Jay’s outback room for our seminar but it didn’t work out due to September 12th being their early fall weekend sale. Let’s kick this around our next meeting of October 12th.

I can’t thank enough the many members who helped out at the seminar. I thought it worked like a well designed well-oiled machine. The many door prizes were a hit thanks to the generosity of members like Mr. Jeff Best, Mr. Lee Brooks, Mr. Jim Williams and of course the donated prints from Jay’s. I know I missed somebody, so will you please tell me who you are so I can thank you personally. The lucky winners in the raffle were Mr. Steven Brent of Mainstay who won the 30.06 (he won the 54 cal. muzzle loader last year), Mr. Brad Escheat of Dundee won the 12 ga. shotgun, Mr. Jeff Carter of Midland won the 3 day bow hunt, Mr. Tom Torangeau of Windsor, Canada won the 50 cal. muzzleloader and Sandy Nephen of Bay City won the shoulder mount.

This coming December 12th membership meeting will be our election of (9) members (2-year term). I will question each existing board member and see if they would like to be nominated. I will also ask other members their interest in this. Any one interested please contacts me. The list of nominees will be posted in our next newsletter. We have been an organized branch for two years now. My! Time goes fast when you're having fun.

May the gentle autumn breeze blow your troubles away and the balmy fall sun brew kindness in your heart and may you always enjoy the fun in hunting.

Ed Spinazzola