What is the strangest thing you have seen?

[hogdogs]

I guess a more recent event ranks up there for me...

I decided to shoot a particularly brave/stupid cottontail rabbit with my .22 lr. Since it has the see thru scope rings and the shot was only 25-30 feet I aimed a tad higher than usual to compensate for the couple inches higher objective...

He had his back to me exactly facing away. When I shot he did a full front flip as was expected unless he would have fell right over.

I inspect them closely for flea infestation before giving them to one of several bulldogs. I also like to find entrance and exit wounds to verify my aim. He not only was free of fleas, he had no bullet wound. Not even a skinned scalp or body. This was a hollow point and I have never had one not leave an obvious massive wound.

I decided it had to be fright related death or possibly as the bullet passed by, an air pressure spike killed him or knocked him out and he stayed unconscious long enuff for me to get him to the bulldog who looked for a wound as she normally utilized it as a starting point before she gave up and just chomped the head.
Brent

 

[jakec2789]

remington where can i find that article? i find that very intriguing.

i would say the strangest thing i have ever seen while hunting was a deer getting chased by a beaver. dogs started running, deer hit the beaver pond like they always do. well, that particular day, that deer had more to worry about than just hunters or dogs. a beaver proceeded to attack this deer until it got out of the water and chase it up the hill. i was laughing so hard that i couldn't possibly aim to shoot.

 

[bamaranger]

I was rabbit hunting one AM as a teenager along the mainline RR tracks not far from my home and came upon a big Cat bulldozer that had come off of a flatbed rail car and cleaned out a an adjacent length of track and a siding as well. ran all the way home, scared another train would come along and crash, before I could report it.

Was plugging a farm pond one evening at dusk when a small flight of geese came in. The last one in hit a tree limb head on and crash/flopped into the pond! About the time I was going to try and snag him for meal for my landlady, he unfolded himself, looked around (I hope nobody saw that......) and swam off.

Was walking out one night after a bow hunt and kept thinking I could see headlights/vehicle, reflecting off the trees/clouds and approaching in the distance. Turns out it was the Northern Lights, very rare I suppose, to be seen here in AL.

 

[CajunBass]

It wasn't hunting, but fishing the James River, near Richmond, I saw what looked like a Volkswagen floating down the river. Turns out that's exactly what it was.

It washed up on the bank near Kingslanding and stayed there for a year or so. Finally someone pulled it out.

We figured it had been dumped on the side of the river, somewhere upstream and broke loose during a recent high water event. No idea how far it had floated. VW used to advertise that their bugs would float, and that one sure did.

Another time, my wife and I were fishing the Mattioponi River, near the town of Walkerton and I saw something moving in the pad field. I wasn't sure what it was, but my first thought was "Manatee." Now we're a LONG way from Manatee country so I told myself it was nothing. A few minutes later my wife asked me "What was that?" She had seen it too. She too thought Manatee.

A few days later, I saw in the paper that a dead dolphin (mammal) had been found in that area, apparently hit by a boat. It's a pretty long way to salt water from Walkerton, but my guess is that's what we saw.

One other "fish story." Again my wife and I fishing along the shoreline. Two young women, late teens maybe, ran down the bank, hand in hand, and ran into the water and started pulling each others clothes off. They then spotted us, laughed, ran back up the bank giggling and waving and disappeared into the woods.

No idea what was going on there.

 

[Uncle Buck]

The strangest thing I saw was a DEER while DEER hunting in N.H., yup, its that bad in some parts of the state.

My brother occasionally makes that same claim about deer hunting in RI.

He reminded me of the time we went quail hunting and comming back, crossed an old farm bridge and saw a body wedged under some trees on the up-river side of the bridge, under water.

Turned out it was one of the damned-fool canoeist who tried to go over the Potter Hills falls in the spring floods. Every year, when I was a kid, some idiots would try to shoot the falls and tip the canoe. At least one of them would end up missing, then they would call out the local fire department and people would risk their lives looking for an idiot who did not have enough sense to dress appropriately for this type of event.

 

[2rugers]

Saw this just yesterday.

Maybe not the strangest thing I have ever seen , but definitely weirdly humorous.

He goes where they go and was even trying to get my bull to fight with him like he would another boar hog.

 

[Deerhunter]

About 10 years ago a few of us were out on opening day of pheasant season. My buddy and I walked down a field. We were walking back towards the other guys when a big 6 or 8 point buck ran right between us. We were in a corn field with about 2 rows between us. I could have reached out and touched it. We both just looked at each other and couldn't believe what happened. If that deer would have hit one of us it wouldn't have been good.

 

[langenc]

Jumped a nice ringneck pheasant on two different occasions-bird flew 20 yards or so and smacked into the barn. Got one but the other recovered for we could get around and out of the weed chocked corral.

 

[robhof]

robhof

I got to my ground blind a few years ago before daybreak and as soon as I'm settled in I start hearing cracking brush and sniffing sounds around my blind and the faint scent of skunk. The zipper on my blind doesn't close completely and the little skunk comes in and looks around and finally leaves. I wasn't going to move or bother him for sure. He looked up at me a few times, but seemed very relaxed thank goodness.

 

[Fat White Boy]

10-96... I found a weather balloon, also. I was about 12 years old, hunting pheasant with my dad near Ontario, Ca. I was convinced I would get a big reward for sending in the card. Needless to say, I was slightly disappointed when I got a Thank You card from NOAA...

 

[LateNightFlight]

A couple of weeks ago, my cousin and I got a late start for a black powder hunt because he stopped to dispatch and retrieve a deer he witnessed being hit by a car. By the time he got a permit from the sheriff’s office to keep the deer, then got it field dressed and hung, it was too late for us to go over to the farm we planned to hunt. Instead, we decided we would walk out to the back of the farm we were on and make the best of what would only be an hour before dark. As we got to the end of the lane and started into the back field, we were shocked to see two puppies out on the snow. And by “pups,” I don’t mean young lost dogs. These tykes just waddled along, bellies dragging through the snow, way out in the middle of nowhere, unsheltered in some serious negative wind chills.

At first I wondered if they might be feral, but they weren’t afraid of us. Even if they were feral, where was the mother and how had they not already been eaten by the hawks patrolling the fields, or coyotes, or a bobcat? We wondered if there might be others, so after scooping these two up, we tried to back track along their meandering prints looking for more puppies they may have separated from. But within a hundred yards or so, the blowing snow had covered their tracks. It was bizarre – and we darn sure couldn’t figure out how they got there, where they could have come from, and how they ever made it through the snow drifts. But we knew they hadn’t just fallen out of the sky!

They were shivering, so we tucked them in our coats and packed them back to the house. As luck would have it, my aunt had just learned that a neighbor’s dog had pups, so we took them over to their house and sure enough they had been looking for them. They were very happy and hugely relieved. These 7 week old puppies had somehow traveled almost a half mile as the crow flies. Perhaps they had tried to follow their mother, but got separated because of the snow drifts and then began to wander?

These are two very luck puppies! If the deer hadn’t been hit… if my cousin hadn’t stopped… hadn’t learned he needed to go to the sheriff’s office and so forth, we would have never been there. And there’s no way two 7 week old puppies would have survived the night. If the predators didn’t get them, the cold would have finished them for sure.

 

[hogdogs]

If I were the owner to get them back, I would name them Lucky and Chance
Glad it worked out as it did for them and hope ya'll missin' a hunt and finding them will be rewarded with a right fine deer of the type you seek, be it trophy or freezer fodder.
Brent

 

[WhistlerSWE]

I was out in the woods with a couple of friends shooting airsoft rifles on each other (we do it in the summer when the hunt is off) when my friend accidently scares up a doe, who runs straight at me, not seeing me being all ghillied up and sitting still. At that speed, those things sure are large! I threw myself to the side and found myself wishing for a whole other type of rifle.

About ten or twelve years ago I was out with my family on a weekend canoe trip. We followed a small river that went pretty deep into the forest, where we really didn't expect any kind of civilisation. About 60 feet up in the air we see a large white bird strung up on a Y-formed branch. First we thought it was a prank, that someone had placed a rubber bird there as a prank, but as we paddled closer we saw that it was a real animal. It was too far up to say for certain, but it was probably a swan that had flown into the tree and hung himself.

 

[Noonan]

Many years ago I was canoeing in Everglades National Park with some friends. We had stopped to camp, and we saw a very strange animal climbing up a tree on the other side of the river. I took a picture of it, it was kind of like a giant raccoon. Years later I found out that it was a Coati, which is not native to the area, but was introduced into the Everglades. We had no idea what this thing was.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coati

 

[A_Gamehog]

I saw a Goose nested in a tree in a lake!

Hyatt Lake, Or. when I was hunting there.

 

[CajunBass]

Those remind me of some pictures I used to have of geese nesting on top of a duck blind. I've always thought the perfect caption would have been: "They'll never find us here."

 

[POKEYJOE04]

I was rabbit hunting with my brother-in-law and his three beagles. The beagles jumped a swamp rabbit and chased it out into the edge of a small lake, and the rabbit turned around and tried to drown one of the beagles. My brother-in-law had to wade out in the cold water and rescue his beagle from the rabbit.

 

[Big Bill]

I saw a Woverine up by Lick Lake in central Idaho,

In about 1972 I saw a comet pass directly overhead. I thought it was a plane going down at first, but then it just kept going north till it went over the horizon. It was hissing and popping the entire time and it was HUGE!

 

[fisherman66]

1. Aunt and Uncle out night clubbing and on the way home in the fog hit a deer broadside with their Cadillac. No damage whatsoever to the car, deer not so lucky, he rolled over the hood and kept on rolling uo over the windshield till it was atop the car and came to a stop with the rear feet over the passenger door and the head and feet over the driver side door. They drove home and at dark thirty in the morning sat in the driveway honking their horn. Next door neighbor was a game warden and they need him to get the deer off the car so they could get out and so he could tag it as road k9ll so they could keep the deer.

Wow, you might be a redneck...

I ain't got nuttin on most of these stories, but I'll share.

We had a full house on the opening weekend of whitetail season several years ago. I was in the bunkhouse with several other younger lease members and guests. One young hunter awoke in the middle of the night screaming. Apparently he had a rat crawl into his sleeping bag and nestled against his chest. He had just gotten a new puppy; who slept in his bed at home, and in his sleep he confused the rat for his new puppy. After he pets the varmint for a few minutes he realizes he's not at home and his puppy is. It didn't take long for him to realize he was petting a rat. When he screamed, he jumped, flinging the rat into the middle of the room and hitting his own head on the top bunk, putting a pretty nasty egg in the center of his forehead. We all brought rubber rats to camp for the next several years, tucking them into his sleeping bag when he wasn't looking. That's not the only rats story of that weekend, but that's the one I remember the most vividly.

 

[Huffmanite]

While not strange, more unusual, but one day I was driving through the woods along a little used dirt road on the way to the land I hunted on. There was a part of the road that was little more than a trail and I had slowed down my car to almost a crawl and I was just a couple of feet from a barbed wire fence on the driver's side of the car when I looked out my side window to see a sight that few people have probably ever seen. Just a few feet on the other side of the fence was a doe that had just given birth to a fawn. I stopped my car to watch the doe jump up and run a short distance away leaving the fawn on the ground. I spent several minutes watching the fawn struggle to stand up for the first time on it wobblely legs. What a beautiful sight as it finally stood and took its first steps on its way to the side of its mother.

Another story is on the strange side. Back about 1966, I'm attending SFA University in Nacogdoches, Tx. I had ridden home with a friend for the weekend and we were returning to Nacogdoches late at night. Back then most of Hwy 59 was a two lane asphalt road and we were between Lufkin and Nacogdoches, along a stretch of the road where few people lived. I was half asleep in the front seat. when my friend began yelling at me to wake up and look in front of us. Well, I awoke with a start and looked. My friend had hit his high beams and I was able to see what he was yelling about just as it was leaving the headlights. Before I could say anything about what we had seen, my friend asked me what I thought it was. Now to be quite honest, I had not seen all of the critter, just from the front shoulder to its tail. Just as my eyes had focused on the critter, it had turned slightly so I could not see its head. Anyway, I replied to my friend that at first I thought it was just a big black dog with short fur, but no way it was a dog with the way it held its tail and how it ran, that I had seen some kind of very large BLACK cat, that appeared to be larger than a cougar. My friend, who had seen it the whole time it had crossed the highway in front of us then told me that I was right, it was a big black cat. I do not like to use the term black panther to describe the cat. About 6 years later, while attending a sporting show at the Astrodome complex, the Texas Parks & wildlife people had an exhibit and I chatted with a game warden from that part of Texas, telling him my story about the cat. Well, lets just say he did not believe my story, but he did say there had been stories about black cats in East Texas, but none had ever been documented......and etc. LOL, several years ago I read an article in the Houston newspaper that pretty up confirmed their existence in East Texas and western Louisiana.