What is your "fear factor"?

H

hogdogs

Staff In Memoriam
Can't think of a better title...
What creeps you out in the woods? Day and/or night?
For me A wildcat howl (even the first from a feral cat) raises my hackles but good. I ain't wigged out by spiders and snakes so long as I don't end up with them ON ME un seen in advance! At that time I do a dance that would make a schoolgirl laugh at me:o... Yeah a deer or pig I stir up at just a couple feet in the dark will make me freeze a second or 2 but that is about it I can think of...
Now take a gander at "Junior" on the right in the pic...
Picture052.jpg

Burly lookin 18 year old boy of about 200 pounds and pretty much a solid young man... But for some reason he gets creeped out somethin bad when he hears a hoot owl... NO SIR HE JUST DON'T LIKE THAT SOUND!!!:eek::D He said following the owl hoots 'yote howls and yips comes in #2 on the pucker meter:rolleyes: It don't do him no good to be out hog doggin trying to be real quiet listening for dogs and hogs in the middle of a clear night and have a pack of yotes surrounding us yipping to each other in a 1/4 to 1/2 mile circle and they wake up 4-8 owls all within 100 yard radius...:eek: You would think he done entered a haunted house! So what is your pucker power?
Brent
 
Snakes ! Ever since I stepped over a log and put my foot on a coiled rattlesnake. I immediately flipped backwards to my right and ended in a mesquite bush. Every prick I felt from that bush I was sure was a rattlesnake bite. Ever since any snake, not just rattlesnakes, give my the creepy crawlers.
 
Ever since I stepped over a log and put my foot on a coiled rattlesnake.
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Never ever step over a log or fallen tree no matter how small. Always step up on it. Screech owls in the woods at night make me jumpy for a few minutes when I first hear one.
 
Walking along on a nice trail near Sitka, big douglas furs all around and some muskeg medows back through the trees a beutiful river on the right, just after sunrise. You round a bend and notice salmon carcases strewn about on the trail. All the normal forest sounds stop. The squirels stop their chittering, the ravens stop flying and land on trees around you and watch. The river even seems quiter.

I backed out of there, figured I'd gone far enough up that trail. There are lots of other trails to walk up.
 
Thinking about it, not much in the wild really gets me. In fact, nothing I can think of.

I think such things are really cool; owls hooting, a wolf howling, an elk bugling. Heck, even spiders and snakes can be pretty facinating, as long as the poisonous ones aren't close enough to bite me.

Dad and I even had a mt lion screaming at us from just outside of camp once. I think it was after the horses, and it made them all kinids of nervous, but I stayed up with them for a while (yeah, with a firearm) until they settled down. They knew when the danger was gone.

Now, when a buddy shot an inland grizzly that charged at him, and we weren't sure how well he'd hit it, it made us both just a bit nervous until we found it dead.

Not really a fear factor, IMO; just showing that critter all the respect it was due! ;)

Daryl
 
Basically anything that surprises me in the morning dark when I'm out alone. Call me a sissy if you have to. But I'm usually half asleep trying to not break the perfect quiet - then some deer blows at me or a pheasant flies up in my face, and even though I know I'm not in danger, it just tenses me up. Thankfully most of my hunting has been done in areas where bear, timber wolves, cats and poisonous snakes are almost never seen. Don't really have any, period, out here in Ohio now either.
 
I don't mind having a spider on me, but I can't stand to walk through a web in the dark. Sound-wise I think two raccoons fighting in the treetops above your head in the dark is an experience......not one I enjoy much either :) Animal-wise.....I don't care much for dogs, too many bad experiences with them.
 
For you spider haters...

heather-banana-spider.jpg

We have these all over our woods... It seems they prefer the center of the sparrow catching tuff web about "YAY HIGH" (hogdogs holds his index finger to his nose) sprung 'tween the most walkable of sapling lined paths... When I encounter them in a planned setting I will capture bugs and toss them on the web to watch the spider rush in and kill then spin 'em up!
They are incredible web builders the large web is stitched up as tight as they can be but it is still too loose so they make a zig-zag stitch of thicker silk from the center downward to draw it taut... It also seems they have a built in "big critter excluder plan" as the outer most circle has dots and dashes looking markings of bright white and the nearly invisible regular silk like the rest of the web. Appears it is there as a warning that the web is there:D
In this link you can see some of the zig-zag handi-work...
http://images.google.com/imgres?img...firefox-a&rls=org.mozilla:en-US:official&sa=N
Brent
 
It's the humans

The sound of a bullet whizzing past me like an angry bee...it creeps me out and pisses me off.

But what really creeps me out is the felling I get when I walk into an area that is/was a meth kitchen or a pot farm.....with the everpresent threat of drug patch guards with guns and booby-traps.
I do a lot of Search and Rescue with a local sheriff's dept during hunting season and most of the time we can close an area down for a search mission. A lot of bow hunters stay in the woods despite our best efforts...but they're a bit sharper than most folks with guns. We also keep our SAR dogs closer and wearing blaze orange and bells so they're not as likely to be mistake for game.
 
Sitting in a temp ground blind at night, mile from the border, waiting for a bunch of hogs to find me, mountain lion or whatever else eats folks occasionally, when I hear some texmex being spoken 40 yards or less from me on posted land and I belong there!!!! Lock and Loaded I stay!
ken
 
I've done a lot of outdoors activities in the course of my life but I have to tell you the ONE thing that freaks me out worse than anything else, out in the woods, at night, is ALIENS (well the thought of aliens...thanks hollywood).

Go ahead, laugh, get it over with.

Ever since I saw that movie "fire in the sky" back in '93 all it takes is one recollection of that movie to have me jumping at every damned noise for half the night. Well, actually it's not the noise that makes me jumpy, it's those odd silences you get every now and then when ALL of the animal and insect sounds just....pause.

(let the teasing commence)
 
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ZeSpectre, are they legal or illegal???? LOL... Know what ya mean though. I do believe in them things. But when it bets quiet at night near the border, it is usually the illegal ones......:D
 
Ticks you say? Them are just a given in our areas and we often feel the buggers while still in the woods but we always strip out doors and check our selves before going in... Ever since momma thought it was a pimple behind her ear the morning after I carried in the bed:eek: needless to say she put her foot down but hard!:mad:
Brent
 
meth kitchen or a pot farm
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++1

I also have a real thing about mountain lions...Never used too until one night when we were getting a cow elk out of a canyon. The retrieval started in the daylight, so we were caught still deep in with just a little mag-light. So we have a gut pile in the dark behind us, blood on us, pitch black, clawing out way up a steep incline through normal western Oregon brush and brambles. And then a freaking cougar screamed..... I instantly realized I was walking cougar chum...
 
To Mr. Hogdogs with the ginormous spider, you suck!
I get the heebie geebies with spiders:eek:... then I, as violently as possible, kill them.
Snakes, mountain lions, bears, whatever... those little eight-legged demons will do it every time. I'm not as bad as my sister, though. She's arachnophobic.
P.S. Hogdogs, you have beautiful dogs!:)
 
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