Hunting Tactics: Read All About It

© Othmar Vohringer

Common belief has it that outdoor writers are the lucky ones because they can spend all their time in the great outdoors. While I admit that I call myself “lucky” I do not spend all my time outdoors. A good part of my time as an outdoor writer is used up in my office writing about the outdoors. Proof of that are my new articles published this fall in the BC Outdoors and western Sportsman magazine, available on the newsstands now.

Western Sportsman magazine. September/October 2012: Beat Them To It. On page 69 I reveal seven of my favourite early season deer hunting tactics that may help you too to get an early season buck this year. Here is a teaser.

Hunt Escape Routes.

For most hunters there is nothing worse than having to share the same area with hordes of other hunters. In fact, dealing with all the other hunters used to be the reason why I rarely went out in the early season. Not anymore! I learned how to use the other hunters as my involuntary deer drivers. When hunting highly pressured areas I forget about scouting for deer sign. Instead, I scout for other hunters and the sign they leave behind. Given the habitual human nature the hunters will do the same things again this season. Try to find trail markers hunters have left behind (they always do), stand locations and easy walking and driving access routes to the area.

A Guideline on Outdoor Writing

© By Othmar Vohringer

My blogging friend Phillip wrote, what I consider the best article I have read in a very long time, on The Hog Blog.

Words to live by - and how we use them is an outstanding article about the fact that our blogs are read by audience of no-hunters too. The question is what words should we use to describe facts of hunting such as shooting a game animal. Should we be politically correct by choosing less graphic words than “killing” or “blood trail” in order as not to offend the non-hunters that read our blogs? Or should we be honest and write things as they are and how we feel about the event we describe.

The discussion is not new, in fact Phillip picked the idea up on the DeerPhD blog written by Bryan, another good blogging friend of mine. Bryan has posted several posts about the subject and encouraged a lively discussion of different views.

In turn I encourage all my fellow outdoor bloggers to visit the two above mentioned blogs and read what they have to say. It certainly contained valuable information for me and helped me in the struggle between my personal voice and words and the feelings of the non-hunting visitors to my blogs.

Tags: The Hog Blog, DeerPhD Blog, Outdoor Bloggers, Hunting, Outdoor Writing, Political Correctness

Protect your rights.

© By Othmar Vohringer

A little more than a week ago Kristine sent me an email with which she alerted me to a blog that had some of my articles posted. Kristine asked if I was aware of it and I was not. A link to that particular blog was thankfully provided with the email and so needless to say, I wanted to see with my own eyes what was happening. My jaw almost dropped to the floor when I discovered that every second article on that blog was a copy and paste job off my blog. The fake links back to the original article did not work.

The blog featured an extraordinary amount of advertising that led me quickly to the conclusion that this whole blog was a scheme to garner income from advertisers but without doing any of the work to earn that money. There was no contact information to this blogger and I use the term “blogger” very loosely here. I made a comment on his blog about the fact that this article had been posted without my consent and would the publisher please remove it from his blog. The next day when I checked the article was still up but my comment was gone.

Once again I posted a comment on that fraudulent blog but with a stiff warning added this time, that if not all my articles were removed within 24 hours I would take steps to have it shut down. Again, when I checked back the next day not only were all the articles still there but the guy actually stole yet another one from my blog and posted it on his. And so, true to my warning, I contacted the blog providers (Maxblog.Eu) and let them know about my problems with a copyright violator on their blogging net. Within two days I got an email from Maxblog.Eu informing me that they looked into the matter and consequently shut the offending blog down.

We may not often think about the fact that what we write on our blogs is our intellectual property and protected by the National and International Copyright law. But when people lack the most common manners and think that they can just take whatever they want without asking first we have to defend what is ours. Besides having the blog shut down, another good thing came out of all of this: I remembered a neat feature that I installed on my blog. It’s called Copyscape and it is a script that lets me check in a matter of seconds if my articles have been published elsewhere without me knowing about it. In the future all the articles that I write will carry a copyright plus the Copyscape banner as a warning to potential copyright violators and as a reminder for me to use that neat tool more often.

Interestingly enough my wife last week wrote an article about the intellectual property rights of a person who has passed away. In my wife’s case the bulk of her intellectual property is artwork and photography. It is short but well written and thought provoking piece that is relevant to anybody who posts content that is publicly accessible in print or on the Internet.