Not Too Bad

I took these at 21-22 yards. One of the carbons didn't survive a mosquito and cell phone induced critical fumble earlier but the aluminum matched up pretty well. Not exactly something I'd do normally but I do like having at least 4 arrows in the target, preferably matched as closely as possible. I definitely need more time at the range and in the wilderness -- I'm getting pale enough to rival one of those spectral reflectance panels we used to use to calibrate the spectrometers in my chaparral days and if I keep getting paler from too much time indoors, I'm going to have to cover myself up to prevent a blinding -VOIP!- from firing off my skin! I also need to practice a lot more to keep myself nice and deadly for that buck, doe, or hog!

Sparrowhawk

What can I say? When I'm not overly tired or worn out, I can actually shoot halfway well! I didn't keep close track of my score this time, but out of 20 targets, I had four misses, three of which were forgetting that Sparrowhawk's trajectory is much flatter than Sorondil-Telcontar's and one was a genuine didn't reach full draw and went way left. Of my non-misses, I was generally hitting 10s and 12s except for an accidental 14 where I didn't reach full draw and the arrow shot stiff and a really hilarious 5 on a bear I usually neuter because I forgot I was standing a bit closer than usual :) I think Sparrowhawk will be my primary 3D bow, although pulling arrows is a lot more difficult and I had to put a couple of targets back together after knocking the wind out of it!

Adventures in Alachua

To see pictures from two days in the field, go to these two links:
Sunday: http://good-times.webshots.com/album/560967944mEbLlr
Monday: http://good-times.webshots.com/album/560983568lCdZRX

Measuring soil carbon fluxes are fun!

Sucky Reason to Not Sleep...

I had yet another nightmare... Something involving enforced sedentary-ness, drowning in bureaucratic paperwork, swarms of politician-shaped ticks, and my First and Second Amendment Rights being seriously violated.

Now I need to figure out how I'm going to actually get some sleep...

IKAC Fun

Once in a great while, even I can get more than 1-2 points from 40 yards during a speed round. It's even cooler seeing that I actually hit the "X".



Someone managed to get her arrow stuck on the target frame, and no, it wasn't me. This just looked too cool to not photograph. Usually the arrow looks a lot more pathetic, but this arrow just looked proud to be stuck up there =)

Mission: Estimating Phosphorous Content in Soil Samples Without Getting Killed

Remember the trip to Austin Cary Memorial Forest last week, the one resulting in multiple bug-bites, bruises, scratches, a few cases of poison ivy (not me for once!), and a general decision that maybe fire is our friend? We did a follow-up today to look at phosphorous content in our soil samples with two methods -- a double-acid (H2SO4 and HCl) and water extractions. I like filtering and pipetting! Maybe there's hope for me in doing something away from the computer =)

Highlights from today:
-- Someone had never, ever used a pipette before.
Me and the TA: "There's the tips right here."
Colleague: [sticks the tip-less pipette into the water and tries to draw it up]
Me and the TA: "Noooooo!!!!!!!"
-- Someone still has his marks from walking into a patch of Rhus toxicodendron and wondering why while scratching himself
-- Washing dishes. Lots of them. But hey, beats swearing like a pirate and sitting on my butt in a seminar!

Again, to see the pictures, click on the title!

Lucky Bare Shaft

29.5" 2016 Easton XX78 Super-Slam shaft, 125 grain point. It flew insanely well that time too. Now if I could only do this consistently, even if it was only from 16-17 yards!

Practice at Bear Archery

So there's another spot I have at my disposal for archery practice. It's the little range by the Bear Archery factory just west of I-75. This place is within jogging distance for me, although biking or jogging with archery equipment is miserable to say the very least. I prefer Gator Bowmen though because it's a lot quieter and I don't hear so much traffic noise, plus there's something a lot more appealing about practicing in a hardwood forest than by a bunch of warehouses!

Again, click on the link for some pictures from my camera. I think I'm a bit of a rebel for being the one person in the group who's likely to hunt and shoots something other than a pure-bred longbow!

Return of the Equalizer

I finally made enough time to shoot a half-field round. My score was pretty embarrassing (245/280... including a target where I only got 10/20 points and another target where I had a 15/20) but heck, I did pretty well for not having shot any field since the end of July! I seem to be asymptoting around 255/280 on half-fields and around 510/560 on a full field. I know what I need to do to get past this but I've also committed myself to getting the Piled High and Deeper degree and unlike a BS degree, won't get themselves done without me making a huge sacrifice to appease the gods of academia. Of course, this is so I can open up more time for myself in the long run to spend more time outdoors ;)

After shooting purely traditional for a long time, the Equalizer does feel incredibly heavy and the combination of the back-tension release, let-off, and looking through a peep sight and a field scope is extremely trippy!

Caught in the Act

I like lizards despite the fact that I'll probably end up in lizard hell for shooting so many of them. I also like to test my hand-eye coordination and try to catch them so I can get a closer look at them. It so happened that I was falling asleep in my office from lack of circulation to my brain from spending too much time in R. I was out by the Reitz Union and saw a number of cute little brown anoles. My natural instinct is to try to catch them so I tried to catch one and just as I missed it (would've caught it but apparently someone caught it at least once before judging by its stumpy little tail), one of my fellow foresters sees me and asks what I'm doing. I think my lizard-catching skills are much better in the winter than in the fall, but then again, maybe it has something to do with the fact that they're ectothermic and I'm endothermic :)

And now back to the regularly scheduled program of staring at R. Or maybe just pacing up and down the stairs another 4-5 times until the botany seminar. What I really want to do now though are a subset the following:

1) Jog a few miles on the treadmill
2) Shoot a full-blown (28 target) field or 900 round with the Equalizer
3) Shoot a 300 or 3D with Sparrowhawk but with broadheads
4) Shoot an IKAC or 3D with Sorondil-Telcontar
5) Experiment with the Equalizer using more of a huntin' setup than me spot-shootin' setup
6) Go raptor or lizard watching

Adventures in Methods of Ecosystem Ecology

How many grad students does it take to get through 100 meters of dense understory in a longleaf pine (Pinus palustris) forest that hasn't been burned in 25 years? I'll let you ponder over the answer for a bit. In case you haven't figured it out, click on the title of the post to see the pictures.

In other news, I've been tinkering around with my longbow and a recurve that a friend of mine loaned me. The longbow, the take-down from Four Winds that I have now dubbed "Sparrowhawk" (in honor of Ged, whose use-name was Sparrowhawk, from the Earthsea series and in reference to a few of my quirks), behaved a whole lot better today after I did something I usually don't like to do. I raised the brace-height from 6.75 inches (which is a bit higher than I usually like on a longbow) to 7.25 inches (which is about where I set my recurve to... that's a really good recurve brace-height for me!) and even though I lost some speed, I certainly was able to get some more consistent arrow flight. I usually don't like to give up too much speed because my draw length is so painfully short, but if it makes my bow a lot easier to control and place a better shot, losing a few feet per second may not suck so much.

I like Sparrowhawk better than the River's Edge recurve, although there is a lot more of a battle of wills between me and Sparrowhawk. The River's Edge bow is certainly very well-engineered with its static limb-tips and is one of the few deflexed riser bows that I can actually shoot reasonably well with. For only getting about 40 lbs at my draw length, it puts a pretty nice zip and isn't as picky about what goes through it, although it certainly has its preferences in arrows... It's a much gentler bow and a lot easier to transport, but I still have my biases towards the much more aggressive Sparrowhawk (Phoenix 3-piece T/D longbow built by Lester Pynne, who lives about an hour's drive from me) and the zippy but mellow little Sorondil-Telcontar :)

Making Some Progress...

I did a bit more test-shooting with different arrows. The black and white fletchings are my 28" 1916 shafts with 100 grain points, which flew a lot better than they did with the 125 points. The yellow fletchings are my friend's 29.5" 2016 shafts with 100 grain points. Those flew perfectly and the only reason I even saw them in flight was because of the fletching. I also got a bit of broadhead training so I feel a lot better about shooting them now too. All I need to do now is to either cut my 1916s by about half an inch or get 29" 2016 shafts to use 125 grain broadheads or 29.5" 2016 shafts with the 100 grain broadheads.

I can't wait to actually hunt!

Random Data

The chronograph kindly provided the following speeds for me on the take-down:
4-fletched 28" cedar arrows: 145 fps (some insist that I'm getting more like 155-160 fps)
3-fletched 28" 1916 arrows: 167 fps (again, there's dispute that this figure should be closer to 175-180)

All I know that this one shoots with a much flatter trajectory than Sorondil-Telcontar. I still haven't named this one. I think a name will form once I bond with it some more.,

Seminar Brain Fart

So I was drifting between reality and fantasy during the weekly SNRE seminar, which was surprisingly good for a non-biophysical or simulation modelling talk. I realized why they call the coffee concoction I took as a precaution "Eye Opener". It's not so much of true mental alertness as the agony of a full bladder about 15 minutes into the darned 50 minute torture session and not being able to leave in case something I have to write down comes up (ie, attendance sheet and speaker evaluation forms). Just imagine, a 600 mL capacity bladder is at 595 mL and they're still in the middle of the talk... then in a need to remove more water from the bloodstream, the bladder grows to inhuman sizes and the sensation of my internal organs floating in a solution of urea, followed gradually by my eyeballs being submerged in that yellow solution. And then just as explosion seems to be inevitable, I either bolt out the door to the nearest water closet during the lengthy Q&A session or the session finally finishes completely and I can finally escape without doing the sprint of embarrassment.

I think I'm going to stick with something a bit less powerful than "Eye Opener" unless it's a known snoozer topic for me that I actually have to be awake for. Only one more semester of these weekly torture sessions!

Cool Shot of the Day and Forestry Orientation Group

Whew, I have a serious gut in this picture! I think I need to spend more time jogging and working out than staring at the computer... either that or learn to live on more fiber and less meat.

If this had been a hunting situation, a pass-through there would be ideal to hasten the bleeding. Of course though, this spot has been rendered squishy and vulnerable to pass-through from repeated abuse from fellow archers, especially the compound shooters. Doing a bit of 3D is a great way to bond with a new bow as long as I remember to bring enough arrows and allocate enough time to search for the inevitable misses. I probably had about a 50% hit rate, typically from stochastic arrow error from incorrect spine. The trajectory is also a tiny bit flatter than my recurve, although at 25 yards and under, the aim is about the same between the longbow and the recurve, which is really good so I don't have to spend as much time re-calibrating if I decide to shoot both bows in the same day.




I'm still calibrating and tuning my T/D longbow (yet to be named but operating under the use-name "Sparrowhawk") but it looks like the 1916s with a 125 grain point are working pretty darned well. The 1913s aren't quite spined right -- looks like I'm going to get the 145 or 160 grain points for them, but in the meanwhile, they've been serving me reasonably well. With a bit of clever calculation, I could probably get both bows to use the same arrows -- a slightly longer 1916 arrow could easily spine correctly for both bows and with a bit of proper tuning and luck, I could probably even use the same points!

Some People Keep Pets, Others Keep Weapons...

I have yet to decide on a name for this beautiful little longbow from Four Winds Archery (based in Silver Springs, FL... just outside of Ocala), although originally I had thought to name this bow Undomiel (elvish for "Daughter of Twilight") until I looked at the nearly-complete bow last week. Then I knew that name just didn't fit, although three other possible names have come up from last week and they still stick in my mind after seeing the finished bow and practicing with it. The three names in my mind are: Sparrowhawk (inspired from watching the local kestrels hunting for small birds and large bugs), Irian (after one of the "were-dragons" in Ursula LeGuinn's Earthsea series), and Haitaka (the name given to Ged in Gedo Senki, the anime adaptation of Earthsea by Goro Miyazaki, I think it translates to "Sparrowhawk")

I did spend a bit of time trying to tune this one and after bruising myself pretty thoroughly even through the arm-guard in my efforts to find an optimal brace-height and spine/point combination given a set nock-point. I had prepared a set of bare shafts with points to do this some time ago and so far, it's still unclear what works best, although I eliminated the 5/16" 35-40 lb spined arrows after watching some serious fish-tailing (left-right oscillation). The 40-45 lb spined arrows seem to be working fairly well and I haven't worked with the 45-50 lb spined arrows yet. So far, given an arrow length of 28" (if I had more time, there's so much more I could do!), seems like a point weight of around 145-160 grains seems to work best, although I need to do a bit more of a thorough analysis. This also includes paper-tuning, which is watching how the arrow tears through the paper and the nature of the tear will say a lot about the arrow-flight and whether or not my points are too light/heavy and my shaft is too stiff/soft. Even with the challenge of tuning this one, I already can tell this one shoots extremely well -- very fast and smooth-drawing. I'll soon see what arrows fit it best once I can have some time to myself during daylight hours!

I Need To Do More Of These...

This was a very lucky shot from about 45 yards. The rest of my shots weren't quite this good, but I'm making progress on my gap-shooting from 35 yards and beyond. I also need more arrows -- my gap-shooting drills and a recent mini-tournament took a toll on my arrow population and school's about to kick in.

TBoF 2007 Fall Rendezvous

There's nothing quite like the feeling of shooting 3D with a traditional bow. It's such a thrilling experience for me, stepping up to the stake in the bushes and shrubbery, seeing that realistic critter and then shooting it. It's even more thrilling when that arrow flies straight and true from my bow and strikes it through the heart and lungs, had it been flesh and blood. I didn't realize how much my performance got affected by stress until this weekend because I had just finished doing my part of a grant proposal and printed a poster that I'll be presenting at a big conference and I didn't have anything hanging over my head. I took 4th place and got a total score of 330/600 -- I don't remember the exact score for the winner, but I knew the person right ahead of me got 360. I was very pleasantly surprised when I got my card this morning for the championship round and saw that I got grouped with the huge fish in my division instead of my usual bottom-of-the-pack group. It was a blast shooting with this group today -- lots of humor (mostly potty jokes) and very little pressure (well, unless you count that one target with the "ick" behind it). Now that I know I am capable of keeping up with some of the top shooters in the area, I feel a whole lot better knowing that when I'm on with the right arrows and completely relaxed (ie, nothing to worry about), I can do some serious butt-kicking.


Figure: Shootin' my trusty little Chek-Mate


Figure: He's further than he looks! I was the only one who hit him at all and he would've been limping around and furious.


Figure: The little coyote that nobody hit. How embarrassing!


Figure: Partial group picture. We lost a few members of our group somewhere. Did they get eaten by bears or hungry bow-hunters?


Figure:Trick-shot through the trash can and to the critter behind it. I think I abused that poor trash can a bit too much. Thank goodness this one didn't count to my final score!


Figure: Top 3 in women's longbow.


Figure: Top 3 in women's recurve.

Spewing from a Pile of Brain Jello

I'm almost done with my grant proposal and just about ready to print my poster, but my brain is in pretty sad shape and it's pouring outside. I'm almost tempted to shoot indoors with my targets, except I'm running a bit low on compound arrows and I'm trying to make this set last as long as I can before I sink another $150-200 for another set. I'm also trying to conserve traditional arrows -- woods (or delicate aluminum arrows) and shooting from about 3-4 yards into a target don't exactly mix. So to amuse myself, I'm gonna post random "lists"...

So there's a certain type of song that's sometimes referred to as "Earworms", or songs that once heard, get imprinted into the mind, similar to the effects of staring into the sun or having a flash photo taken after being in the dark for a day or two. Here's a list of fifteen of the biggest ones (only stuff with vocals) in my book in no particular order:

Dragostea Din Tei (O-Zone)
Despre Tine (O-Zone)
It's the End of the World As We Know It (REM)
Shiny Happy People (REM)
Just Can't Get Enough (Depeche Mode)
Dancing With Myself (Billy Idol)
La Gloria (Erasure)
Oh L'Amour (Erasure)
Love Me, Love Me (Arsenium)
Tu Sabes Lo Que Quiero (Moenia)
Closer (Nine Inch Nails)
Dancing Queen (ABBA)
Tren al Sur (Los Prisioneros)
Du Hast (Rammstein)
Rock Lobster (B-52s)

Here's some (10) of the instrumental earworms:
Trepak Dance from the Nutcracker Suite (P. Tchaikovsky)
Gopak (M. Mussorgsky)
Fuer Elise (L. van Beethoven)
Dueling Banjos (?)
The Celts (Enya)
In the Hall of the Mountain King from Peer Gynt Suite (E. Grieg)
Revolutionary Etude (F. Chopin)
Rondo Alla Turca (W. Mozart)
Rustles of Spring (C. Sinding)
The Three Musics (Jo Morrison)

And now back to the regularly schedulled show so I can be happy and relaxed at TBoF and ESA!

Lots of Bugs and a Cool Shot

This ain't the first time, nor will this be the last as long as I continue to strive for ever greater heights of accuracy and precision, but behold:

I'll let you guess what happened and which arrow did that. Suffice to say I lost both arrows. Had this been an actual field shoot, I would've lost a point from this, but as a 20 yard warm-up, I think that was pretty darned cool. This is why we use a 5-spot target in a 300 instead of the uni-spot target!

And now to the specimens of bugs I've been encountering on a regular basis of late. Well, technically insects and arachnids.