The Indian Summer weather has been awesome for anyone interested in outdoor activities.

My buddies have been either archery hunting with some success, fishing with some success or heading for the western states for elk with no reports in yet.

Early muzzleloader and archery have not worked out very well for me as a family crisis and some health issues have put the stops to my early efforts.

I am not throwing in the towel as plenty of opportunities are still waiting for the persistent hunter.

I went for a walk about with my old pal Jimmy to check out some game activity in the area this past week.

Each place that we visited ended up with us bouncing deer or small game out of the habitat. We plan on doing some hunting in the upcoming weeks and see if our scouting efforts hold up to our expectations.

I have had to pass on some small bucks and does with fawns already.

The idea of taking a healthy doe out of the breeding pool with three yearlings just doesn’t work for me.

I have seen a doe that is a mature animal with no fawns and she is on my lookout list.

Turkey season is underway and I am looking for a mature gobbler.

Harvesting a jake or a hen doesn’t work for me either.

In earlier years I would have been thrilled to have any wild turkey but I also have arrived to the point that it is also alright to come home empty handed if the day was a nice experience in the woods. I often comment to my friends that it doesn’t matter if you don’t fill your tags because sometimes it’s just good enough to be out there!

Turkeys, deer and bear are going to be spread out all over the woodlands this year.

The food supplies are bountiful and spread out everywhere. Acorns, apples and corn are in abundance in many of the areas that I hunt.

However, many of the acorns and Hickory nuts have been infested with drilling worms.

Watch the squirrels and deer reject the nuts that are worm infested, not quite sure if they can feel by weight or reject them by smell…but they do.

I made some friends with a few farmers lately by helping them with their hunting equipment.

One farmer friend who will remain nameless (because he threatened to put me to work if I did use his name) has recently retired from the daily grind and has become a recreational farmer.

He reported that for years he has worked when everyone else was fishing or hunting and he wanted to give it a try.

He has been starting to catch some fish from his farm pond and is going out on the boat with his daughter’s family.

It appears that he is catching on to the rod and reel but still needs to work on fish identification.

Everything is a perch to him and his reaction to being told to release the short fish has been comical. On the other hand, he is trying to do some cross bow hunting and was having a hard time practicing with his bolts and their condition.

I saw him shooting a practice target and his fletching on the bolts was a bit shredded.

He was blaming the target block and the velocity of the bolts impact on the target.

The problem as I saw it was that the bolts never went through the target thus it had to be the placement before shooting.

An adjustment on the bolt placement on the bow straightened that issue right out. I moved him back a few more yards and he was doing quite well.

He moved it back a bit further and we promptly lost a bolt as it buried itself in the barnyard. He wasn’t fazed as he explained that he had more in the house.

We discussed why a practice point has to weigh the same as a hunting broad head and after that clarification I figured that he had enough to work on without any more of my 2 cents.

A few of my buddies are getting interested in bear hunting due to the number of bears showing up in Penn’s Woods.

The PGC predicts that around 18,000 bears are in PA with around 175,000 bear hunters.

The harvest for the past 10 years has been exceptional with over 3,500 bears expected to be taken by hunters this year as well.

The weather and food sources play a large role in bear hunting and I expect that the bears will den later this year and continue to feed.

The bear archery season comes in on November 16th and the firearms season comes in on November 21st.

Many of the WMU’s have an extended hunting season and several coincide with deer hunting season. Check with the PGC sites to check on the opportunities and remember to always hunt safely!

Jay Hewitt is an outdoors columnist for the Butler Eagle