A Few Good Friends, a Campsite and a Trusted old Gun

Every year around this time, as he has for the past 52 years, Matthew Kelly packs a sleeping bag, extra wool clothing, a couple of bags of trail mix, a French forager’s knife and a Browning 12-gauge shotgun equipped with iron sights, then heads up the high country around Pine Plains to camp out with good friends and stalk deer. Kelly, 68, shot his first buck at age 17. “That’s when I got the bug,” he said.

Nov. 16 was the start of the 23-day shotgun season for deer hunting in Dutchess and Columbia counties. Hundreds of area residents have been making plans for this day since closing day last year. “I’ll be out there at dawn with my 12-gauge and five slugs,” said Kelly, who hunts mostly on private land and on state land behind Stissing Mountain. “I will try to do my damnedest to get the deer down near me.”

Across New York state, hunters generate approximately $1.5 billion in economic activity every year. “I used to work in the wine business,” Kelly said. “My customers understood when I would disappear for some time each November. They got used to it.”

Kelly hunts in a particularly sporting way, giving the deer more of a chance to escape. He calls this “still hunting” — a difficult practice that involves creeping soundlessly around the forest to stalk deer that are not coming toward the hunter. “I prefer to hunt from the ground instead of from a tree stand where you have to just sit around for hours and hours and wait for the deer to come,” he said, adding, “My method is harder.”

Asked how he can locate deer without spooking them, Kellysaid, “When the weather is warm like it has been this fall, you can find deer bedded down during the day. I know the bedding areas around here.”

Like many local hunters, Kelly field dresses his deer and brings them to Down the Road butchery in Milan. “We eat the venison all year long and share it with family and friends, Kelly said. “My late wife made plans for the venison and would say to me sternly before the start of the season, ‘Matthew, I want three deer this year.’”

Kelly has two daughters. Both took hunter safety courses, but so far, he said with some disappointment, they are “not very interested” in hunting.

In recent years, local deer have been slammed by Epizootic Hemorrhagic Disease (EHD), a virus carried by biting midges (aka no-see-ums) that is fatal to deer but harmless to humans. This year, according to the State Department of Conservation, cases of EHD have dropped precipitously from a statewide peak in 2021, with only a handful reported so far.

For a hunter, the days leading up to deer season are often accompanied by anxiety. Will it be too warm? Will the deer move around enough? These and other questions are debated in minute detail among friends. Like other longtime hunters, Kelly is a keen monitor of changing environmental conditions, and he has learned to pick up clues from nature.

“I’m concerned most of all that our red oaks and pignut hickory on top of Stissing Mountain have not produced nuts this year,” he said. “There’s really no mast crop. The deer will not have this key food source.”

He is also concerned about the continuing aging of the sport: “There are fewer young people going into hunting. That concerns me because there’s less understanding now of hunting.”

In response, New York state in 2021 enacted legislation creating a pilot program to allow 12- and 13-year olds to hunt deer with a firearm or crossbow. The program supports Gov. Kathy Hochul’s new Get Offline, Get Outside initiative, launched this summer to strengthen physical and mental health by encouraging young people to take a break from social media and enjoy the outdoors.

Kelly worries, too, about an attenuation in hunter safety protocols. “It’s important for me to do it right,” he said. “I understand there are hunters who drive around with a loaded gun in their vehicle. That’s wrong. It puts a stain on the sport and on other hunters.”

Careful and experienced as he is, Kelly has suffered setbacks. “Recently a good-sized black bear decided to maul my trail camera,” he said. “I don’t know what it thought it was doing with that camera, but this year, we are practicing bear protocols.”