As part of CVA’s goal to provide as much online content to the muzzleloading community as possible, 2 new blogs have launched. You can now get more specific muzzleloading information from CVA professional muzzleloaders at the CVA Muzzleloaders & Single Shot Rifles blog and CVA Muzzleloading  Elk Hunting blog.

Elkhunting blog- Are you an avid elk hunter? Are you also a muzzleloader hunter? Then this blog is perfect for you. Brought to you by the muzzleloading experts at CVA Muzzleloaders, the Elk Hunting Blog will provide you with all the information you need to make your elk hunting trip a great success

Single Shot Rifles  & Muzzleloader blog is powered by the muzzleloading experts at CVA. This is one of many blogs that CVA is powering to bring the muzzleloader community all the information it needs. In that respect, our hope is that you, the users, will let us know exactly what kind of information you are looking for.

Keep an eye out for even more new blogs launching in the near future, and let us know if there is anything you’d like to know more about specifically. Maybe you will get a post on one of the new CVA blogs!

Tips for the beginning muzzleloader

To successfully deer hunt with your CVA muzzleloader, you must know the game better and be more conscious of the wind than you are when you hunt with a conventional rifle. When you pick up your CVA rifle, you’ve made the decision to hunt white-tailed deer the way your forefathers did. Here are some tips for muzzleloading beginners.

Know Your Equipment

Hunting deer with black powder means you may have to carry more accessories in your pouch than you do when hunting with a modern deer rifle. The blackpowder shooter may have to take with him patch lube, solvent, powder, balls, patches, a ramrod, cleaning jags and a ball-pulling worm in case a patch gets stuck.

Understand the Limitations of Some Muzzleloaders

The reason your effective range changes when you use a muzzleloader instead of conventional weapons is because your ability to sight through an open sight is much-less accurate than your ability to sight through a telescopic sight. The effective range of a blackpowder rifle generally is determined more by the hunter’s ability to see and sight-in rather than the rifle’s ability to perform at greater distances. But today more hunters are opting to put riflescopes on their muzzleloaders, and more states will permit riflescopes on muzzleloaders. Make sure you know the regulations about using scopes in the state where you’ll be hunting. Check-out www.durasight.com to learn about DuraSight scope rings and bases for mounting scopes.

Remember, You Have One Shot

Making the mental conversion from a five-shot hunt to a one-shot hunt often is difficult for many hunters. Often due to the multiple-shot concept, a hunter will take whatever shot is presented to him as soon as it’s offered, feeling that if he doesn’t bag the deer with the first bullet, he still has a chance to down his buck. However, when using a muzzleloader, the muzzleloading hunter must wait for that one shot. Although he can see the deer, if the deer doesn’t present a good killing shot, then the blackpowder hunter can’t shoot and may have to watch his trophy walk off.

Scout During the Pre-Season

Pre-season scouting is much-more critical to the success of the CVA muzzleloading hunter than it is to the conventional-weapon hunter. Not only does the primitive-weapon hunter have to find an area homing a deer, he usually must have that deer within 50 yards to take the animal.

Learn What to Do after the First Shot

When a hunter cleans his rifle and reloads, no matter how clean he is, and how much scent disguise he uses, his clothing and body still will absorb some of that blackpowder smell. He also has another problem – what to do with the patch he uses to clean his rifle. Of course blackpowder shooters don’t want to litter the forest with patches. Some hunters use only as little cleaning solvent and patch lube as possible. Then after cleaning their muzzleloaders, they suggest you take off your boot and sock, place the patch inside and then put the sock and boot back on your foot. You also can wear some kind of scent pad on the sole of your boot to keep the odor in the cleaning patch from moving into the air where the deer can smell it. Or, a better method is to carry a Zip-Loc bag in your hunting coat and place the used patch in it.

Go Deep and Hunt Responsibly

The smart CVA muzzleloading hunter will travel deep into the woods to hunt. He will search for undisturbed deer and hunt lands few other hunters ever see, just like America’s early frontiersmen did. As a conservationist and a deer manager, a responsible blackpowder hunter will harvest an unantlered deer in the areas and the states where needed and permitted, since the sport of muzzleloading requires skill and patience to take any deer.

If you’ll start now working on improving the green fields on your hunting club or farm, you’ll have more and bigger deer to hunt with your CVA muzzleloader. According to Dr. Grant Woods of Reeds Spring, Missouri, a nationally-known wildlife biologist and white-tailed deer researcher, “A 1-acre food plot on your land can make a tremendous difference in the amount of food available for deer to eat. A quality food plot should produce 2,000 to 10,000 pounds of dry forage per acre per year.” Woods reports that the hardwood forests in the United States only will produce about 200 pounds of dry forage per acre. An acre of cutover land probably will yield 1,000 to 2,000 pounds of dry forage per acre. By planting highly-nutritious food plots with quality seed suited to your section of the country, you not only can increase the amount of food available for deer to eat but also the quality of that food. Then you’ll grow more and bigger deer on your property that you can hunt.

But merely planting a food plot doesn’t insure that the plot will produce a large amount of high-quality food for the deer, unless you follow procedures like these:

• Have a soil test of the land done to determine where you need to lime and/or fertilize.

• Apply lime, if the soil test dictates the land needs liming. Then allow time for the lime to absorb into the ground prior to planting.

• Apply a high-quality commercial-grade time-released fertilizer ‚Äì perhaps 28-10-10 ‚Äì at planting time. You only need to apply this fertilizer once a year, whether you plant in the fall or the spring. Time-released nitrogen granules will release their nutrients gradually, which means there’s less nutrient loss from leaching over a long time. The continually-fed plants will contain more protein than conventionally-maintained plants, which translates into bigger and healthier deer.

Often when muzzleloading hunters plant food plots, they don’t leave thick-cover corridors for deer to use to go to or come out of those food plots. Biologists have found a serpentine or a snake-like design for food plots to be the most productive. If you build and maintain the food plot in thick cover, the likelihood of the deer’s using the food plot during daylight hours will increase greatly.

To further drastically increase your odds for taking a nice buck with your CVA muzzleloader this season near honey holes and green fields:

• Find the trails deer use when moving from their feeding to their bedding sites.

• Fertilize nut trees, shrubs and grasses in thick cover close to the deer’s bedding sites. By having highly-nutritious deer food near a deer’s bed, a deer often will stop and feed at this site as it leaves from or returns to its bedding area. If you put a tree stand near the site you’ve fertilized, then you can take a buck in the early morning or late afternoon there.

• Fertilize certain trees, shrubs or grasses on which the deer feed along the trail the animal takes to its primary food source, possibly a green field, an agricultural field or a nut-producing tree other hunters on your hunting lease have identified as a hot spot. This tactic may help you get a buck to stop and feed before he reaches his primary food source.

• Fertilize trees, shrubs or grasses in thick-cover places close to the deer’s food source.¬† If an older-aged-class buck feeds in an agricultural field or on a planted green field, he’ll often hold in thick cover close to that feeding site and wait until nightfall to move out into the field. By fertilizing foods a buck can snack on before he goes to the green field after dark, you can create a honey hole where you can take a fine buck just before nightfall. Remember, fertilizer has two tremendous benefits for the hunter. It can enable you to bring deer out into the open, and it will increase the amount of nutritious food for your deer herd to grow bigger and healthier deer. Using fertilizer as a hunting tool to grow and take deer may be one of the best-kept secrets in the entire outdoors.