Question:
I really have no good way of actually measuring the height of the
tree it was standing by unless I cut it down
Answer:
Here's an old logger's trick: get a straight stick in your hand, extend
your arm, and hold the stick with your extended hand so the tip of the stick
touches your nose. Without changing handhold, point the stick up with your
arm parallel to the ground. Now the length of your extended arm is about
the same as the length from your hand to the top of the stick. Now, when
looking at the tree, move closer or further away as needed to cover the
height of the tree with the length of stick (no more, no less; tip of stick
optically over tip of tree, top of hand optically at base of tree trunk).
Where you are now standing is about where the top of the tree would fall if
chopped down, and you can pace off the distance to measure how tall the tree
is.
Bet you never knew loggers were skilled in geometry! It's basically nesting
a smaller isosceles triangle (corner points being your eye, tip of stick,
hand) within a larger one (corner points being eye, tip of tree, base of
tree).
For hunting purposes you can use this in mountainous terrain when planning a
stalk. If all the trees are about the same height in mature forest, you can
figure out roughly how tall most trees are near you. Let's say you see a
mulie bedded down in real thick stuff across a valley from you, but you know
you'll probably miss recognizing the spot once up close, but if there's a
recognizable feature like a rock outcropping you can estimate the animal's
distance from it by counting how many tree lengths away it is and
multiplying by the tree height. For example, buck in small pine grove
across the gully, 5 tree lengths from big boulder, times 50 ft per tree, so
about 250 feet from boulder, and 1.5 tree lengths below ridge crest, so
about 70-80 feet down from crest when I go around behind it and the ridge
and try to get a shot from above it on the ridge.
This way you can use old fashioned tricks to measure distances between
points you're not at. However, a range finder still works best at measuring
the distance from you to something.
Now, a really crude method of having a homemade rangefinder is possible,
doing something similar to the logger's trick. Take a full-size deer decoy,
target, etc., and put it at 100 yards. Take an old light colored credit
card and draw a thick black line on it with a Sharpie pen. Hold the card at
arm's length, position the top of the black line even with the deer target's
belly, and draw a thin line even with the top of the deer's back. Mark it
as 100 yds. Do the same at 150, 200, 250, 300 yards. Each line will get
closer to the big black line as the target gets smaller. Now if you see a
deer a long way off you could use this card to estimate the distance,
assuming the deer is about the same size as you used for your card
rangefinder. This is basically how some cheapie golfing rangefinders work
(based on a standard sized flag at each hole). Sure, tough to use if you
don't have a deer to measure, or if the deer doesn't want to hang around.
But it's a cheaper option than a laser rangefinder. I think some older
fixed power scopes with built-in rangefinders did this same basic thing,
though I've never used one.
