Drive Safe!

There seems to be a lot of deer getting hit by cars lately, and if you were an unfortunate part of that, well, I apologize. Not really! Although, as part of the hunting community, the DNR counts on us hunters to keep the deer numbers at a good place, and I really didn't help out with that a whole lot this past year, but it's still not my fault. Don't get me wrong. I hunted a fair amount last year. You can ask Jenelle. It's just that I got a case of tunnel vision and couldn't shake it. If you've been reading my blog, you probably remember me writing about this buck or that buck that I was after. I don't really consider myself to be a trophy hunter, but I like the challenge of trying to figure out the particular antiques of a certain buck and then hunting for that buck with my longbow. It’s not that I don’t like bagging a big buck just as much as the next guy, it’s just that the whole experience is much more meaningful to me than just shooting a deer. I would rather tag a mediocre deer here in my home county that I've been trying to keep track of and figure out all year than a monster buck from somewhere else that I just happened to luck into. And so I spend most of my year trying to figure out a particular buck's whereabouts and then when hunting I tend to focus on that buck so much that I mostly come home empty handed. It's not that I wouldn't shoot another buck if I had the opportunity, it's more that the bucks that I like to pursue are old and wise and often live in secluded areas where there really aren't many other deer. Of course that all changes when the rut kicks in and the bucks move closer into what I will call doe territory. And that's often when I lose track of them and probably when someone else ends up tagging them.

Last year was no different. The previous year I was after a nice eight point. I had gotten really close several times but never got a shot. In rifle season he disappeared and so after season I set cameras out in different areas hoping to find him. The day after Christmas I got a picture of him with two smaller bucks about a mile and a half away from where I had seen him other times.

I was able to keep tabs on him and last fall the buck was a little bigger and I focused hard on figuring him out, but no luck. I did get pictures of him and one of the younger bucks and an older buck hanging out together early in the season. When October came around the bigger buck pretty much disappeared and so I just focused on the older buck. I never got him either. Because most of the land that I hunt is public, I never know when someone else gets the deer I've been after and so I wasn't sure if any of the bucks made it through the season. Part of me thought they did and another part of me said they didn't. The only real way to know is to find their sheds. This spring had me out early. I looked harder than ever. Up one ridge and down another. In rhododendron and green briar thickets. No luck. And even though I looked harder than ever, I found fewer sheds than ever. Probably due to the fact that there weren't tons of acorns last fall, and so the deer possibly migrated several miles to the agricultural areas. And that probably meant that there was even less chance that my buck survived. But I kept looking. And now with ferns and green things everywhere I'd pretty much given up on finding any of those bucks sheds and was wondering if I should give up hunting for these loner bucks that live on the state and go back to hunting a private place that we had permission to hunt and the kids always seemed to find success. At least then my odds of getting a deer would definitely be up.

 But last week I made a discovery.

You see, two other guys and myself drew elk tags to bowhunt in Colorado next September, and that means I need to get in better shape. Because my knees and back don't like running, I mostly bike and hike in the hills around here and that usually gets my legs and lungs burning just enough. And I like to mix that in with my scouting for the fall bow season. So I took my bike out the road a ways and then took a forest road that was a killer to go up and then I hiked 1.7 miles to put out a camera just in case the old buck survived. And when I was hiking I saw something sticking out of the ground that looked like an antler. And it was. Not from the big eight point or old buck, but from the younger one. And now that he's a little older, just like me, I think that's where I'll put my focus this fall. Maybe I'll focus on him so much that I won't get a deer or an elk. But that's ok. I'm pretty sure that I will at least find a good story to write about somewhere along the way.

Drive safe!