December 27th Deer Season Journal

The four days after Christmas is the final doe season and bow season ends here at the end of the month. Ryan and I decided to head to our hunting property on Wednesday afternoon to try to take a doe.

We arrived early enough to hunt the evening. Ryan headed to a blind we had left in the old house food plot to find that it had blown into the woods. He retrieved it out of the woods and headed back to report his findings to me. He thought that the commotion that he made dragging it out of the woods probably scared every deer out of the area.

Since I had also left a blind at the middle food plot/feeder area we decided to stay there for the evening.

I stayed at this location until dusk and didn’t see a single deer. Ryan left a little earlier and saw one doe back closer to the house but wasn’t able to get a shot.

On Friday morning I headed to the blind Ryan had retrieved from the woods and arrived right after daylight. I saw three bucks; the wide four point, a spike, an eight point buck and not a single doe. I stayed in the blind for almost two hours.

This blind didn’t have any stakes holding it down so I had to literally hold down the fort a few times when the wind blew. I had visions of the wind taking the blind away leaving me sitting there like a lump on a log.

In the afternoon our neighbor put on a couple of drives for Ryan. Ryan didn’t see any deer but the driver saw several. I was putting out cameras and had two deer cross in front of me, but of course, I didn’t have a gun with me.

This is a picture of the eight point buck I saw Thursday morning. We have high hopes for this buck over the next year.

This ended our deer season, which seems to go faster every year. I suppose that comes with getting older.

I’ll have to admit that we are a little disappointed. For the second year in a row we didn’t shoot a single buck and there are few older age bucks left at the end of the season. There is a debate among deer hunters concerning how much property you need to affectively manage a deer herd. It looks like 400 acres isn’t enough to greatly influence the buck population in our area. We’ve only shot ten bucks in the last eleven seasons so we can’t be blamed for thinning the buck population out ourselves. I would like to keep the fun in hunting and if that means the chance of shooting a buck we may have to look at loosening up our expectations a little.




Return from the December 27th Journal to the December 8th Journal.