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November 6th Update
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The action had already begun when I arrived at my treestand at 7:00 AM. As I approached the stand, I saw a buck with his head down chasing a doe around. They went off into the woods and two other deer scurried off when I got closer. There was no doubt now that I had arrived too late.
I had seen a buck harassing a doe on my way to work Friday morning as well as the buck this morning, so I knew that the pre-rut had begun. Hopefully a buck would chase a doe in front of me even though I had missed prime time.
Unfortunately, the woods were quiet except for one snorting doe for the next hour and a half. I gave up and went back to the house to see if anyone else had made it out of bed.
Just before noon I was on my way back to the house on the four wheeler when I spotted three does near the bottom of our hayfield. I hurried to the house to pick up Ryan. This Saturday was youth doe hunting day here in West Virginia. He threw his stuff on and grabbed his .410 and some slugs.
We went back to the field and parked on the opposite side so that we could try to sneak across the top and look down to where I had last seen the does. They were still there but had drifted down into the woods.
Over the next several minutes we crawled and scooted on our butts as close to the woods as we could as we watched the deer browse around in the woods.
After a little while, we found the mama doe and hoped that she would present a good shot. She was a little nervous and started to snort. I told Ryan to take the shot if a good one presented itself.
I was watching through the binoculars when Ryan shot. After recovering from being startled at the shot, I found the doe running over the hill with no sign of being hit. I told Ryan that I thought that he had missed and he agreed, but we started over the hill to take a look just to make sure.
After arriving at the spot where we thought that she was, we could find no blood and we split up to walk over the hill a little to look for some sign of a hit. After walking about 20 yards over the hill I looked further into the woods below me and saw a deer lying there. Sure enough there she was. We were both pretty excited. Ryan had made a good shot after all. The shot had hit the lungs and liver and she hadn't gone much more than 40 yards. She was a healthy middle age doe that weighed 60 pounds. I told Ryan later that I was not going to buy him any more ammo until he starts gutting his own deer. He said that he had a lot left.
Ryan had told Megan that he would shoot a doe early and give her a chance to shoot one.
At about 3:00 PM or so Megan and I set out to see if we could find a doe for her to get a shot at. Usually in the evening the deer start filtering out of the woods into the hayfield and to check under the apple trees.
For the next couple of hours the deer made a fool of us as we would spot a couple and then be foiled as we tried to get close.
Eventually we saw a couple of does in the woods that were headed in the direction of the apple trees so we sat and waited. After a few minutes they finally started to come up out of the woods under the apple trees. I told Megan which doe to try to take and wait for a good broadside shot. I was again surprised when she shot and the doe again didn't appear to be hit. The deer just stood looking around for a little bit and then headed for the woods.
We went into the woods looking to see if she had hit her, coming along for some extra help were- Ryan and their grandfather. Unfortunately we could find no sign of a hit. I was real proud of Megan. This is the first shot that she has taken at a deer and she was real steady even though she missed. It was a great learning experience for her and we had a lot of fun chasing the deer around all evening.
Again this week we saw a fresh scrape and a few more rubs that we had not seen last week. Hopefully the bucks will be at it full bore when we get a chance to hunt again next week.
Once again we retrieved our digital scouting camera to review the whitetail deer photographs from the previous week. We had over 50 pictures to go over and got some real good pictures but no new bucks showed up that we had not seen before. My favorite is a picture of a 9 point buck with a oak limb stuck in his antlers. Interestingly we had several pictures of this buck at another location and this was the first and only time that we have gotten a picture of him at this spot. It is going to be interesting to see if we start getting pictures of bucks that we had not seen before or bucks in different areas now that the rut is kicking in.
We are going to keep the cape from Ryan’s doe and possibly mount it this winter to practice our taxidermy skills. It’s not always easy to find forms for smaller deer, especially does. They don’t make a whole lot of doe forms, not too many hunters have their trophy does mounted.
The quote of the weekend came from my 9 year old daughter. On Saturday we were all eating lunch together and she said "this is the life". She sure was right!
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