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Whitetail Deer Hunting Season Journal
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We arrived at our hunting property just before dark on Friday night. I had hoped to get there in time to get a little hunting in but it didn’t work out this week. As you all know we turned the clocks back last week and I don’t like losing that hour of evening daylight. I’m also not crazy about getting up earlier in the morning.
Of course I did get out to collect our digital scouting cameras and put another one out. I was also fortunate enough to see a shooting star later that evening as well. I had walked outside and there wasn’t a cloud in the sky. As I was staring up at the stars the shooting star came from behind me and burned out in front of me. You know, there are advantages to having an outhouse.
I had heard from a few sources that the bucks were chasing does but you couldn’t prove that by our sightings this weekend, we only saw two bucks. I would attribute this to possibly a combination of the warm weather, abundant acorn crop and bucks holed up with does. It’s really anybodies guess, our neighbor is blaming the coyotes that we heard on Saturday evening.
It was a beautiful day with sunshine and temperatures in the seventies. Not quite deer hunting weather but still great weather.
I sat from 7:00 AM to 9:30 AM on Saturday morning and only saw one deer. I thought that I had gotten to my stand too late, but later, viewing of Woodland SpyCam pictures from that spot revealed that the small three point that I saw was the first deer that showed up Saturday morning.
A buck I spooked away from the apple trees near the house when I left in the morning was the only other buck that we saw all day.
Ryan and I went back to the same stand that I had used in the morning. I’m still hoping to get a look at a buck that we haven’t seen since this spring.
We were only in our stands about 15 minutes when a doe and button buck showed up. The doe was real spooky and she checked things out a long time before she came up to the feeder.
I had told Ryan that he would get the first shot but, as usual, they came in from the opposite direction. We tried to get Ryan in position to get a shot but the wary doe caught us moving and got even spookier. There was a maple tree limb between us and the feeder.
Eventually the doe was in a hole in the leaves that I thought I could sneak an arrow through. After getting the OK from Ryan I looked for a shot.
The first time I started pulling back the wind blew and the hole in the leaves closed up. When the hole opened up again I pulled back and took the shot. The arrow found its way through the leaves and hit her right behind the shoulder and we heard her crash just over the hill.
This is the second deer I have shot with an expandable broadhead and I’m impressed so far. This deer only traveled about 50 yards and the doe shot last year didn’t go much farther. I’ve hit other deer in both lungs and had miserably long tracking jobs.
The first broadhead was the Wasp Jak-Hammer SST and Saturday’s doe fell to an NAP Spitfire.
Ryan and the trophy doe. I don’t know if the look on his face is because he didn’t get to take the shot or if it was because this was the sixth picture that I took.
We removed the lower jaw from this doe since we’ve been learning to age deer. We’ll be looking at the jaw later this week to see how old she was. Our preliminary guess is that she’d been around for a while.
Update. We brushed her teeth (some think we are crazy) and compared them to the Deer Aging Tool. We were right and it looks like this doe was at least 6 1/2 years old and definitely in the mature age class.
One thing that I saw on Saturday was deer drinking from the water tubs that we put out for them this year. We try to give them all of the comforts of home and I had been wondering if anything other than the birds were using them.
Next week will be our last chance in bow season. Hopefully the bucks will be moving again and Ryan will get a shot.
Return from the November 5th Update to the 2005 Whitetail Deer Season Journal.
