6 hunts in the books.  4 by me.  2 by dad.  Let’s just say he didn’t not hunt the 2 other sits because he was sick.  I’ll let you fill in the blanks on that one.

I’ve decided to recap the hunt live-hunt style, but not until I get back in Alabama.  All I’ve got to say so far is Kansas is a whitetail deer mecca.  More on that in a couple days.  I’m such a tease.

…after a 14 hour drive that started at 1:45 a.m. this morning.  Drive went smooth.  Overcast and drizzly all day – what I wouldn’t have given to be sitting in a stand instead of in a truck.

Shot our bows when we arrived at my buddy’s place and even saw a few decent bucks in our final descent to southeast Kansas.  800 miles logged on the Colorado and a SE wind in line for the morning.

I’ll be sitting a large bean field with a creek that wraps in behind me.  A solid 150″ buck was killed out of the stand about 4 weeks ago, and it is also the same field where I saw a 145″ buck last year during early muzzleloader season.

Dad will be sitting a food plot located near some old abandoned aquaculture ponds.  To say this area has thick cover surrounding it would be an understatement.  I’ve never sat the stand, but last year Nate Cline of Outdoor Insights smoked a 140″ 10 point with his muzzleloader.  Multiple bucks in the 120s-130s have been sighted in this hideyhole over the past 3 months and dad should be in for a good sit.

My buddy will be sitting in a narrow funnel along the riverbottom between 2 significant chunks of timber.  2 150″ class bucks have photo documented multiple times cruising past this stand, so everybody certainly has the potential to take down a P&Y in the morning.

Should be a great sit in the morning.  Hopefully we’ll all be into deer and I am looking forward to what the next 5 days will bring.  I’ll have my digital camera on stand with me – hopefully getting some pix of the action.

During the midday, we will be checking up on some food plots (a few of which haven’t been hunted  a single time yet this year) and pulling some trail cameras to see what kind of bucks have been active the last 6 or 7 days on our hunting ground.

Stay tuned…should be a great 5 days of hunting ahead.

Dad connected on his best rifle buck ever on Monday – second day of North Carolina’s firearms season.  8 pointer that scored 126.

Also, his hunting buddy Todd took a 130-ish class 10 pointer tonight.

As dad said on the phone yesterday – “hopefully just an appetizer for the rest of this week and next”

That’s right.  I hop in the truck at 1:30 a.m. to drive to Memphis to pick dad up at the airport and then continue our trek to the land of Oz.

I’ll try to get out updates as frequently as possible.  Then again I might just wait until the hunt is over and trickle out reports one hunt at a time after I get back in the eastern United States.  We shall see.  Best of luck to everyone the next 10 days or so.  I hope to bring reports of my best deer ever.  I know it will be a great hunt regardless of the death toll though.

Wanted to post this picture of one of my dad’s good hunting buddy’s first archery buck ever.  What a way to start with this fine Alamance County buck!  He got it done on the last day of 2009 archery season.  Congrats Jeremy!

Gave Tuskegee NF one last hurrah before the legions invade with smoke poles then rifles for the next 2 months.  I sat in the same white oak stand that I harvested my archery doe about a month earlier.  I got skunked even with acorns still dropping around me.  One of my other hunting buddies also got the skunk treatment, but a third hunter (first time hunting with him this year) saw a doe that wandered through too far for a clean shot and had a coyote make 2 passes within an hour but again — out of range.

We discussed it.  Seems like beginner’s luck rules at this place.  First time you’re going to see critters.  After that, you’re better off staying in bed asleep.

Anyways, that was probably my last time in the AL deer woods before my trip to Kansas.  I’ve been wearing out the practice sessions (2-3 daily) for the last week and I’m shooting about as good as I have at any time this year.  Seems I am as ready as I am going to be.  Big buck sightings have been at a premium the last 5-7 days in SE Kansas as they appear to be locked down with does, but hopefully this cold front that passed through on Saturday will get them on their feet moving again.

…A miss that is.

I worked at my research site all day and had a couple hours at the tail end of the day to climb a tree.  Found the biggest concentration of white oaks on the entire 700 acres and got skinnied up the tree by 3:00 p.m.

I had barely sat an hour when I saw a doe coming in to feed.  She meandered around between 35-50 yards for 5 minutes before I tried bleating like a fawn to try and draw her close enough for a shot.  It worked like a charm and after a couple tense minutes of her cautiously advancing past my climbing stand location, I had a clean 15 yard quartering away shot.

You might remember that I spined the buck I shot last weekend in North Carolina at almost the exact same distance.  Compensating to what I figured would be a dead center punch, I put the sight pin on her hairline in tight to the shoulder and pulled the trigger on my release.  What do you know it…that’s exactly where my arrow flew.  One blade had hair and some blood on it, the other was clean.  I watched her bounce off and then just meander on down the ridge picking up water oak acorns.  None the worse for wear.

So, I couldn’t keep my hot streak going with archery gear but I am thankful that my miss occurred here in Alabama and not in Kansas next week.  Hopefully that will get that out of my system and I can refocus a possible shot at the biggest buck of my life next week.

Just telling the season like it is…good, bad, ugly.  Hope everyone has a good weekend hunting.  I’m headed out to Tuskegee National Forest in the morning for my final go-round of the Alabama archery season.

My last hunt of the whirlwind North Carolina hunting trip was spent in a ladder stand overlooking a big hardwood flat that was filled with raining oaks.  Warm temperatures squashed deer movement again and a strong breeze rattling the clinging oak/hickory leaves probably didn’t help either.

With just 20 minutes of shooting light left, I could hear a deer approaching in the “potato chip” dry leaves.  I was going to have to unload my muzzleloader when I got home so I figured if a doe showed up, I might as well make loading the muzzleloader worth my trouble.

Sure enough, it was a she.  I gave her over 10 minutes for a romantic partner to show up but he never did.  She was walking directly under the treestand at the extreme long range of 3 yards when she looked straight up in the tree and stomped her foot.  Mistake.

Not sure if the powder burns or the big sabot killed her, but we blood trailed her over 100 yards to her final resting place.  An average sized doe to cap off a tremendous weekend of hunting and supply some great eating venison.

She was kind of a special harvest because I hadn’t killed a deer with a muzzleloader in 7 years.  The last being a piebald deer in 2002.  Had plenty of chances to kill oodles of deer, but usually holding out for a big buck this time of year.

Deer #4 on the year and the vast majority of great hunting is still in this deer season’s future.

Kansas in 7 days…can’t wait!

Smokepole season had arrived and the temperatures were cold again.  With lows around 30 degrees, I trekked into my climbing stand before daylight.  I was within 15 feet of my selected tree when I heard 2 bucks lock antlers in the darkness probably not 100 yards away in a pine stand.  As quietly as I could, I climbed the tree and got ready for shooting light.

It wasn’t long after daylight when I had my first sighting of the morning.  2 adult does were making their way downwind between my stand and the creek.  They caught my scent stream and hung around long enough making their minds up about what to do that I don’t think anything was following them.

Not long after they moved off, I spotted another doe all the way across the 200 yard wide hardwood bowl that I was hunting over.  I verified her sex through my binoculars and watched her wander up into a bedding area.  Within a minute or two, another deer appeared at the same exact spot but traveling backwards of the doe’s movement.  A quick head check showed this was no doe.  Big Buck!

2 nights before a monster 7 pointer showed up on one of dad’s trail cameras for the first time and here I was staring at him through my binoculars at nearly 200 yards.  The only reason I could see him was because the trees have dropped their leaves, but unfortunately they don’t also drop their branches and there was no way to even think about risking a shot.

He couldn’t hear my seductive bleats or my “come over here and kick my butt” grunts, but he did tune his ears into a snort wheeze.  No sooner had that sound carried over to him, he went bow legged and walked to the nearest American beech tree and made a scrape.  The whole routine – pawing leaves, licking branch, urinating down his hocks.

One of the scrapes he made under my binocular surveillance.

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Friday night was a solid 30 degrees warmer than it had been earlier that morning.  The warm temperatures effectively terminated the great pre-rut activity from the morning as well.

I sat in a cedar thicket along a hardwood corridor for 3 hours without seeing, smelling, hearing, or even sensing a deer.

Clint sat on the edge of barbed wire fence row looking into a 30 acre regenerating field.  He saw 4 does but they got downwind and the gig was up before coming into archery range.

The only good luck of the night was had by one of my dad’s good hunting buddies.  He made his first bow kill a fine one.  He grunted a 3 year old buck in from over 150 yards away and put an outstanding slightly quartering to shot on him.  Grosses near 120 and is just a beautiful North Carolina 8 pointer.  Pictures as soon as I get them in an email.

Took off from Auburn on Thursday afternoon with my buddy Clint to hunt for 2 days in North Carolina at my parent’s house.  My reason for the trip was picking up dad’s equipment for our upcoming Kansas archery hunt next week.  He didn’t want to pack his bow and other expensive equipment on the airplane, so it was a convenient excuse to come home and hunt the last day of archery and first day of muzzleloader season.

We decided to hunt a small 5 acre tract of land that funnels deer to an almost unbelievable extent during the rut.  We’re obviously not managing for trophy deer on 5 acres (although there are some great deer over there), so the option for shooting a small buck especially since it was bowseason was in play.

We positioned ourselves about 200 yards apart and the action began.  At 7:15 I grunted and not 20 seconds later a little 3 pointer is crossing the creek ditch and coming straight to a scent wick I had dipped in estrous scent.

Meanwhile, Clint is having deer cruise all around him.  A spike first, then a doe with her fawn come through.  No buck was following the doe and he tried to get a shot off on her, but she stayed just behind enough limbs to save herself.  She was traveling in my direction until another buck cut her off and chased her right back past Clint’s stand.  In the meantime, he had already had another buck cross the creek below him and cruise through the hardwoods in search of love.

Back to my stand…  20 minutes later I tried grunting again.  This time it took about a minute and 20 seconds, but the same result.  Here comes a 4 pointer.  At this point, I was concerned that I might not be able to get my bow drawn on deer to my east because I don’t have a lot of cover (none at all actually) on the tree I climbed.  I figured trying to get drawn on this lovestruck buck would be a good experiment.  Well, I got to full draw undetected and that old familiar feeling came back to me.  It felt so good that I just settled my top pin and squeezed the release.  I’m not sure if I shot a little higher than I wanted to or if the buck dropped down a couple inches, but the result was the same.  No tracking needed.

Looking back to my climbing tree.  You can see my climber still attached.

Back to Clint’s stand.  I text him to say I had caved in to the call of venison and he says all bets are off now.

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