We’re finally done.  4 looonnnnggg weeks of not much sleep but getting to do one of the best jobs in the whole world….darting deer.

Last night wrapped things up with one of my fellow PhD students darting a good 10 pointer we like to call the “Mainbeam Buck”.  His beams aren’t actually that much longer than a normal deer’s would be, but his rack formation makes it look like they go on for a long ways.

He had all the body characteristics and tooth wear of a classic 4 year old.  Gross score was 130 and a half inches.

With a rainy front on the move, we didn’t even have to wait for darkness to get a dart in our final buck of the 2009 buck darting season.

All our GPS collars are now in the woods and taking locations.

Stay tuned for the end of this week and the next 3 and a half months.  We are switching from catch-and-release hunting to the real mccoy.  Bow season comes in on Thursday and I don’t plan on slowing down much until deer seasons wrap up in the end of January.

I’m going to try and bring hunts to you day-by-day…picture heavy as in seasons past.  Hopefully harvest heavy too.  I’ve got a chest freezer that is yearning for a bunch of venison.

Wednesday night was a flurry of flying darts.  I was confident of a good afternoon of darting as I had several stands with good winds and with active deer in daylight hours.  We put 4 guns up trees and started letting the darts fly.

It was certainly a night that deer darters dream about.

First to sleep was this little 5 pointer.  I hadn’t been gone 5 minutes from dropping off my help at this spot when deer started pouring into the pea patch.

Nicknamed “Fire Ant” because he didn’t exactly pick an optimal place to fall asleep.

20 minutes later, another of my helpers had 4 or 5 deer descend on his location.  He picked out the largest of the bucks and let another dart fly.  Zzzzzzzzzz……..

“00 Buck” because he recycled the tagged deer list from 99 back to “00″.  Good brow tines on this big-bodied buck.

Gross score on the 4+ year old was 128.

Shortly after getting the second text of the evening communicating success, I was watching a handful of bucks stage about 100 yards from my stand site when I looked over my shoulder and saw a buck closing fast.

I had just enough to time to stand up, turn around, range him, grunt, and fling a dart at 22 yards.  Money.

This buck had an absolute slob of a body.  “Jowls” was definitely 5+ years old and scored right at 120″ as a clean 8 point.  With all his fat rolls, he was certainly in the 210-225 pound range.  Stud!

Stay tuned for the Banana Buck – #11 and our largest of the darting season…by far!

Tacked on a few more deer to the list this past week.

Here is a yearling 6 pointer that I darted out of a lawn chair one night.  I got dropped off by some of my helpers that were leaving to head back to Auburn at 10:30 p.m. but I was waiting for more help to arrive at 1:00 a.m.  Rather than wasting time, I figured I would sit in a lawn chair near a feeder and maybe luck out.  I didn’t even get the seat warm.  6 minutes later and I was tracking the buck.  Why can’t they all be that easy!

Here is what the scene looks like when we are working up a deer at night.

Here’s a buck that might redefine ugly.  His teeth were significantly worn down and he must have sustained an injury to his skull or pedicles at some point because his antler structure was jacked up!  Feeling around the pedicles was like feeling a series of divets and points and stuff that shouldn’t be happening.  Also, he was sporting a nice wart over his eye.  An old gnarly cantankerous buck.

Another shot of his symmetrical antlers.

And last but not least, his optical wart.

A fine specimen indeed.

I climbed into a stand at 10:45 p.m. on Thursday night and got a shot off at 1:45 a.m.  This buck had been doing circles around my stand for over 20 minutes when he finally came into range and stood still enough for a shot.  Almost unbelievably, he swapped sides in the time it took for my dart to get from my gun to his body.  Aimed at his left side.  Hit him on his right side.  Still hit in a good spot and it put down within 150 yards.  That made giving him a nickname pretty easy – “180″.  Certainly not for his antler score, but definitely for his catlike reflexes.  He would actually need an extra 100″ of antler to reach 180 antler score.  The 2.5-year-old measured a whopping 79″ and change.

At 5:50 a.m., one of the guys that showed up around 2:00 a.m. darted an old 6 pointer that had been previously captured as a much younger deer.  #60 has been around the block a while and a look back at records showed he was 6 years old this fall.  He woke up in daylight hours so I was able to get a few pictures with my camera as he was stumbling off to the woods to get his whits about him.

He scored 104″ and change as a 6 pointer.

Finally got the wheels turning on darting our adult bucks for GPS radiocollar deployment this fall.  We’ve been dodging raindrops, messed up collars, and other uncontrollable factors trying to start putting out my 15 collars for PhD research.

Thursday night, we got on the board with this 124″ 8 pointer.  Aged him at 3.5+ years old and approximately 190 pounds live weight.

Friday morning, we headed out to the stand at 2:30 a.m. trying to dart another deer.  I connected at 5:00 a.m. on this 8 point mainframe buck.  Adding in 3 extra nontypical kickers, we scored him at 128 gross.  2 down, 13 to go.

In the daylight, we captured some good shots of him making his way off to rest a while.

We also aged him at 3.5 with a smaller body than the buck the previous night.

And somebody was telling me that I am getting paid to do this kind of work.

Didn’t use my camera as much as I usually do today for whatever reason.

But I did head down to the study site and attempt to dart deer this morning.  Nothing doing except some shed-out bucks and a buttonhead that was much too far to attempt a shot.

I did hear quite a chorus of turkeys though.  I had several single hens come through all emitting their own version of turkey talk.  Some cutting, putting, even a little purring.  The gobblers weren’t far off either, but I never laid eyes on them.  Definitely got an earful though.

After trying to dart deer, I put the walking boots on and went shed hunting with my advisor from Auburn Univ.  We picked up about 15 antlers, most of which were old and chewed.

However, I did manage a nice 5 point shed that was fresh and we tag-teamed on 1 side apiece of a 2.5 year old 8 point set.

The 2 other fresh antlers were small, probably yearling bucks.

To boot, we even threw in a little fishing and managed to pull out a handful for the freezer.

Good day to be alive.  Sorry no pictures, but maybe I’ll snap a picture next trip of the sheds that we found.

Headed out this morning and darted a little doe fawn at the study site.  First time to sit in an old wooden ladderstand that I sured up about 3 weeks ago.  Waiting for the perfect wind and got it this morning.  I love it when deer read the script, 25 yards…money.

The more interesting part is that my neighbor (you all know him recently as my turkey hunting buddy) went and sat in a stand also to relax.  He was wanting to video some of the processing (ear tags, branding, taking care of the deer, etc.), so he had the video camera set up on a tripod.

Well, when it came time to wake the deer up, he just left the camera sit to capture some more footage.  I couldn’t resist taking this picture.

This picture deserves a good caption, so fire away in the comments section.  If we get some good captions, I’ll post the picture up again in about a week with some of the one-liners.  Have fun.

And another…

I headed out to hunt a rare NNW wind at my study site to try and dart a young deer to mark with ear tags and freeze branding.

Hung over 4 weeks ago, I finally got to sit in a loc-on that I knew would produce given the right wind.  At 8:05, I was proven right.  4 deer – 2 does and 2 doe fawns – approached to within 15 yards.  Money.

This little doe probably didn’t weigh over 45 pounds, but she got some really nice jewelry out of the ordeal.

While I was waiting for her to wake up from the deep sleep, I took a 30-minute walk and found a shed from last year and my first fresh one of the year at the Alabama study site.  Look carefully and you can see the old one’s tines sticking up to the left of the dark trunked tree in the left half of the picture.

Close-ups

The freshie had some mulie genetics going on.

This old antler looks ginormous, but it really wasn’t very big at all.  Probably only a 110″ deer or so.

By the time I got back to “sleepy head”, she was just getting her legs underneath her.  A good day to be at work!

I went out last night to help a fellow graduate student capture some deer for her genetics study.  It wasn’t long before I had deer (more specifically bucks) showing up around me, but this one was the only one really hungry for corn.  Unfortunately, he didn’t know what was lurking in a treestand just 20 yards away.  Surprisingly, we aged (hard to do on a live white-tailed deer, let alone on a dead one) this little jacked-up buck at 3.5 years old.

Not 20 minutes after I darted, another buck was darted across the property and we had our hands full.  Decent 8 pointer that scored between 95-100″.

Both recoveries were easy, processing ran smoothly, and the bucks were on the way within a couple of hours.  That was the first time that I had darted in 18 months and it reminded me how fun “work” can be sometimes.

Just so everyone knows the context in which I will be carrying out my field work and research in the next few years, I want to take the time to sketch an outline for you all.

I will probably have several more research topics floating to the surface in the coming weeks and months as I formulate my proposal, but for starters.

My primary objective is to investigate the breeding ecology of male white-tailed deer.  Yearling bucks on up to mature 5, 6, and 7 year old bruisers.  By placing GPS radiocollars on the bucks before, during, and after the rut, we will be looking to see if different age bucks adopt different strategies to maximize their reproductive success.  For instance, do 1.5 year old bucks expend two- or three- fold as much energy as older, more experienced bucks do before the rut trying to capitalize on a couple of early estrous does?  The questions we can ask are limitless, but you get the idea.

Also, I will be looking at, once again, the movements of bucks relative to hunters on the property and how does food plot use, areas around permanent stands, etc… fluctuate throughout the season.  Most of you all are familiar with some of the stuff we did at Chesapeake Farms through NC State, basically just following up on that note with some little extra stuff thrown in.

Now to describe the property…

It is a square mile high fenced white-tailed deer population.

I can already see the hands going up in the audience as you prepare to throw me to the wolves…

My research is going to be particularly interesting for precisely that reason! The limitless questions we can ask about deer just became even more limitless.

…How do high fence deer behave relative to free ranging populations?

…Do yearling bucks exhibit dispersal behavior in spite of the presence of the fence?

…If high fence, relatively large acreage deer populations (most of us would shudder to think it so…) are microcosms of the outside world, then universities have the perfect environment in which to set up experiments people have been dying to try in free range populations for decades.

…If not a microcosm, then we will learn some of the limits of how high fenced populations can be used in the context of research.

One common misconception that will be expressed in countless comments, conversations, and other venues, is “I can’t believe it’s in a high fence!”.  This primarily stems from the fact that there is a higher density population than most free ranging herds.  People perceive that you see more and bigger deer than you would in most normal hunting situations (we must have forgot about Iowa cornfields in December, the Milk River anytime, and early season soybean fields in the Southeast).

Higher densities (i.e., seeing more deer) have no impact whatsoever on whether the deer are tame or wild, and they are bigger because you can control hunting pressure and harvest and increase the age of the bucks…something QDMA has been preaching for 20 years.

I’ve got my own opinion on whether or not the deer are tame or wild…and I’ll give you a hint.  They ain’t pets!  Every bit as wild as the public land NC deer I chased this past fall, and private land whitetails I’ve hunted for the last 11 years in NC, TX, MD, PA, VA, and KS.

I am going to rely partially on you, my readers, to provide fodder for side project type research questions.  The sky is the limit during the next 3 to 4 years.  I want to know things you have been dying to know about white-tailed deer and we’ll see if we can’t work in a couple of suggestions.

I hope you guys and gals enjoy following me through the field work and research of my PhD over the next 3 or 4 years as much as I enjoy bringing it to you!  The Outdoor Smorgasbord is almost one year old and it has been a blast so far.  I can’t wait to see where the next 3 or 4 years takes us!  Hang on, it will be a wild ride!