Well, I put in a couple of hunts this weekend. I went down to one of our farms and hunted Friday evening. I saw 12 does and fawns but no bucks. One of the button buck fawns that I saw was being harassed by a coyote. The fawn ran past my tree stand location. The coyote was so intent on staying on the fawns trail that he did not notice me up in the tree. I let the coyote have a taste of my G5 Striker broadhead at approximately 25 yards. It was a complete pass through which means the coyote would not go far. That made my weekend a success and I had only been in the stand for 2 hours.
The next day I got up early to try my first morning hunt of the year. I was in the stand about a half hour before day break. It was fun to be in the stand again and watch the sun rise. The morning was full of anticipation but I only saw one doe over a 3 hour period. I got down for the day and returned to hunt the stand for the evening hunt. I was disappointed to see only 3 does. No bucks for me. I found it interesting that the does were of a different age class and came from different directions. None of them had fawns with them. One of the does looked old so she maybe could not have fawns anymore but the remaining two does should have had babies with them. I began to wonder if coyotes had been hitting the fawns hard on our farm in the spring/summer while they are smaller. I will have to look into that some more.
Dad hunted the evening hunt on one of our food plots. We checked our trail cameras to find that we only had pictures of one mature buck regularly hitting our fields. It was the Crab Claw 10 point buck (see August 28th post- Food Plots are Finished for a picture of this buck). He was hitting this particular field between 11pm and 3 am. I thought Dad should hunt that field in the event that he came out early on this night. As luck would have it, the does and fawns did not enter the field until the last 15 minutes of light (not a good sign but it was 80 degrees). The Crab Claw 10 showed up right at dark (too dark to shoot) and stayed out beyond Dad's shooting distance. He visited a cedar tree that he has been rubbing regularly. Then he put his head down and began to check the does in the field. After pushing the does around, he left the field and the hunt was over.
Other than the Crab Claw 10 sighting, I think everyone is experiencing the October Lull from Wisconsin to Kansas. Some of you may be asking what the October Lull is. Well, it seems that mid-October has little to no buck movement. There are a couple of reasons for this. One of them is the bucks are beginning to become more aggressive. They break away from their bachelor groups and began to challenge each other to work out their pecking order of dominance. This is also a time when many of the crops (corn, soybeans, milo, etc) are being harvested. The deer have moved away from the early season feeding patterns. Many deer stay in the woods and feed on falling acorns under oak trees. Leaves are beginning to turn color and fall but there is still a fair amount of browsing in the woods close to the forest floor, so the deer don't move much. Sometimes it seems like the bucks scatter, disappear and become nocturnal. It is a tough time to kill a buck. However, we are only a couple of weeks away from the pre-rut activity. We just need the weather to cooperate.
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