(Continued from Part 2. This concludes the article.)
Early in the season, in this same spot, I learned that I was truly a hunter. It was not when I took my deer because I took him from another place on our land. Instead, it was when I passed up an immature buck. That spike I mentioned earlier gave me multiple opportunities to shoot. I never did. Knowing that I had the discipline to stick with what I had deemed a mature animal gave me the confidence to continue hunting the big bucks. I knew, without a shadow of a doubt, that even if I saw a monster, I would not shoot unless I was sure that my shot could be placed properly.
I will not attempt to explain every encounter with deer I had during my first season, but I will attempt to give some pointers to those looking for big bucks. Big bucks are tricky. John Wooters called it right when he wrote in Peterson’s Hunting 1987, “A mature Whitetail buck is the easiest animal on the face of the earth to underestimate. He’s capable of things the average hunter simply refuses to believe. The more credit you give him for wiliness…and for wariness…the closer you are to the truth-and to collecting his scalp. And the less credit he gets, the better he likes it. Like old Lucifer, he prospers most when no one believes in him.”
It is often assumed that big bucks only like thick areas, but this is not always the case. I have seen more buck sign in edges between types of woods more than any other place. A good portion of our property is swamp during the deer season. Thick as the devil. I have never seen a big buck in this area thick as it may be.
Big bucks also out-smart hunters by the time they are moving. One morning as I was heading out, I was foiled by a buck who was in replanted pine. That is the clearest area on our land, but he knew he was safe because of the time.
On another occasion, I heard a buck move out of the swamp just after sundown heading towards drier area to bed down. I was hunting at the same place when a buck moved out of a different area of the swamp and bedded down just far enough away to be out of the water. He bedded down 5 to 10 yards from where I was sitting. Both of the two previous instances happened just at the end of legal shooting time.
So when do bucks move during legal shooting time? I am not entirely sure. The rut changes the habits of all deer, but it seems that as more and more hunters pressure the deer during the season, the deer adapt to move at times no one believes them to be moving. This is during the mid-day hours.Continue reading“Becoming a Hunter – Part 3, by Remington Smith”