2013 -2014 Deer Season Part 2 - Hunting

Success is defined as the accomplishment of an aim or purpose...

I'm going to start off right away by saying, I didn't kill a deer during this season. You read that correctly, I spent 118 hours on stand during 3 separate deer seasons and did not manage to kill a single deer. I'm sure that most people would consider the season a failure, but for me it was still a success.

4 unfilled deer tags

It has always been a dream of mine to own a place for my family and I to deer hunt. A place where I can make the land management decisions and help to manage the local deer heard. When that dream was finally realized during the winter/early spring of 2012, I could not have been more excited. At the same time, I was very overwhelmed, and didn't know where to start, so I started with some things that were familiar to me. During the first year we focused on fixing up the cabin itself, putting up a storage shed and lean-to, and getting some tree stands up to hunt from.

As bow season opened, I thought the hunting would come easy, but it didn't. As the season wore on, I began to feel very frustrated and began questioning whether or not I did the right thing in purchasing this place. I was lucky enough to kill a doe with my bow in November and a 2 year old 8 point buck with my shotgun during 1st shotgun season, but those seemed to be anomalies and not the norm. In fact, the buck I shot during shotgun season was the only deer that my dad, brother, or I saw during the first 3 days of the season.

It may help to put a few numbers to it. During the 2012-2013 season we spent over 160 hours on stand in 49 sits and only saw 31 deer total. That comes to an average of seeing 0.19 deer per hour or 0.63 deer per sit. Worse yet, I saw 24 of those 31 deer, leaving the remaining 7 sightings split up between the 4 guests that I hosted on my property. If all of the numbers haven't made your head spin yet, I will finish off with the stat that I think best describes the season. Out of 49 sits on stand, there were 35 without even seeing a single deer (that is over 70% of sits without seeing a deer).

My frustrations finally boiled over at the end of shotgun season and I decided to cut my season short and did not return for the remainder of the year. As most of you already know, I can be an extremely stubborn person and I don't give up easy. I decided I was going to put a plan together and do whatever I could to make the hunting better the following season (you can look at my previous post to read about what I did).

With all of the hard work put in during the off season, I was very confident going into this season. My first trip down to hunt was in the middle of October. After an evening sit overlooking the food plot and a morning sit without a single deer sighting, I was beginning to question all of the hard work that I had done. Thankfully, things picked up the 2nd evening. I was back in a ground blind on the food plot and deer were coming out from every direction. I saw 7 deer that evening (and the trail camera revealed several that I didn't see). Even though 4 of the deer came close enough to shoot, the ground blind was sitting too low for me to get a shot through the grass and plants that had grown up in the food plot.

I'm sitting in a ground blind that is to the right, just
outside the frame of the camera

View from the ground blind with grass and brassicas
grown up and in the way

 I was able to head home that evening very happy with how the season started. I thought, if I could get the ground blind to sit just a little higher off of the ground, it might end up being the best spot on the property. So when I got home, I headed to Menards for supplies and decided to spend the following weekend building a 2 foot high platform instead of heading back to the cabin to hunt. The last weekend of October, I met my dad down at the cabin to hunt and put the new platform in place.

Ground blind places up on the new platform

View from the blind on the platform

It didn't take long for the new platform to show its value. I hunted in the blind the evening after and had an encounter with a very nice 10 point buck. He didn't come within bow range, so I put down my bow and picked up the camera.

Watching a buck about 50 yards across the food plot

The first weekend of November, dad and I spent 4 days at the cabin hunting the front end of the rut. On Sunday afternoon, I actually got a shot at the same buck that I had seen the weekend before. The shot was 35 yards and the buck ducked under my arrow at the sound of the shot and got away.

Trail camera picture of the buck moments before I shot

That same weekend, I nearly got a shot at a unique looking 8 point buck and also passed up a shot opportunity at a fork horn buck that passed directly under my tree stand.

Throughout the month of November, dad and I both had some pretty good hunts. Both of us got to see bucks fighting and chasing does from the stand, but more importantly, we saw a lot of deer. While hunting the weekend before Thanksgiving, I passed up another chance at the same fork horn buck that I had passed on earlier in the season.

Trail cam photo of the fork horn buck walking past my stand

4 does feeding in the food plot, well out of bow range

 Based on the number of deer that we were seeing, Dad and I were both excited heading into shotgun season. As the first weekend of December approached, the forecast looked frigid with daytime highs in the single digits and teens and lows falling below 0 degrees. I left as early as possible Friday after work to fire up the heaters in the cabin to heat things up for Dad, Paul and I to have a comfortable night sleep. The season did not start off very well, I was the only one to see a deer the first 2 days and none of them offered a shot. I'm not sure if it was the cold weather keeping the deer hunkered down, the clover portion of my food plot (the half seemingly favored by the deer) finally going dormant, or some other factor, but the deer just weren't using our property. It was hard for dad and I to believe that we were sitting in the same stands that had produced dozens of deer sightings just a week or 2 prior.

-2 degrees when we headed to the stand on the
opening morning of shotgun season

We got about 4 inches of snow during the day on Sunday and a very slight warm up (high around 20 degrees) on Monday. Monday was the best day of the hunt. In the morning, I shot a doe but was unable find her, I also missed a shot at a doe in the afternoon. Dad shot a doe that evening to fill our first and only tag of the season. Dad also shot a doe and was unable to find it on Tuesday morning.

After the shotgun season was over, I decided to shoot my shotgun at a target to make sure that it was me and not the gun having issues. Well, it turned out to be the gun. I have been shooting the same brand of slugs through this gun for over a decade and have killed over 2 dozen deer in that time frame. I'm still not sure what was going on, but I hope to figure it out in the off season. At the same time, I made sure that my muzzleloader was dialed in and picked up an antlerless tag for the late muzzleloader season with the goal of trying to put some meat in the freezer.

I took 2 more trips to the cabin after Christmas with both my muzzleloader and bow in hand. On the first trip, I actually saw what I believe to be the doe that I shot during shotgun season based on the type of injury that she had. Sadly, she didn't present me with a shot opportunity. On the final sit of the season, with less than 5 minutes before the end of shooting time, I missed a shot at a doe with my muzzleloader. As dad helped me track the deer to confirm that I didn't hit her, instead of getting upset, I couldn't help but laugh a little. After the way the season had gone for me, it was an appropriate way to end it.

For those of you still with me, you may be wondering how I am considering this season as a success. Well, as I stated earlier in this post, my focus for the season was to make the hunting on our property better, and in that, I succeeded. Over the course of this season, we logged over 206 hours on stand and saw 113 deer on stand. That means we saw 82 more deer this year than we did last year (let that sink in for a minute). This year, on average, we saw 0.55 deer per hour or 1.85 deer per sit. Out of 61 sits on stand this year, we only sat 25 times without seeing a deer (that is only 40% of sits without seeing a deer).

Even more then the increase in deer sightings, I was thrilled by the fact that the deer sightings were spread evenly between my dad and I who were the primary hunters on our property this year. Clearly a success in my book.

On that note, I would like to end the post with a few pictures from on stand throughout the season. There is truly nothing more beautiful then spending time in God's creation. Thanks for reading!

North stand October 16th

East stand November 2nd

Ridge stand November 17th

Center stand November 23rd

Pinch stand December 8th

SW Corner stand January 4th

2013 - 2014 Deer Season Part 1 - Preparations

Deer season, for me, did not start at the beginning of October with the opening of bow season. Instead, it started on a brisk Saturday morning, February 16th, when I met my dad at the cabin to get started on preparations for the next hunting season. The disappointment left over from the 2012 season was being replaced with excitement around plans for the next year. Over the course of the next 7 months, I would spend many days at the cabin working from dawn until dusk on various land and wildlife management projects. From moving tree stands, clearing out access paths and cutting ATV trails through the timber to planting apple trees and food plots for the deer. Everything that I worked on was for 1 goal, to make the next hunting season better then the last.

I spent a couple of trips in February and March working with my mom and dad to clear out access paths to our tree stands as well as to locate new tree stand locations. My property is split east and west by a very deep ravine that has a wet season creek at the bottom.So to make accessing tree stands throughout the property easier, we fired up the chainsaw and cleared out that ravine allowing us to sneak around the property during hunting season without alerting all of the deer. We also began work on clearing out brush along the fields in preparation for food plots. 

Dad and I working to clear out overhanging limbs along the big field

When we bought the property, there was already a small fruit orchard out in front of the cabin that had about 20 trees in it. It appeared that the previous owner had not dedicated time to pruning and maintaining the trees after they were planted, so I set to work on providing the trees with a little tlc. I pruned, fertilized, mulched, and re-caged the existing trees.

The existing apple/pear orchard all cleaned up

The fruit trees ended up producing a good amount of mast early, but the summer drought ended up doing them in later.

Pears

Apples

I also ordered a dozen new apple and pear trees from the Arbor Day Foundation and dad drove around flood waters to come down and help me plant them.

Dad driving in a stake to cage the new fruit trees

Oh yeah...and it had been so wet throughout May that I manged to get my truck stuck and dad had to pull me out.

Oops!

The rest of the spring and early summer was spent, with the help of my dad and brother-in-law Mike, preparing and planting my very first food plot (along with several other smaller projects). I decided to divide up a 2 acre portion of the large field into 4 quadrants. The SW would be planted to clover in the spring, the SE would be planted to turnips and radishes, the NE would be planted into a mix of winter peas and forage brassicas, and the NW would be planted to more clover in late summer. Also, on the North end of the field, I decided to plant some Egyptian Wheat to screen the cabin from the rest of the big field.

1/2 ton of lime for the food plots

Mike spraying gly to prepare for food plot planting

Me planting my very first food plot

Dad finishing up planting the forage brassicas and winter peas

Luckily, the first half of the year provided plenty of moisture so the clover planted in the spring and the turnips/radishes planted in late July grew very well. Sadly, the late summer and early fall were so dry, that the brassica/pea mixture and the fall planted clover did not fair so well.

The Egyptian Wheat plot screen grew over 10 feet tall
(the cabin is back there somewhere)

The spring planted clover food plot turned out very well

The turnip/radish plot came in well, even with very little rain

A purple top turnip larger then a softball!

Although not a project, I was bound and determined to learn more about deer movement through our property this year. Starting with the initial trip in February, I ran 3 trail cameras different places throughout the year to figure out where and when the deer moved through the property. This was probably my favorite part of the off season, every time I went out to pull the SD cards from the cameras, I felt like a kid on Christmas morning. I spent hours looking through and studying the nearly 20,000 pictures that were taken and learned a lot in the process. A few of my favorite pictures are below:

3 does (My favorite picture of the year)

Fawns were a rare sight last year, but a common one this year

2 young bucks fighting

View of the food plot the evening before shotgun season opened

Using trail cameras boosted my confidence as I was able to see that there were far more deer moving through my property then I thought. It also showed me the number and quality of the bucks that were around. Over the course of the year, I picked up over 30 different bucks on trail camera. Of course most of those deer would only be travelling through occasionally, but it was still really cool to see. More importantly then just picking up deer on trail camera, I was able to see how valuable the food plots were this year. It was very rewarding after putting in so much time and energy to see them pulling in the deer from all directions.

13 deer feeding in the food plot at one time

Of course there were several other smaller projects that we accomplished this year as well. My brother-in-law, Mike, and I nearly drove ourselves to exhaustion clearing out an ATV/Walking trail loop on the East side of the deep ravine. Oh, and there was mowing, mowing, and more mowing. With such a wet spring the grass grew like crazy.

Mowing at the cabin on Father's Day

You may remember that Labor Day weekend last September was extremely hot and humid. Well, dad and I still had to get 5 tree stands put up, shooting lanes cleared, and paths into and out of those tree stands cut. We started out early, but it was already north of 80 degrees out and by the time we finished the last stand, it was over 90. I made the mistake of pushing myself too hard and had to sit down in the bottom of the deep ravine on our way back from putting up the last stand. In the end though, I was very pleased with everywhere that we decided to set stands.

Tree stands loaded up and ready to go

Last tree stand put up (the one that nearly killed me)

Erin testing out the ridge tree stand

 I have to admit, my favorite part of this season had nothing to do with deer or deer hunting at all. Instead, it was the people that I got to spend time with that made the year such a great one.

Mom and Dad walking back to the cabin
after a long days work

Mike firing up the ATV to spread some lime

Erin and Abigail "riding" the ATV

Abigail helping daddy spread clover seed

Dad resting after planting new fruit trees

Erin shooting her new bow

Abigail posing with Grandma and Grandpa O'Connell

Abigail posing with mommy and daddy before going down the slide

Cousins eating lunch on Labor Day

Cousins posing with Grandma and Grandpa O'Connell

 There is no way that I could finish off my part 1 overview without mentioning my best friend who was by my side throughout the entire year. He loved every minute of it!

Hunter waiting patiently to kick off our 2nd year at the cabin

Hunter supervising as we clear the ATV trail to plant clover

Abigail watching on as Hunter gets a much needed drink

Hunter checking out the plot screen

Hunter relaxing on a very hot Labor Day weekend

 Stay tuned for Part 2 coming soon!