2010 Season Blog, Does and Arrows

I rolled up to my brother in-law's condo at 5:45am on Sunday, he loaded up and we were on the road. I don't remember exactly when we got to the cabin but it was probably a little before 9:00am when we pulled in the driveway. Easy trip up and now we had the majority of the day ahead of us.

We really only had a few things we "needed" to take care of this trip so we weren't really rushing around. The main goals were to pull the cards from the trail cam's, check the plot's and shoot our bow's. Pretty easy day!

One of our cam's was running on internal memory so we ran and grabbed that one first since it had to come up to the cabin and get hooked to the laptop. This camera was set on a trail that sits about 10-15yds inside the woods edge and runs parallel to the neighbors cornfield. It cuts through the woods running from one large bedding area to another. It also happens to pass within about 10yds of one of our favorite stands, one we call the Cornapple.

I had found some fresh tracks in the area when I set the cam a few weeks ago and when we showed up Sunday we found several tracks, including some from this guy (or girl?)



Thankfully the 'yote wasn't the only visitor, we also got a pic of our best buck so far this year. He isn't all that big but he's the best we've found so far. Looks like he will end up a 7 or an 8 pt with some decent mass for a young deer. Hopefully we will see him again and get a few more pictures as he develops.



We also had a doe and fawn visit a few times along with a few shots of some lone doe's as well. Many shots were of deer coming down the trail towards the camera. If they continue past the camera and stay on the trail they will work right into our stand location so that was good to see. Once the corn gets up taller they will start to prefer the cover of the corn over the trail through. Hopefully once the corn comes down in the fall they will go back to using the trail more often.

The other thing that I like about this trail is that trails that parallel common gathering/feeding area's (the corn field) on the downwind side (this trail is on the east edge of the field) are also used by bucks to scent check the field without going out in the open. Hopefully one of us can catch a buck cruising through here in a few months!

From there we headed over to the Fenceline plot, which is in alfalfa this year, to see how the plot was looking and pull the card from the Moultrie. We had some bad weeds in this plot until I mowed a few weeks back but it is looking a lot better now, still some weeds here and there but the alfalfa is doing good.

Thanks to the tall weeds that surround this plot we had over 2,000 pics on this cam but only about 30 with deer in them. Chris took the time to go through them all and delete the dud's, said his fingers and thumbs were cramping up!!

In the end, it looks like we have a bunch of does and these two small bucks using the plot with regularity right now. One thing we noticed right away was that most of the pictures were taken at night. That wasn't something we were hoping to find at this time of year. Have to keep an eye on that.





We debated on whether or not this was the same buck. The dates are just over a week apart so it's possible he could have grown between the two shots. The more I look at it I think its two different bucks though. Hopefully they stick around for a few years!!

Next stop was the Bushnell that I put up at the open gate. Turns out I didn't really have it postitioned/angled all that well and probably missed out on some pictures. Still had a few pictures on it and we know the deer are using this area.





We saved our "best" spot for last and we were anxiously waiting to get this card in our hands. This plot tends to see a lot of action and last summer a nice bachelor group was using it very frequently. We were hoping for some nice velvet bucks but we got mainly does, fawns and only one very small buck.

Here's Chris checking the clover. This plot was just cut a few weeks ago and is already back to flowering again. It looks way better after being mowed and in a few weeks it will be getting trimmed up again, and probably having brassica's over seeded into it. Last year the deer hammered the brassica's in our plots.



This is the only buck we had on this cam, he is basiclly a button buck but when we zoomed in we were a bit surprised. The top of each of his buttons have like 3 knobs on top of them. Never seen a button buck like that before. Not sure what's going on but hopefully we get some better pics of it. He certainly isn't going to be much this year but maybe some whacky rack characteristics in the future? One can hope.......



Also had two big ladies working the plot as well, lots of steaks on these ladies!!






Once we got all the cards pulled we decided to move the cam that was at the open gate. We put that cam in an area that it could watch a trail that was running out into a 2 acre grass field. The field use to be pasture but is now behind the fence we built this spring. Our land owner is going to be planting the field at some point, probably next spring, but for now it is just a grass field. There was a trail forming in a "corner" of the field so we set up the Bushnell and we'll see who wanders by!!

The other cam's were left where we had them. One on each of the plots and one on the trail near the cornfield. Hopefully we'll get some more good pic's this week from those locations. We usually leave the cam's on the plots but depending on the pictures we get from the others we move them around.

I know if Chris reads this he'll be mad if I don't mention that after we finished everything we shot our bows for a while. I was having one of those days and was not shooting well at all. Chris definitely outshot me and I even managed to fling an arrow over the target and off into never-never land. In my defense it was at 30+yds, which is way farther than I normally shoot, but missing the target is pretty embarassing. Haven't done that in a while!!! Chris shot well though and he is ready to make up for last years skunking! Those deer better look out come fall!!!!!

That about does it for this week. We accidently left the ceiling fan on at the cabin so I guess I'll have to go back up this weekend to turn it off. Don't want the electric bill to go through the roof!!!! May as well check the cams and do some work while I'm up there.............

Take care, and thanks for reading!!