Day 3 – 10/11/14

Time: 5pm to dark

Conditions – Partly cloudy light wind out of the north, Temps mid to low 60s

 

After the excitement of Thursday evening, my anticipation to get back in my stand on my property was running pretty high.  I unfortunately had to go out of town Friday through midday Saturday, so my next hunt would have to wait until Saturday evening, which just so happened to also be a good wind.  The evening progressed very slowly.  A few squirrels barked in the trees behind me, a decent amount of doves and geese flew out in front of me in the main field, but the deer remained fairly quiet.  Around 6:45pm, I caught movement at the far end of the back field right around where you would normally enter the back field.  I pulled up the binoculars, but was only able to see the back end of a deer moving towards the main field.  Fortunately, I have a trail camera sitting right there, so I was later able to determine that it was the browtine-less buck from Thursday evening.  After the deer disappeared, I began glassing the cut corn field in the distance and spotted between 5 or 6 deer feeding.  They were probably either bedding in the nearby bean fields or my fencerow woods.  Pretty soon darkness fell and it was time to call it a night.

Trail camera picture of the buck that I caught a glimpse of tonight

On Sunday, I came back over to the property to assess the deer activity and try to see if I could possibly identify trails that I had not seen in the summer months.  A check of the cameras revealed quite the influx of deer activity from the previous week, especially on Thursday morning.  Over the course of Thursday, I caught 6 different legal bucks on camera in various locations of the property.  The best buck was an 8 point that I assume was the buck I saw running with the 9 point on Thursday, although he definitely looked bigger in person.  The camera revealed a 13-14” 8 point with good point length.  I think I got the 9 point on camera 20 minutes before the 8 point came through, but all you can see is the body of a decent-sized deer.

Another picture of the browless buck, who is making himself right at home 

8 point

Additional scouting revealed two trails that I was unaware of that came from the area that I have deemed to be the “off-limits” bedding area on the western end of the property.  I set up one of the trail cameras at the junction with my mowed path and decided to see what the results of that would hold at the end of this week.  Neither trail was in a spot that would allow me to set up a treestand with good vision of both trails and the mowed path.  I followed both new trails to see where they ended up and each of them seemed to end up in either the western edge of the back field, where you can enter the back field, or popped out in my main field just out of sight from my current stand.  With this new information, I decided to put up a new hang-on stand where the road from the front field enters the back field.  This stand will allow me to catch anything heading into the main field and anything that funnels from the back field to the main field.  The only bad thing about this stand is I will have to expose myself to the main field when walking to and from it.  I feel like today brought up more questions than answers.  Hopefully I can pinpoint things before the rest of the neighboring corn gets cut.  I have a feeling once that happens I will need to be pretty precise with every stand setup to avoid spooking deer.