Thanks for the company

It was definitely not the best day of hunting we have ever had. We had planned to skip Friday afternoon so that Hubby could come up with me, but thanks to an illness, he didn't come and I missed the opportunity to catch the last couple of hours with Dad in the woods.

With the moon almost full, Dad and I figured that we would walk in extra early on Saturday and get set up before the deer started moving. My 4 am wake up call (Mom coming to wake me up so an alarm does not wake the baby up) came at 4:26. I have never jumped out of bed and dressed so fast! The problem is that I sit when I hunt, so I dress in many, many... many! layers. It also means that it takes me more than 30 minutes to get dressed so that I dont get over heated and sweaty before I leave the house. Not that Saturday. I was sweating and rushed. A bad combo.

The moon had disappeared behind thick clouds by the time we started along the roadway. We got the flashlight out and rounded the corner.

Snap!

Leaves crunched off to our right. My mind raced. If we could get to the Sky Condo, then we could get ahead of this deer. Dad stopped. We listed and heard more steps. We continued on our path towards the Sky Condo then stopped again. More steps in the leaves to our right. It was as though this deer was walking with us to the Sky Condo. We continued on and as quietly as we could, climbed into the Sky Condo and waited to see if the deer would appear.

Dad walking from one stand to another

He never did. The rest of the day was spent dealing with some surprising guests and looking for a good buck. We found a lot!! of scrapes and some rubs. It is very clear that there are a handful of bucks around and marking their scent in as many locations as possible.

Three trees with varying levels of rub marks

A scrape and rub probably belonging to the spike

Saturday was a perfect day to be out in the woods because it was so quiet. A deer could have stepped out at any moment, but none did. We ended the weekend without seeing any meat to bring home. We know there are plenty of deer around, we just need to figure out how to be in the right place at the right time.

Comments

Taking Turkeys to Texas

There are a few less turkeys in Maine to hunt this year. A few months ago, Maine Inland Fisheries & Wildlife in partnership with the National Wild Turkey Federation , captured and released more than 50 birds into East Texas with the hope of rebuilding their population. “Eastern turkeys are where the restocking efforts originally began,” explained Shawn Roberts, Director of Field Operations for the National Wild Turkey Federation, “We tried in the 1920’s but it didn’t work. We tried pen-raised birds and that didn’t work either. The only thing that was successful was to trap birds and relocate them to good habitat.” “We started this current effort in the early ‘80s and we had to begin looking outside the state to see if we could get them moved in. We didn’t want to violate The Lacey Act so we had to come up with a way to compensate the states that were giving up a resource either by trading other wildlife or paying them monetarily,” said Roberts. Texas is on the very edge o

Utilizing technology to make you more aware

Staci and I were roaming around the woods on a piece of property that she knew. It was snowing and we were chasing deer tracks to see if we could find some early sheds. It was a perfect day to be out in the woods and we were relaxed and not really paying attention to where we were going. We knew the border of the property and we knew that if we walked long enough we would hit roads or the bog and find our way back. We got to a point where we thought we knew where we were but we were not sure. Staci got out her compass to take a waypoint to make sure we were going in the right direction to get back to the truck. I took out my phone and turned on OnX. Within seconds we knew where we were, where the property borders were in relation to us and we could watch the dot (that represented us) on the map move as we walked out of the woods and got closer to the truck. In another adventure, my son and I headed out on a shed hunting mission. When we got into the woods, I turned on the tracker

Where are the women?

This week, my interview with Steve at The Maine Outdoorsman went live. Steve said yesterday 200 people hit his site viewing over 500 pages. That is a lot of people reading about little ole me and hunting. Why? When I think of women who are in the general public's eye and hunt, I can think of 2 - Country singer Miranda Lambert and Sarah Palin. Why only two? Why is the female hunter such a fascinating thing? (I should probably note that I do not have cable so any and all female hunters on the hunting stations are lost to me. I'll keep it to the general public because that's what I am familiar with.) People/media were fascinated by the fact that they could get footage of Palin and her gun, shooting (and gutting) animals but I feel like the nostalgia would be lost if they had the same footage of McCain. Lambert and her hubby Blake Shelton tweet photos of their kills, and comment on what/where they are hunting. I only know this because I follow both. That's it.

and a strong cup of coffee

Search This Blog