Skip to main content

The 2016 deer season starts now

When it is sunny out and there is snow on the ground, it is hard not to want to be outside.  Last weekend, we brought in the trail cameras and tried to figure out where we should be hunting for the 2016 season.  It is never too early to start prepping for the next season!

I pulled up to where we normally park and as we got out of the car, there was nothing but deer tracks all around us. Big, little, going in both directions... all kinds of tracks.

Only a couple of feet from the roadway with this bed.  I stood in the bed and snapped another photo of the beds around it.  I posted that picture on our FB page and asked people how many deer beds they could find.

The deer bed closest to the road
Four more deer beds 
If you look through the brush and above the snow mound, you can see my car.  I am always amazed when we find out just how close the deer are to us.  We know that we have a group of 3-5 does around so this grouping could be them all bedding down or it could be a couple of deer who bedded here on two or more occasions.

We could also see the super highway of trails running alongside of these beds and crossing the main roadway up to the Sky Condo.

A well used deer trail in the snow
We followed this trail to find out how close the deer were staying compared to where our tree seat and the Sky Condo are.  We could walk a few yards and find another well worn path or a deer bed or two or five.  During our entire woodland adventure, I counted 17 deer beds of all shapes, sizes and ages.  About seven inches of snow fell the week before so we could tell that the beds with the bare ground underneath were made the night it was snowing.  This also helped us age some of the tracks.



Dad blazed our path through the woods and we made a couple of large circles around the property.  We searched for well traveled paths that had the deer going both ways and we looked for areas that would make a good spot for me to sit in if we decide to move a couple of treeseats around.

We still have the better part of a year to wait but it is always fun to start thinking and planning, especially when you see these tracks!





Labels:

Comments

  1. penbaymanJanuary 08, 2016

    Preparing for 2016? Definitely! Good going Erin and Happy New Year!

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

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
Post a Comment
Read more

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
Post a Comment
Read more

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.
15 comments
Read more