Chance, The tale of an old buck

[deerhuntingdawg]

Great story and pics.

 

[PappyHoel]

Is the no buck guest rule back in effect now?

This...great story and I'm impressed at your ability to track the deer.

 

[BassHunter25]

This...great story and I'm impressed at your ability to track the deer.

The rule will be amended for next season. I don't mind a guest shooting a big buck, but we pay a pretty penny to hopefully get one of them, I already told my dad I was just gonna be a guest next season LOL. Probably going to be a $500.00 fee if a guest kills a buck. I mean that sounds like a lot of money, but you can't go to any outfitter and kill a wall hanger anywhere near that cheap.

I have several bucks that I have been able to keep track of for several years. But this buck was a camera hog. He would disappear for a few weeks at a time some years, but in velvet and late season he stuck tight to one area. 90% of all his pics are in the same spot.

My dad also killed a buck this season that was 4 or 5. I have had him on cam for three years. Again it was hard to say if he was 2 or 3 when I first got him on cam. He was only a 105 inch 8 point. Just had bad genes, 16 inches wide good mass but short tines.

 

[GameMgr270]

The rule will be amended for next season. I don't mind a guest shooting a big buck, but we pay a pretty penny to hopefully get one of them, I already told my dad I was just gonna be a guest next season LOL. Probably going to be a $500.00 fee if a guest kills a buck. I mean that sounds like a lot of money, but you can't go to any outfitter and kill a wall hanger anywhere near that cheap.

I have several bucks that I have been able to keep track of for several years. But this buck was a camera hog. He would disappear for a few weeks at a time some years, but in velvet and late season he stuck tight to one area. 90% of all his pics are in the same spot.

My dad also killed a buck this season that was 4 or 5. I have had him on cam for three years. Again it was hard to say if he was 2 or 3 when I first got him on cam. He was only a 105 inch 8 point. Just had bad genes, 16 inches wide good mass but short tines.

Great story. We have a very similar story about an 8.5yr old we finally got last year. He was an 8pt the whole time. Hunted hard, never saw in the stand for years then finally killed in a food plot at 5:20pm of all places for an old buck to be. Hundreds of pics of him. Very consistent most of the time. Smartest we ever had the privilege of hunting.

It has to be hard that a guest got him and not one of you that put all the time in. That's why we stopped letting guest come in too.
You mentioned he crossed a road. Dirt or highway? We have some that cross a dirt road pretty consistently.
What was his home range like? As much as I love hunting and eating deer I am equally intrigued by the old bucks and how they make it to be so old in heavily hunted environments.

 

[BassHunter25]

Great story. We have a very similar story about an 8.5yr old we finally got last year. He was an 8pt the whole time. Hunted hard, never saw in the stand for years then finally killed in a food plot at 5:20pm of all places for an old buck to be. Hundreds of pics of him. Very consistent most of the time. Smartest we ever had the privilege of hunting.

It has to be hard that a guest got him and not one of you that put all the time in. That's why we stopped letting guest come in too.
You mentioned he crossed a road. Dirt or highway? We have some that cross a dirt road pretty consistently.
What was his home range like? As much as I love hunting and eating deer I am equally intrigued by the old bucks and how they make it to be so old in heavily hunted environments.

He was crossing a pretty well used paved highway. We have 300 acres on one side of the highway and 900 on the other side of the highway. The first 3 and a half seasons he only showed up on the 300 acres side and usually only on about 200 acres of that. But they cleared about a 50 acre thick area right in the middle of that and then he started crossing the highway last season when they did that. We are surrounded by other hunting clubs. There are several stands on neighboring properties that I can see from our property. I can't tell you how many times I have heard them shoot and just knew they shot him.

 

[Woodsman28]

Awesome story..really enjoyed reading, thanks for sharing.

I have had similar experiences in the past with bucks that seemed to live on our property and seemed to never venture beyond to neighboring property, yet they were like ghosts and never moved in daylight hours and never once made a mistake. Yet, all the while, we see and harvest mature bucks fairly consistently of the same age or older every year. I think the simple moral of the story is that deer are individuals and some bucks are just innately smarter than others.

Our property is in the middle of farm land with huge Ag fields in every direction in the surrounding area. From 1999 through around 2003 we did not have hogs in our area. Once the hogs arrived, local farmers started shinning and shooting hogs out of necessity at all hours of the night all year long. Every deer in the area feeds on these large Ag fields and I believe over time, certain bucks become extremely nocturnal and difficult to hunt due to this fact. Prior to the hog invasion, our very biggest and oldest bucks were much more likely to be seen during daylight hours on our foodplots or otherwise. Just an interesting observation.

 

[Curtis-UGA]

Great story! Really neat to have that kind of history on such an elusive animal.