Unpredictable white tails

[Charliefrank]

This story takes place in the Green Mountains of Vermont.
In the middle of a lackluster season, (not seeing any of the bucks previously scouted ) I decided to try a new area several miles from my normal stomping grounds. I enter the woods around 8 am, fully light out now. Going to do a little still hunting /scouting for sign. It had rained the night before so super quite walking. I make into the woods about 200 yards and come across an old logging road. I walk down about 75 yards and spot a pretty good size scrape. Before I even get up to it I can see a single branch hanging over it about 2 1/2 feet off the ground. Excitement begins to build. This is a main scrape. I get to the scrape thinking I'm going to put a little doe urine in it and walk to an ambush spot, dragging a urine soaked rag attached to my pant cuff. Perfect. What the hell is that in the middle of the scrape? Oh my god, some uneducated hunter thought this was an excellent place to rub out a cigarette. Fu****g ruined! Excitement drains immediately. I decide to make progressively larger circles from the scrape site to see if the mystery buck has reposted his calling card. Zip, zero, zilch. Eventually I come back out on the logging road. Curiosity gets the best of me, so I head back down towards the disaster area. As I slowly round one of the many corners, I freeze! There's a deer smelling that same scrape. No abnormal reaction and deer slowly moves towards me sniffing the ground as it comes. Wait, I see antlers. It's a spike horn. Clearly not the beast that must have made that scrape. No matter, I need venison and you can't eat horns. I slowly shoulder my 270. He looks up at me, again I freeze. He puts his his head down again I take the safety off, we are 30 yards apart and facing each other. I whistle, he looks directly at me. My cross hairs are already centered on his chest. I squeeze the trigger. He comes about a foot off the ground and falls over dead. Sometimes you just can't predict a white tails behavior. He dressed out at 120 lbs, and was excellent eating.

 

[buck460XVR]

Sometimes all the luck/skill one needs to take a deer is just being in the right place at the right time. That can be something planned or just coincidence. One thing I have realized over the years is one can never judge the size of a deer by the size of the scrape. A rub yes, but not a scrape. Many experienced bow hunters I know, will actually pee in a fresh/active scrape just to tick a deer off and attempt to make them come to the scrape to refresh it. I've also found that the best time to hunt active scrape lines is 1). when the are first being made.(you need to know where scrape lines have been in the past). 2). When leaves are heavily falling and cover the scrapes in a matter of hours, and 3). after a form of inclement weather such as rain/snow that has washed out any sign/smell of/in the scrape. One way I check to see if scrapes are active is to clean them myself and then cover them with boot tracks. If I come back a day later or so and there are no more boot tracks in the scrape, I know that buck is not very far away. Congrats on getting your buck.

 

[Taurus 617 CCW]

We had a pretty unpredictable deer season in North Idaho as well. Everything was going great from opening day to a few weeks in and then we got 15 inches of snow early. My hunting partner harvested a spike buck on opening day and that was all we saw on that property. Normally there are deer everywhere but not this year. It’s as if they all just up and left. If it wasn’t for some nice folks at church letting me hunt their property, I would have gone empty handed. Last Sunday I bagged a nice size whitetail doe. As others have said, you can’t eat the horns.