Off To A Good Start

-By Rich Miller

So far this year my deer season has been as good as it gets. I was fortunate enough to get a good deer early and I have been seeing a lot of deer activity every time I go into the woods.

It has been a long time since I have seen this much food on the ground and the deer are really loving it. Usually when there is this much food it is a problem keeping up with them and trying to figure out where they are feeding. When deer don’t have to move very far to find food it makes it hard to intercept them between bedding and feeding.

Luckily that hasn’t been a problem for me this year and I have been covered up with deer everywhere I have been. In the different hardwoods I have been hunting I have seen a lot of fresh signs from where deer have been bedding there. I haven’t jumped any deer going in to hunt but I have been worried that they will be there before I get there.

I normally take the opportunity this time of year to do some doe management but so far I have been really slack. I went down to my hunting club last weekend with the intent to take out some does and just have some fun with my bow. My hunts went as planned but when I had the opportunity to shoot I got lazy and started thinking I didn’t wasn’t to mess with cleaning a deer that night and never shot anything.

Another reason I didn’t shoot a doe was the amount of buck sign that I found when I arrived at the club. It had been a couple of weeks since I had been down there and there was almost no buck sign then. Man was I in for a shock when I stepped into the woods on Thursday afternoon. There were scrapes and rubs everywhere as I walked to the spot that I intended to hunt.

I had seen two really nice bucks in this area last fall and I was hopeful that they had made it through the season. With all of the sign I saw while setting up, all I could do was picture one of those bucks walking out and checking the fresh scrapes in front of me. I know the odds of seeing one of these mature bucks during daylight hours this time of year are not very good, but I still couldn’t make myself shoot a doe.

As the days get shorter and the temperature gets colder the hunting will just get better every day. It seems like someone is calling me to tell me about the big buck that they had seen or had the chance to harvest on a daily basis.

This is the time of year that we have been waiting months on so if you haven’t gotten out in the woods yet I think it is a perfect time to get off of the couch and get out there.

Good luck when you do!