I got done at work early yesterday so I decided it was a good chance to check out an area I hunted last year with marginal success. I had over shot a decent buck on opening day, seen two forkys running together, shot a coyote, and watched various other does feed out of range last season, all from my climbing stand. I was curious if that buck was still wandering around, though with the heat I knew the odds were slim he'd be out before dark. Going all ground this year I moved to a spot on the top side of the hill that leads down to a goldenrod field to a creek. The hill top was the location that a doe kept busting me last season from my stand. Literally 50 meters from my truck! She'd stand up there and snort and bleat her warning, no doubt getting a full whiff of my scent rolling up the hill from the creek bed I was always hunting. There are no real good candidates for a stand on the hill so I never was able to hunt it. Yesterday I found a good brush spot and trimmed some oak limbs to build a good brush blind. I sat there for a while but the traffic by the road was unusally high so I decided to go down the hill to where the clearing meets the woods before the creek and check it out. At the bottom of the hill I set up another good brush blind about 20 meters from the woodline and settled in for the evening. I checked the wind and while it was still going up the hill and behind me most of the time I wasn't worried too much. About 7 p.m. directly in front of me in the woods there was a loud thrashing as something(s) were charging in hard towards me. I had just bleated my call and at first thought "what luck!" But then realized the noise was far to loud for a deer. Whatever it was got to just before entering the clearing and broke in two seperate directions with one group continuing to my right and the other stopping right in front of me. The brush is still thick this time of year so I couldn't see clearly what they were. After a bit I could make out the legs of several pigs, all of a good size. I figured that it was one large one off to my right because of the ammount of noise he was making but again the brush kept him out of direct view. To be honest, sitting on the ground with a long bow and a knife in a twig blind surrounded with pigs that will probably notice me when it was far to late (where the big one was was thick weeds, he would of been in my lap if he fed towards me before we could see each other) kind of had me on my toes. I scanned around for a decent tree to scale if things went south after the shot, but there were none. Eventually the group to my front took off back into the deeper woods but the one large one to my right kept feeding. I never heard him leave, just stopped hearing him, haha. No shot, no blood, and no deer seen aside from good tracks of some doe and one larger buck (not whre I hoped to find them either), but it was another good night on the ground. The pigs got a pass last night, but I guess so did I depending on how you look at it. If anyone is considering ground hunting but afraid you'll have fewer encounters, read up on it and give it a try. At the end of the season I'm going to do a thread on everything I tried and learned this season on the ground. Every trip out is another learning experience, haha. Not saying I'm going to be a pro by any means, only that I will have done over 30+ hunts on the ground (between season opener mid-september to season closer in january). Hope everyone is having a good season so far, the weatherman promises some colder weather is on the way, which is good because I'm tired of scratching skeeter bites!
Topic: Another interesting and instructive night last night (Read 420 times)
