Killed this buck on my place in Missouri last week. Its special having it come together on your own land, for sure. The first few days were pretty wild with buck activity, they were really bird dogging trails looking for love.
This deal is a situation I set up on purpose....I put in a couple of 0.2 acre clover patches right on the inside edge of a heavy bedding area. Out of the back of one there was an old, old logging road in the timber, grown up so that you had to squint to see it. This I opened up a couple years back to give myself easier access to the bottoms to get deer out, do stand work etc, but since I was doing it anyway I checked the bottom of the ridge first to determine where I wanted to terminate the road. The buck traffic was envisioned to be cruising for does, up or down the ridge between the bottoms and the bedding area on top with the bedding area the main attraction, the clover serves to keep the ladies happy and staying at home more.
There just happened to be a major deer crossing in a good spot, this is in the first bench above the creek, and the property line cuts through there with an old fence. There also JUST happened to be a really nice oak for a stand there too.
kind of like it was planned that way.
I cleaned up the 200 or so yards of logging road, hinge cut along the edges and off to the sides to make more cover. I now spray the trail once a year with the quad (roundup/2,4D mixture) to keep it clean and pull the mower down it once in the summer....viola...deer highway! Its the easiest path thru an area they always traveled anyway. This entails A LOT of sweat equity just for one setup.
Stand access is from the east along the fence thru a deep draw with deer travel basically SW to NE. Hunted on NW, W or WSW wind its killer.
This guy followed the script and came off the neighbor's place, jumped the fence behind me, made a little detour to check another small crossing, then walked past me on the logging road at 7 yards. He made it just out of sight.
He's a 3 1/2 yr old, and it was a fun hunt.... don't confuse me with a trophy guy. I know too many of those, and I know some folks that own fantastic hunting ground and are always miserable because of worrying about trophy hunting in one way or the other, or what the neighbors are doing etc. Frankly, life's too short for that stress...."The right buck at the right time" is a much healthier outlook for me.
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Same equipment as the big guy above, and once again the Snuffer was stuck in the ground on the other side.
Enjoy the rest of the season, folks, and best of luck
R
Topic: 2017 Missouri buck added page 5....2017 Indiana buck (Read 1847 times)
