Deer Season Recap & A Plan For 2016/2017

A nice 8 point Jan. 2009

Several years ago, when my youngest son was born, I came to the conclusion that it was time to get off my deer lease.  After several successful seasons of management and letting deer walk in hopes of shooting a mature buck one day, I was now going to let someone else shoot those deer.  However, I knew that with a baby on the way, mounting bills, and the lack of time I would have to hunt, it was the best thing I could do for my family. Over the course of the next several years, I saw my friends taking bigger more mature deer than I ever have. Nothing like pouring salt in the wound!Fast forward a couple more years and now I am back on the lease.

Back in September, just before bow season opened, we invited Don Bell, creator of Top Secret Deer Scents to Twisted Oak to give a seminar on hunting the rut.  It was a very interesting, and very entertaining seminar that covered the pre, peak, and post-rut activities of the Whitetail Deer, and the use of scents and calls.  The information shared, made me think about the way we hunt in Texas (over baited areas) versus the way many other states hunt (where it is against the law to bait).  

The difference in my mind being that basically, here in Texas, we alter the deer's natural travel corridors by placing feeders to draw them to a specific spot.  We also open up wide shooting lanes along their trail which also has to have an effect on their travels.  Now, don't get me wrong, most hunters are smart enough to place their feeder and stand locations along travel routes to begin with, but not necessarily in areas where a deer would normally stop to browse.  Other times, these feeders placed in oat fields, where deer come to graze.

The way I understand it, (which is from watching TV, and I could be totally wrong here) in other states where baiting is illegal, stands are placed in locations where deer funnel into pastures to graze and browse.  Some states don't even allow hunting over standing crops, so stand locations are forced further back into wooded areas on natural travel routes; and hunters are left to hunt over scrapes and other areas deer are known to travel.  

So, my question became... Do scents and calls work with the way we hunt in Texas?  I believe it's a topic worth researching.  So, I began looking for rubs and scrapes more actively.  I have seen them before, but never really paid much attention to them.  They merely reinforced in my mind that I had placed my feeder in a location where deer were known to travel. Good info to have, but what do you do with that info?  Well, Don answered that question with some great knowledge like when to use which scent, how to apply it, where to apply it and how to change a nockturnal buck's pattern.  I would not do it justice by trying to explain it here, so check out this video.  It's over an hour in length, but as I said, he is pretty entertaining.

Sunset from the bow stand. Near Hondo, TX

The lease I am on, is small and split by a Farm to Market road.  We all have our even smaller areas that we hunt. So, the idea of hunting a specific deer or a scrape/rub line doesn't seem to be very plausable unless it just happens to be in the perfect place. A place where there are no safety concerns with shot direction, I have the right wind direction, can access the spot without spooking everything in the area, and the right buck is traveling that scrape/rub line.  

Since I am now new to the lease again, my area is one that is near the front gate, which has been hunted before, but with marginal results.  I am not sure why things have been so marginal as there is a pond nearby and many, many trails leading out of some of the best cover on the property and our neighbor's property.  This summer, you can bet there will be many scouting trips to figure out the pattern on all this and find the 2x4 walls (as Don likes to put it). 

My season this year was a tough one. Going on what little I knew from my history on the lease 5 years prior, I set things up in a manner similar to the way it had been set up before.  Why would I expect different results?  Storm damage to my blind early in the season and abundant rain keeping things growing and limiting my vision didn't help much either.  

I harvested 2 hogs in my spot on the lease and never saw a deer from my primary blind, except on camera. All of which looked to be pretty young.  I did see what looked like a pretty mature 6 point that made the hit list, but I never saw him in person. It was a pretty poor year.  Toward the end of the year, I set up a secondary bow stand where I began to see what I thought might be a pattern.  If it is then I may have been parking in an area that cut off the deer headed my way. Most of the deer I saw from the bow stand were 150 yds away or more.  I did have some young bucks come into the bow stand on the trail I set with estrus during the peak of the rut.

I was a little disappointed in the way the season turned out, but it was good time spent with my kids. In the next month, I will make a trip or two out to do some shed hunting and begin my scouting for next season.  I like a challenge and look forward to a season full of trials and tribulations next year.  With any luck, I might learn something or even better, harvest the buck of a lifetime!