My Little Slice of Paradise

Don’t feel sorry for me, however as we still have some good deer hanging around that survived the season. This big guy taunted my buddy Jonathan on two separate occasions walking by within bow range while Jonathan only had doe tags left.
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This big guy spent a good bit of time in November and December on our place too:
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These 3.5 yr olds are also alive and well still:
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I’m already looking forward to next season and hope to keep everyone apprised of my habitat work in the meantime!


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Speaking of habitat work, I have one major project this year that I’m still on the fence about whether I’ll get it done. It involves clearing an old logging deck and creating a 3 acre food plot. The key to this is that I’m using the principles I’ve learned from implementing steve bartyllas property plan to ensure I lay the plot out properly with great access and adjacent to great bedding cover. I think it will be a slam dunk setup, but I’m not sure if I will have time to get it done this year. We shall see.
Other than that, I will be releasing and searching for additional wild crabapple trees where I found one producing fruit last year. I hope to do some additional hinge and clear cutting to thicken up the understory in some strategic areas for browse and bedding cover. I also would like to put a waterhole in our camper trail plot. Lastly, my Ranger EV needs a new set of batteries. I now know that I was thoroughly screwed over when I bought the thing and that $60 rural king batteries cant handle the bouncing and vibration from being mounted in a Ranger. They have deteriorated to the point now that I can’t even make it halfway back into my property before I have to stop to ensure I have barely enough power to get back to the barn. I’d say it’s current range is down to less than a mile in rough terrain. ‍♂️


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Yes it was the Year of the Neighbor. You have good deer in your area because you have improved the habitat tremendously.

2018 will be better for you. No moving and you are back in KY.

Wayne
 
Good update Luke. Best of luck to you in the new job. You have a great crop of deer already in place for next season. Hope you are able to spend time during shed season to pick up some of those antlers in your pictures. One good buck and six does is like you say about a seven maybe an eight since your hunting partner shot the nice buck. Now that the neighbors and all have shot a nice buck, you won't feel bad next year taking the largest deer ever there.
 
Shed season is in full swing! My buddy Jonathan was near the farm picking up his mount from the velvet buck he killed back in September. I told him it was too early to shed hunt but he didn’t listen. Looks like I was wrong! I’m headed down next weekend to try to find a few more.
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This is near 15 sheds we’ve found in the last 4 winters in and around our 5 acre bean field that we leave standing. I will continue to plant this field for years to come for the shed hunting alone!


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That is excellent shed hunting you have had so far Luke. We are in a huge thaw with lots of open ground but the woods along the bean field here are still snowed in. They could get open soon. Have been out a few times in very heavy sign but have not found the years first shed yet.

On your three acre food plot that you may get to this year; I used to feel that new food plots needed to be put in their entirety right away but experience has shown here that new food plots though often used some within days of germination took a few years to reach peak use. These days I'm not bothered starting a three acre field out with a 1/10th of an acre the first year. Sure they eat it to dirt but it is better than breaking your neck to get it all done in the first year just to find that they didn't eat but a small part of it anyway. The 1/10th of an acre gets a young buck used to eating there unbothered and using the travel patterns set up. It also sets him up to return a year older next year. Then I make the plot a little larger on it the next year. Perfection in growth size would be having just enough food in it to make the year. By year four new plots are usually completed and in full production food wise and all age deer use. Note; Of course this more relaxed stress free (and frugal) approach doesn't work at all with corn or beans which as you know when planted in too small an area get eaten before they even get to grow much here whether it is a new plot or not. But as we know there are a lot of great plantings to do besides corn and beans.

Enjoyed seeing the results of your shed hunt; it gets me excited to keep at it here.
 
Well it’s been a while since I’ve documented our progress at the farm. Let’s start with turkey season. It was a good opening weekend for me in spite of rainy weather as I was able to kill a tom on opening afternoon and another the following morning on my standing bean field. Tagged out feels pretty good after not killing a deer or turkey at all last year. You’ll have to excuse the photo quality as I took them with the timer on my phone and I was in a hurry with the rain coming down like it was.
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I decided not to do the extra food plot this year that I was pondering after it became clear it was going to cost more money than I cared to put into it this year. However, we did get our box blind moved to a new location that makes it much more huntable. This was a permanent blind set in concrete on 6x6’s that I wanted to move about 80 yards to the opposite side of the plot.
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The course of action we took was to use lag screws to attach skids to the legs of the blind right above the ground. Next we braced it horizontally with additional boards and lag screws. Finally, we cut off the legs with a chainsaw just above the bottom surface of the skids. We used a floor jack to keep the blade from getting pinched once the cut was through. Next, we hooked a chain to the legs on one end of the blind and proceeded to drag it across the plot. If only it went that smoothly:
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You’ll notice it got a little “bow legged” during the drag so we had to brace it up quite a bit more before we got it across the field. Now, it has great access and sets up perfectly for any wind out of the north. I’m hoping to catch up to a buck there this fall. This is also now the spot I expect to take my wife and daughter on their first hunts.


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Time to play catch-up from a whirlwind season! I didn’t hunt early season in KY because I went out to Colorado on an archery elk hunt in the Flat Tops Wilderness Area. Below is a picture from one of the canyon rims where we hunted. Beautiful country!
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Of the 5 of us who had tags, two had shots at bulls but couldn’t connect, and a third guy opted to pass on a cow on the last day. I never drew my bow on this trip except on a coyote but had a great time. My closest encounter with a bull was 130 yards. I can’t wait to go back!


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Our targets going into this season were better than average(seems to be improving every year since we got serious about management). Below are a few of our primary targets:
Stub, 4.5:
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Spike Lee, no history but we think he’s old:
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Wide 10, 4.5:
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Spilts. 4.5+:
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Ghost, 5.5:
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I went into this deer season knowing my time to hunt would be limited due to my elk hunt putting a strain on my family, so I planned to not get serious about deer until basically November. That being said, me and my buddy took our daughters to the farm in late September to overseed our bean field with winter wheat and red clover. The girls had a blast!
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I was very proud of my little girl for embracing the rain and mud and helping her daddy “feed the deer”
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Early season hunting was left to my two buddies, Jonathan and Jim, who shot a few does and had some great hunts in our bean field. I should mention the does were shot in wooded areas near the perimeter of our property, not in any of our food plots. We don’t shoot does in our food plots until late season generally. Jim filmed 11 bucks in our beans on the opening afternoon of archery season and played cat and mouse with Stub and Spike Lee for the first few weeks of the season. September came and went with no buck kills.


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October at the farm was pretty slow from a hunting standpoint but the trail cameras picked up substantially more action starting mid-October. I squeezed in two hunts in October but only managed to blow two opportunities at does. One got by my shooting lane before I was ready and another didn’t appreciate the sound of my arrow falling off the string as I drew my bow (don’t ask). We extended our northern perimeter access trail this year and one October weekend with nothing but south winds provided a great opportunity to utilize the trail for a couple hang and hunts on the north side of the property. No bucks were sighted but I had a couple good hunts in spots I haven’t hunted near in a few years.
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By the time November rolled around, I had been thinking more and more about my goals for this year and decided that if I had an opportunity at a 3.5 yr old with my bow that I was going to take it if it felt right. My largest bow kill was a 112” deer in Tennessee several years ago, and I’d since passed several bigger deer in hopes of finding one that was 4.5 or older. I decided there is nothing wrong with shooting a 3.5 yr old if it makes you happy, and I know several veteran hunters who are thrilled to shoot a 3.5 with a bow every year. That being said, there was a particular 3.5 yr old on the farm that I was not going to shoot because he is in an area of the farm where we have had success getting them to 4.5 and getting opportunities to kill them at 4.5.
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We call this deer Ex-Tex because we thought he was a deer we named Tex a few years ago but after a month or so of summer pictures we knew there was no way he was old enough to be Tex. I am happy to say that in spite of my uncle trying to shoot him last weekend during the late ML season, this buck is still around and hopefully will be prominent on the farm next season.


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Now, the good stuff: THE RUT!
I was off work November 8-11 so I headed to the farm for the long weekend. We had NNE winds, which were perfect for most of our best areas on the farm. My uncle had found a bunch of scrapes on our south perimeter trail down below where our log yard food plot is located. In late October, he had an action packed hunt down there and shot a doe and missed a buck while managing to see 15 more does and an even bigger buck. I decided I wanted to hunt in that general area that morning so I took my climber in and slowly worked my way down the trail in the dark, looking for good trees to climb and waiting to see if the wind would hold steady for more than a minute or two before I climbed up. I finally got to a point farther back than I really wanted to go, but I at least had a somewhat steady wind direction. I climbed up and waited for daylight. I was in an edge type habitat where mature hardwoods butted up against 20 year old hardwoods and I expected the deer to be pinched down to the area I was located due to the steep hardwood ridge that ended just to my north, and the rocky bluff to my south. Just after daylight, a young 8 came off the point of the ridge and crossed the trail just behind/ downwind of me. He was not amused by my scent and spooked back up the hill. A little while later, I heard another noise behind me and turned to see a doe coming up from the bottom to cross behind me as well. She was on edge, presumably hiding from bucks, so when she hit my scent stream she quietly tucked tail and ran away back the way she came. It was prime time and I had lost all confidence in my spot. I decided to head back the way I’d come from and try again to find a spot with a consistent wind closer to the area I knew the deer were spending a lot of time.
I made it probably 200 yards back out the trail and caught a flash of movement. Before I knew it, a nice 3.5+ 9-pointer was cruising by me at 20 yards. I tried to get an arrow out of my quiver and get drawn, but got busted before I could get a clean shot. Not sure if I recognized that buck from any trail camera history, but I distinctly remember it having an extra long G3 on his left side, probably close to 11”. I continued another 150 yards or so down the trail until I felt a somewhat consistent wind direction and proceeded to climb up again. Within minutes, I had does and bucks under me, but within minutes, the wind switched and I had does and bucks running from and blowing at me. Dejected, I climbed down and vowed not to setup again until I could find a spot with a wind direction that stayed constant for 5 full minutes.
Well, I did a lot of creeping around and never did find that spot with a consistent wind. I did find a spot with what I would call a 85% good wind. It was on the lower end of a different finger ridge, right along the edge where mature timber met 20 year old timber. The problem was that if I climbed up in the mature timber, I wouldn’t be able to see very well into the younger timber due to the denser foliage up off the ground. For this reason, I opted for a setup on the ground. I found a tree with a small beech tree directly behind it providing back cover, kicked the leaves out of an area for my feet to stand on, and attached the top half of my climber to the tree to use as a seat:
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At 10:45, I look up to see a buck following a doe down off the finger ridge headed towards me. The doe gets to 30 yards and the buck is hanging back off her right flank about 10 yards behind her. I watch as he lifts his nose and clearly smells me. He looks my way, and nervously trots back up the hill into the thicker cover. Luckily, the doe is just upwind enough to never smell me. She stays put. Within a few minutes, the buck starts working back down toward us but is clearly hanging back in the cover. Then, I notice another deer working its way in from upwind. I am happy to see it is a young buck (spike or button buck, can’t remember because I was so amped) that is also very interested in the doe. As the young buck comes in and puts his nose to the ground and trots up to the doe, the bigger buck can’t take it anymore and charges down to run the other buck off. Then, he apparently forgets about me. The doe slowly works her way in front of me with the buck right on her tail. I draw as his head passes behind a tree, and stop him broadside at 20 yards with a soft mouth bleat. I am relieved after I release the shot to see that it is a great hit. The buck] runs back up the hill into cover and I watch him go down. I was pretty sure the buck was at least 3.5, so I was truly grateful. When I got him back to the barn, he dressed out at 160 lbs. I weighed pitchfork (7.5 yr old) on the same scale a few years back and he only dressed 165, so I am pretty confident this buck was 3.5. I saved his teeth so I suppose I could know for sure at some point; maybe I’ll take pictures and post later.

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Now to update you on the rest of my crew:
My buddy Jonathan hunted hard through the whole rut and saw only one shooter (for him, he wanted a 140” or better this year). That buck was tending a doe on the powerline two days before rifle season opened and hasn’t been seen since. Jonathan also passed on Stub with his ML back in October.
Jim focused his rut hunting mainly in Tennessee this year and never connected on our farm.
My Uncle shot and wounded Spike Lee the second weekend of rifle season. He let him lay overnight because he was concerned about the hit (bright red blood, no bubbles, believed to be a brisket or high shoulder hit). He jumped the buck the next morning and it appeared to be fine. Ran away with tail up and minimal blood in its bed. He hasn’t shown back up on camera yet, but we are hopeful.
I took my brother in law hunting the last weekend of gun season. Alex is an aspiring hunter who is mainly looking for meat. We had a dandy 3 year old buck pop out in the camper trail plot with a doe one evening. The buck was quartering toward us and I told him to put the crosshairs right on the front shoulder. At the shot, the buck barely reacted to the hit. We found a couple small bits of white hairs at the point of impact, but no blood. We spent an hour tracking that evening and never found a bit of blood. A huge rain came through overnight. I called my neighbor who has a tracking dog. The dog he brought over was an “aspiring” tracking dog but my neighbor seemed confident in its abilities. We searched all morning and never found the deer. During our search, we bumped some does by Jonathan and he shot one. We took the tracking dog to Jonathan’s deer (which he watched go down), and the dog basically didn’t react at all to the carpet of blood on the ground left by the heart shot deer. We basically had to coax the dog over to the dead deer. So, with my confidence in the dog now gone, I searched a couple of the areas again to make sure he hadn’t just walked right by the buck. No luck. I hope the deer survived but I’m not sure if that is the case. It took a .308 round presumably through the guts from 80 yards. My brother in law said he put the crosshairs right BEHIND the shoulder because that’s what they learned in hunter education. I explained to him the error in that method when dealing with quartering shots. Lesson learned.


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So now that we’re caught up, here’s what’s next:
I am planning to pull the trigger on clearing out an area for a new food plot this winter. It is centrally located in our property with great access from the NE, E and SE and there is a big enough area there where I believe I can get a 3 acre plot that would sustain soybeans. I’m excited about the future benefits to our hunting but not excited about the upcoming dozer bill! I’ll put together a map of the plot once we get it done and show you my strategy for hunting it and the strategy that went into creating it. Happy hunting everyone and I hope everyone has a Merry Christmas!
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PS I recently made some good summer sausage from my buck. :)
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Enjoyed your updates Luke, a big congratulations on taking a buck from the ground. I enjoyed the stories and can remember dropping an arrow now and them myself. When you drew the arrow on the buck your excitement really came thru on your story, really a great hunt recount. You are living the great life with your kids and getting to hunt also;;Good for you and them!

I like the ridge top food plot plan. I thought we ad finicky winds and we do compared to the lake front properties but nothing compared to what you are running into with all those ridges and low spots.
 
I like the ridge top food plot plan. I thought we ad finicky winds and we do compared to the lake front properties but nothing compared to what you are running into with all those ridges and low spots.

Yes we have been learning as we hunt the property smarter that many areas that look like good spots to hunt based on a map and the wind direction at the time turn out to be poor choices due to swirling wind from terrain features. Our best spots continue to be higher up on the ridges where we get more consistent winds so I’m adjusting my property plan accordingly. It’s proven to be difficult to shoot “fence jumping” does due to the swirling winds down along the property lines. This off season I plan to adjust many of these stands to nearby locations higher up the ridge in the hope of getting more consistent wind directions from the stand. An added benefit is these stands won’t burn out as quickly because they will be a little bit farther off our access trail than they are currently.


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Congrats on the buck Luke! Glad to hear you had a good time in Colorado. I’m considering an elk rut hunt in the fall of 2020.
 
Congrats on the buck Luke! Glad to hear you had a good time in Colorado. I’m considering an elk rut hunt in the fall of 2020.

Thanks! I’ve done 5 rut archery hunts for elk and have been successful on 3 of those trips. I’m no expert but I’d be glad to answer any questions you may have. The group I go with has gone 10 times now and have taken many good bulls through the years.


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