Bowhunter's upstate New York property tour

I was actually after a larger deer that I saw glassing some crp fields the first evening that I was in town. I estimated him to be just shy of 200" so I had no problem passing up on a few 150" deer. I've previously got a few in the 150" range and really wanted to hold out for something larger.
 
Congrats as that is an awesome buck. Loved the vids, to bad you did not get a chance to swing the camera onto him before the shot.
 
I finally got a chance to do some much needed hinge cutting today. I did three different areas where I seldom hunt simply because the deer don’t use these areas because they are very open pieces of timber.

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After:
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How large are the individual areas that are hinged? It sure takes a lot of cutting in those pole sized stands to let the sun in. The deer are really going to enjoy those tops on the ground this week for sure.
 
Chainsaw said:
How large are the individual areas that are hinged? It sure takes a lot of cutting in those pole sized stands to let the sun in. The deer are really going to enjoy those tops on the ground this week for sure.
Click to expand...
They are fairly small areas as of right now. The smallest one is roughly 30 yards by 40 yards, and the biggest is about 40 yards by 60 yards.

I’m sure I’ll have to make these areas larger each year down the road. I didn’t want to keep dropping the trees on top of each other and blocking the deer from being able to get to them.
 
That sounds good. They are large enough to let the sunlight in. I once made the mistake of hinge cutting too much at once and as you said I had a two hundred yard long area that the deer avoided seemingly completely.
 
When I planned out a hinge cut i walked through with ribbon and marked out pathways through the area first. . In each direction. Sometimes one veered off from another. Hint, use existing deer trails as much as you can but never make them straight. Curves and 90’severy 100 ft or so. I found 1 to 2 acres minimum works best. It’s easy to hinge in either direction on each side of marked trail. If one happens to fall the wrong way just make a few cuts and open it up. The deer start using these immediately. Break the whole couple acres into quadrants and adjust plan as necessary. You also might want to think about hinging up a bit higher. Those cuts look pretty low. Sometimes it would take me a week to do one. And I did 12. Lol.
 
Such an incredible hunt I had yesterday for so many reason. It was my very first time taking my son hunting so my expectations for how he’d do was relatively low. He did very well though considering he’s only 2-1/2 years old.

We got out to the blind yesterday later than I wanted because my other son which is only a month old was a little ornery and hungry so I was busy feeding him while my wife slept for a few hours. When we got to the blind finally around 7:45 I did a few series of yelps but didn’t hear nothing in return. We sat there for about an hour and a half and never heard anything or saw anything. Finally my son got a little bored and whispered to me that he wanted to go home. I told him that was fine and started to put everything away and pack up. As I went to unzip the blind door I noticed a bird coming from behind me and moving through one of my food plots about 100 yards away. The next 30 seconds or so were very frantic as I was picking up my son and placing him in his chair and trying to nock an arrow. I somehow got everything rearranged and got settled as the bird had spotted my decoys and started to come right to them. As he got right to the decoys I began to draw back and my son moved and whispered to me to “shoot him daddy”. The bird either heard him or saw me drawing and spooked and alarm putted but he only took a couple steps and stopped to reassess things. That was all I needed as he was only at 7 yards. I hit him right where I needed to with the NAP Gobbler Getter and he stopped him right in his tracks. Heart shot him and he expired within 10 seconds. Very impressed with the Gobbler Getters. I wanted to give the Magnus Bullheads a try but didn’t want to risk trying to get one out of the quiver with a bird right close by in short order. All in all, it was a memorable hunt for many reasons and It will always be burned into my memory. Now onto bird #2 as there’s a lot of season left. Here are a few pictures to share.

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I did a little tree planting yesterday. I put in four Enterprises that I picked up from Stark Brothers as they had the semi dwarfs on sale for a great price. I put these in a location that I haven’t been doing anything with and plan on clearing some area so I can expand more next year.
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I’m thinking of picking up a few Honeycrisp trees for pollinators for the Enterprises that I planted last weekend. They are on sale for dirt cheap and they are one of my favorite eating apples out there.

Does anyone know if they are a good choice as a disease resistant tree?
 
Great story on the bow turkey - very cool that you'll always have that memory~! Nice bird too and enjoyed the pictures as well!!
 
Trees I planted at the end of May are doing great. Going to hit them with some tree prep fertilizer today to give them a boost before fall.
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