"The Ghost" Buck

HuronMtn

Member
Each year it seems we get an elusive and large buck that just barely shows up on one of our game cameras. One that gets caught on the marginal fringes of the cameras capabilities and likely never shows up on another camera again, and, unfortunately doesn't get harvested either. We seem to always call this buck "The Ghost" each year. Does anyone else have any Ghosts on their hunting grounds and care to share a picture?

Here is picture of what I think will be The Ghost for our 2020.

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Each year it seems we get an elusive and large buck that just barely shows up on one of our game cameras. One that gets caught on the marginal fringes of the cameras capabilities and likely never shows up on another camera again, and, unfortunately doesn't get harvested either. We seem to always call this buck "The Ghost" each year. Does anyone else have any Ghosts on their hunting grounds and care to share a picture?

Here is picture of what I think will be The Ghost for our 2020.

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I don’t seem to have any...I generally have an opp at the largest deer we get on camera at some point in time...
 
We often have a yearly ghost buck, a brief and fleeting glimpse, a flash off antler, a grainy picture. But I'm suspicious that some of those sightings may be a figment of the imagination? But whatever they are, they surely liven the sense of excitement around the campfire, and the anticipation that keeps restless hunters glued to the stand for motionless hours. And every now and then the "ghost" comes alive, like 1996 when I shot the "couch buck" a big eight that had been rumored to be hanging around an old couch abandoned deep in the middle of the woods. The only clues to his existence were huge buck rubs in a circle around the couch. I only went to that spot on a whim, after another greedy hunter took my "good" stand, that interestingly enough didn't produce any deer sightings at all that opening day. Proof that buck might have been partially supernatural: I only needed 8 shots to bring him down, and I was shooting "silver" bullets. But when you touch the antlers on the shoulder mount they are as hard as bone. Statistics do show however, that having this so-called ghost deer hanging on my wall before an impending deer hunt has resulted in many more successful trophies harvested.
 
No ghost bucks, but those really big deer that seem to show themselves on camera during the rut for a day or two and then won’t be seen until the following year. I don’t think I have the pictures anymore but for 3 straight years we had a dandy that looked like a mule deer. He only showed up on our cameras after dark and the first week of November.
 
I’ve had one or two like that on camera. Actually, more like four or five. I finally got wise and started putting my cams up as high as I could reach while standing on my golf cart. I started getting multiple pics of those bucks then, but it didn’t help since most of them were still at night. These were mostly cams on trails and scrapes. Evidently bucks don’t like pics circulating of them and their romantic antics. They seem to be much more tolerant of cams on food.
 
Here was a ghost buck a neighbor to a property we hunt got one pic of; 3 days later i shot him, having never seen him before. So, I got to be on the other end of that arrangement for a change! The trail cam pic makes him look bigger than he actually was; but he is still my best ever.

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Most of our “ghost bucks” are paranoid and camera shy: they see the red glow (or smell my human scent around the camera) and pass by that camera once and only once, in the middle of the night, at the furthest extent of the camera’s range. I got one 10 point on 3-4 different cameras, but never twice on the same camera. Never saw the deer in person.

I have switched to all no-glow cameras as an experiment to see if this will make those bucks less leery and more photogenic. Putting them a few sticks high would also achieve the same goal.


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Most of our “ghost bucks” are paranoid and camera shy: they see the red glow (or smell my human scent around the camera) and pass by that camera once and only once, in the middle of the night, at the furthest extent of the camera’s range. I got one 10 point on 3-4 different cameras, but never twice on the same camera. Never saw the deer in person.

I have switched to all no-glow cameras as an experiment to see if this will make those bucks less leery and more photogenic. Putting them a few sticks high would also achieve the same goal.


Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk
Good idea -- raising the camera up -- I need to give that a try.
 
I've got a Buck we call Lobby because his one ear is lopped off about halfway. Maybe a Coyote attack I have no idea.

In any case I get 1-3 pics of him each year, always at Night and rarely twice in the same spot. Biggest Buck we have that visits the property.
 
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