“What the heck, where are all the mature bucks”?
This may have been the most commonly uttered phrase for our 2017 Idaho hunt. The weather started out fantastic as mother nature graced our hunting area with 8” of fresh snow the day before our arrival. We couldn’t have asked for better luck, the cold front should have got the bigger bucks up and moving around looking for doe’s. Should have……..
Well that snow melted off immediately as the next 6 days brought daytime temperatures in the low 60’s. Hunting mule deer in T shirts was not exactly optimal conditions. The smaller bucks were up and moving around but we were having a heck of a time locating any mature deer. We were seeing 60-80 deer a day with a handful of young bucks mixed in, but nothing worth putting a stalk on. We spent a lot of time looking through the glass but a different tactic turned out to be the key in finding our only shooter buck of the trip.
As Kenny and my Dad sat glassing the massive landscape surrounding them they were constantly checking the various groups of doe’s scattered around the basin. Hoping that each time they checked in on them, a bigger buck may have moved in to join the group. As it turns out there was a group of 9 doe’s and fawns across the canyon that had been feeding on and off in a pocket of sage brush all day long. They had glassed this group of deer dozens of times throughout the day. At around 3:30 in the afternoon my dad decided to try one of his favorite tactics…... rolling rocks. Tactic is pretty simple; find a large rock or small boulder and send it over the edge to let gravity take over.
As my dad sent the last boulder down the canyon he picks up the binos and scans back over to the group of 9 deer that had been across the canyon all day. Now there were 10 deer and one of them had horns. After a quick look through the spotting scope Kenny was on his way to try and get in position for a shot. After about an hour, he was sitting around 285 yards from the buck. The buck goes down after a few (cough, cough) finely placed shots. As they say the work really begins after you have an animal down and it ended up taking 2 trips in and out of the depths of a nasty canyon to fully recover all of the meat.
Obviously the original goal of every hunting trip is for your hunting party to be “successful” and harvest a mature animal. However the older I get and the more trips I take, I am realizing that the “success” of the trip doesn’t hinge on everyone harvesting an animal. It reminds me of the closing quote from the “Wild America” series narrated by Marty Stouffer that I watched as a kid. He ended most episodes with “It’s not necessarily the catch or the kill, but the enjoyment of the outdoors”. That quote did not make much sense to me then but it sure does now.
This may have been the most commonly uttered phrase for our 2017 Idaho hunt. The weather started out fantastic as mother nature graced our hunting area with 8” of fresh snow the day before our arrival. We couldn’t have asked for better luck, the cold front should have got the bigger bucks up and moving around looking for doe’s. Should have……..
Well that snow melted off immediately as the next 6 days brought daytime temperatures in the low 60’s. Hunting mule deer in T shirts was not exactly optimal conditions. The smaller bucks were up and moving around but we were having a heck of a time locating any mature deer. We were seeing 60-80 deer a day with a handful of young bucks mixed in, but nothing worth putting a stalk on. We spent a lot of time looking through the glass but a different tactic turned out to be the key in finding our only shooter buck of the trip.
As Kenny and my Dad sat glassing the massive landscape surrounding them they were constantly checking the various groups of doe’s scattered around the basin. Hoping that each time they checked in on them, a bigger buck may have moved in to join the group. As it turns out there was a group of 9 doe’s and fawns across the canyon that had been feeding on and off in a pocket of sage brush all day long. They had glassed this group of deer dozens of times throughout the day. At around 3:30 in the afternoon my dad decided to try one of his favorite tactics…... rolling rocks. Tactic is pretty simple; find a large rock or small boulder and send it over the edge to let gravity take over.
As my dad sent the last boulder down the canyon he picks up the binos and scans back over to the group of 9 deer that had been across the canyon all day. Now there were 10 deer and one of them had horns. After a quick look through the spotting scope Kenny was on his way to try and get in position for a shot. After about an hour, he was sitting around 285 yards from the buck. The buck goes down after a few (cough, cough) finely placed shots. As they say the work really begins after you have an animal down and it ended up taking 2 trips in and out of the depths of a nasty canyon to fully recover all of the meat.
Obviously the original goal of every hunting trip is for your hunting party to be “successful” and harvest a mature animal. However the older I get and the more trips I take, I am realizing that the “success” of the trip doesn’t hinge on everyone harvesting an animal. It reminds me of the closing quote from the “Wild America” series narrated by Marty Stouffer that I watched as a kid. He ended most episodes with “It’s not necessarily the catch or the kill, but the enjoyment of the outdoors”. That quote did not make much sense to me then but it sure does now.
