GA Deer Season 2022

[BradA]

Beautiful buck congrats!

 

[noharleyyet]

Awesome buck @RobertD !
Like the pic shares.

 

[Scott85]

Congrats!!!

 

[Brad W]

Great buck! You earned it passing up all the smaller ones. I enjoy these threads that show me totally different landscapes to hunt in than I am used to.

 

[SwaggyD]

Helluva whitetail. Congrats!!

 

[RobertD]

@Hem

Scored a touch lower than I expected. 142 gross, but my tape is pretty conservative - officially would probably be another inch or two and change.

 

[Hem]

@Hem

Scored a touch lower than I expected. 142 gross, but my tape is pretty conservative - officially would probably be another inch or two and change.

I kinda ride the fence on the importance of score. Personally, with any exceptional deer I might kill i like knowing the score simply to help categorize. With a couple of good bucks on the wall to stare at in the off season, it helps me analyze anything I might see in the field.
That said, most good hunters recognize a quality buck immediately and don't worry about score.
Thanks for sharing story and info.

 

[RobertD]

I kinda ride the fence on the importance of score. Personally, with any exceptional deer I might kill i like knowing the score simply to help categorize. With a couple of good bucks on the wall to stare at in the off season, it helps me analyze anything I might see in the field.
That said, most good hunters recognize a quality buck immediately and don't worry about score.
Thanks for sharing story and info.

I agree with this enough I wanted to quote it and say so.

Score is super useful in conversation with other hunters when communicating about/hunting the same property or area or same group of deer. I like taping bucks just to build that skill of analyzing and judging them. (When I worked in taxidermy I taped every pronghorn I could just for future in field reference. )

When it comes to killing one it's certainly more than numbers on a sheet that get your heart pumping!

 

[Hem]

I agree with this enough I wanted to quote it and say so.

Score is super useful in conversation with other hunters when communicating about/hunting the same property or area or same group of deer. I like taping bucks just to build that skill of analyzing and judging them. (When I worked in taxidermy I taped every pronghorn I could just for future in field reference. )

When it comes to killing one it's certainly more than numbers on a sheet that get your heart pumping!

I find these kind of threads about whitetails to be some of the most interesting on Hunttalk. We get to see deer killed from every corner and between.

 

[RobertD]

Aaaaaaaaand... we're back.

I took the last week or ten days off hunting for a few reasons. I had some work on my hands with putting up the first buck, and I don't really want to kill another one on the same property anyways.

So I hunted a few evenings, particularly in an out of the way spot that I'm trying to monitor the deer movement on.

Still, never tempted to pull the trigger. Here's why: Our general hunting license is good for two bucks, and I've got the great privilege of hunting two different areas in my state.

My first buck came from the main area I get to hunt, which is in my home county. Our area has a fairly traditional November rut.

But I can also hunt a few places a few hours away from home. Here the rut is generally post-Thanksgiving, and on the more southern property it's even later than that, peaking sometime in the middle of December. (I know at least one HuntTalker will know where I am based on that last bit.)

I'll call these areas Out West, because they are roughly west of home, and divide them into North and South.

I wait all year long to hunt here.

I may get a creative bug and wax poetic later about why I love it so much, but the rough breakdown is fewer people, less development, and although it's a step down in trophy quality (North moreso than South), there are a lot of deer here and hunting them can be an absolute blast.

The goal this year has been from the beginning to kill a nice deer at home and then to do it again Out West. So I've saved the second buck for chances to come hunt over here.

The challenge is the same as it always is: finding the time. Luckily though... My dad and I have found some time this weekend for a little scouting mission.

The hunt for Buck #2 has begun.

 

[RobertD]

Nothing about this trip was like I expected. The important part is this: Buck #2 has been located. I have gotten closer than you could believe, but also, somehow not.

I had it in mind to scout this year for a few bucks from last year, locate them and make a decision on shooting one. That was the plan; there is a new plan now. The desk has been cleared, the slate cleaned, there's only one name on the list and it's got a big red circle around it.

The hunt continues because it must continue. Eventually, I will tell this story in its entirety. But for now, again, just know this much: I found him, I'll hunt him and only him from here on, and if there's just a touch more magic in the air, I'll put my damn hands on him yet.



"Where is he?"

"Down by the creek
Walkin on the water"

 

[RobertD]

I. Confidence

Eventually is now. I'm back home and twelve hours removed from my departure from the hunting lands of Out West. I wanted more distance between myself and the story when I tried to write it, but... I only slept a few hours again last night. I need to write.

I had an incredible, whirlwind twenty-four hours that started with the old familiar thwack of a bullet finding its home downrange, but ended with the as-of-late unfamiliar feeling of bemused wonder and bitter regret.

See, my confidence when shooting at deer, including big gnarly bucks, has grown exceptionally over the past few seasons.

I used to be a nervous trigger man; big deer put anxiety in my heart and I flubbed shots or froze up on a buck at least once per season. But that's changed the past few years. Now I work with methodical intent and am cool under pressure. I started hunting with the old trusted .308 two seasons ago and my growing bond with the rifle has aided the near immeite death of three whitetail bucks in eleven months. Extending back a few years, I've been on a streak of clean, quick or immediate kills on large game. I had grown quite confident.

This great confidence meant that when I put the crosshairs behind a heavy buck's shoulder about ten minutes before dark Saturday, I knew he was in trouble. When I touched off, I liked my shot. My confidence told me he'd be rolled up dead in the trees outside of the field edge.

My confidence pushed out a negative thought about the sound the bullet made.

My confidence told me it was done, that the buck was dead, I'd rolled up an absolute stomper and was set to collect my reward at the end of a blood trail.

My confidence pushed out any notion of the truth that I would face directly (note that verb and adverb choice) the following afternoon.

The truth, my friends, was this:

Judging it a chipshot, I misjudged the angle of the buck when I shot him. That was strike one.

I also pulled the shot just a bit, maybe two inches, and in the direction that exacerbated strike one instead of canceling it out. Strike two.

The buck likely moved a bit at the shot, helping create the impossobly narrow window the bullet traveled through, drawing blood and breaking through the shoulder and front of the thoracic cavity and out the chest, but never penetrating vital organ tissue.

Strike three.

You can trust me when I tell you this, even though I never recovered the buck. I've got plenty of data. We'll get to that part.

You can also trust me when I tell you that he was likely up and moving this morning, pushing does or checking scrapes, and that he won't die from the bullet wound I gave him Saturday.

And finally you can trust this more than anything: If there's a next time, he will NOT be so lucky.



The voice you hear isn't confidence. Not anymore. It's humility.

 

[RobertD]

II. Frankie Says Relax

This story has taken a turn for the negative – that much is obvious. But there’s a lot of the story left to tell, and there is reason to be optimistic looking forward.

You already know that I shot a deer and didn’t recover him, coming home emptyhanded. But you don’t know what happened in between. It’s really the best part of the story.

(TL;DR at the end in italics.)

Finding blood in the dark after shooting Saturday evening wasn’t difficult. Following the blood trail down into the thick woods towards the creek bottom wasn’t either, but the blood trail rain about after about seventy yards. A combination of lost blood, darkness and extremely dense undergrowth made tracking a headache.

Eventually, fear over pushing the deer (if he was still alive) or destroying the scent on his trail (in case we called in dogs) got us out of the woods. Dad and I had dinner at a watering hole in a nearby town, and I managed to get some restless sleep on the floor of the old farmhouse we camp in when hunting here. We knew that a search in the daylight would yield the buck.

We were wrong, and it didn’t take long to realize. I was becoming more accepting of the idea that the deer wasn’t mortally wounded, but land features, deer habits and general sign/activity made me confident the deer was still close by, occupying some section of the same creek bottom we’d been tracking him through.

It was time to call in the dogs.

Finding a tracker with dogs usually isn’t difficult, but our search seemed prone to prove as fruitless as the search for the buck. The break came when I called an acquaintance from back home, a legendary tracker who has built a reputation in our area for running quality dogs that consistently find deer. He passed me contact info for a tracker out of northwest Florida who, miraculously, sounded thrilled at the idea of bringing her dogs up into the hills of southwest Georgia.

The tracker warned us that she would need time to get from her home to where we were. She mentioned a long night the night before, trailing a spike buck over one thousand yards in the dark in a South Alabama county just over the river from where I shot my buck the same evening. This held up our search but gave me some confidence in the seriousness of our tracker and the tenacity of her dogs.

The confidence was warranted. The tracker dropped three dogs. A young female lab mix with a pretty French name, and two dogo Argentinos. The dogos were brother and sister across separate litters. The older male’s name was Frankie.

The dogs found the trail immediately and within five minutes had plunged into the dense undergrowth, coursing the creek bottom for the track amongst the pooled scent of the wounded buck, other deer, and untold numbers of hogs.

The lab struck after only a few minutes in the creek bottom. This isn’t a huge patch of woods, and it wasn’t a surprise that they’d found him already.

The problem of course, is that the lab was barking live. She was looking at the deer. The tracker’s Garmin showed the icons of the two dogos closing in on the lab’s position, and then the deer broke.

The dogs gave pursuit but pulled off quickly. The tracker and I remained in the creek bottom. In what seemed like no time at all to me, the dogs returned to our location.

The buck I shot had been following a doe. It’s likely that the first bark and chase was at the doe herself, reunited with the buck but then driven off by the dogs. The dogs realized their mistake and returned with almost as much speed as they did when chasing the doe out. This was all explained to me in real time by the tracker, who was growing excited.

I trusted this tracker and her dogs pretty implicitly, so when she began to get visibly restless and talk in an Outdoor Channel shout-whisper, I knew it was time to get serious.

“He’s in here! He’s in here! They’re going to find him! Your buck, Frankie’s gonna find him!”

The dogs were coursing about looking to regain the buck’s scent. The lab was intent and moved quickly with her nose down. The dogos used their noses but their eyes as well. Frankie, the big male, had a habit of looking down the length of stretches of creek water (smart dog).

It was clear that the dogs were on to something. I was convinced, but unprepared for how quickly proof would come.

The first thing that occurred was noise, a noise defined chiefly by the sound of crashing branches and splashing water. The noise violated the silence of the creek bottom. It was accompanied by a chorus of dog voices, the high and excited yapping of the lab, the we’re-on-your-ass-now chorus of the dogos. The buck didn’t so much appear as materialize in front of us, and he was close.

Really close. Like, dangerously close.

The whole thing took about three seconds, but the human brain being the amazing thing that it is… it might as well have been a three-hour movie. Adrenaline, I think, is what does that to us. “Slows down” time. But it doesn’t really slow down, I understand, rather it’s that we take it all in so quickly, we’re so alive in that moment, the memories record so well that it feels in hindsight that time had slowed down.

We are in those moments, by definition, more alive.

How close was this buck? Twenty feet? Less. I can’t give you an exact distance. So I’ll say he was the distance from your bed to your bathroom door, and moving directly towards us. Quickly.

We had been standing right next to his bed. We were standing directly on top of the path he had chosen to flee the dogs. The dogs were behind him, negating the chance for a safe shot.

The best we could do was to get down low behind the limited cover available (the wispy top of a downed sweet gum sapling) and hope for the best. He was too big a deer to want to be that close to in a state of panic, but he was about to be on top of us. I was closer to the deer, so I tried to shield the tracker somewhat and braced for impact.

My plan had been to try to take the blow and roll backwards, going under the deer as he charged over. Let him bowl me right over like a Brahman cow, and I’ll work on avoiding his antlers at all cost.

I got lucky. You know those “the deer jumped over the log I was sittin behind” stories? Well, the deer jumped over the “log” we were sitting behind. At a distance of about five feet, he and I made eye contact and he shifted just enough to not change anything about my physical health or wellbeing, leapt and cleared the branches of the downed sapling.

We had made eye contact. Just as casually as if we had passed each other in the grocery store. I looked into his eyes. Dark brown. Like all deer eyes really. Dilated in the dark creek bottom. Expressionless, except for a tiny shred of something that looked like annoyance or contempt. The bullet wound in his shoulder was just a patch of clotted blood and dark red muscle tissue. He was wounded, but barely enough to make a noticeable limp.

He was there and then he was gone. The dogs swarmed over the downed tree and lit out after him.

I’m going to stop here for now. I’ll cover the rest of the tracking job in another post this evening.

TL;DR: The deer was wounded, but not badly, and had lain down not far from where we gave up the track. The dogs initially struck on the doe bedded with him but returned and flushed the buck at point blank range. After narrowly avoiding a collision, I got a good look at the buck before he bolted with the dogs trailing behind him.

 

[np307]

II. Frankie Says Relax

This story has taken a turn for the negative – that much is obvious. But there’s a lot of the story left to tell, and there is reason to be optimistic looking forward.

You already know that I shot a deer and didn’t recover him, coming home emptyhanded. But you don’t know what happened in between. It’s really the best part of the story.

(TL;DR at the end in italics.)

Finding blood in the dark after shooting Saturday evening wasn’t difficult. Following the blood trail down into the thick woods towards the creek bottom wasn’t either, but the blood trail rain about after about seventy yards. A combination of lost blood, darkness and extremely dense undergrowth made tracking a headache.

Eventually, fear over pushing the deer (if he was still alive) or destroying the scent on his trail (in case we called in dogs) got us out of the woods. Dad and I had dinner at a watering hole in a nearby town, and I managed to get some restless sleep on the floor of the old farmhouse we camp in when hunting here. We knew that a search in the daylight would yield the buck.

We were wrong, and it didn’t take long to realize. I was becoming more accepting of the idea that the deer wasn’t mortally wounded, but land features, deer habits and general sign/activity made me confident the deer was still close by, occupying some section of the same creek bottom we’d been tracking him through.

It was time to call in the dogs.

Finding a tracker with dogs usually isn’t difficult, but our search seemed prone to prove as fruitless as the search for the buck. The break came when I called an acquaintance from back home, a legendary tracker who has built a reputation in our area for running quality dogs that consistently find deer. He passed me contact info for a tracker out of northwest Florida who, miraculously, sounded thrilled at the idea of bringing her dogs up into the hills of southwest Georgia.

The tracker warned us that she would need time to get from her home to where we were. She mentioned a long night the night before, trailing a spike buck over one thousand yards in the dark in a South Alabama county just over the river from where I shot my buck the same evening. This held up our search but gave me some confidence in the seriousness of our tracker and the tenacity of her dogs.

The confidence was warranted. The tracker dropped three dogs. A young female lab mix with a pretty French name, and two dogo Argentinos. The dogos were brother and sister across separate litters. The older male’s name was Frankie.

The dogs found the trail immediately and within five minutes had plunged into the dense undergrowth, coursing the creek bottom for the track amongst the pooled scent of the wounded buck, other deer, and untold numbers of hogs.

The lab struck after only a few minutes in the creek bottom. This isn’t a huge patch of woods, and it wasn’t a surprise that they’d found him already.

The problem of course, is that the lab was barking live. She was looking at the deer. The tracker’s Garmin showed the icons of the two dogos closing in on the lab’s position, and then the deer broke.

The dogs gave pursuit but pulled off quickly. The tracker and I remained in the creek bottom. In what seemed like no time at all to me, the dogs returned to our location.

The buck I shot had been following a doe. It’s likely that the first bark and chase was at the doe herself, reunited with the buck but then driven off by the dogs. The dogs realized their mistake and returned with almost as much speed as they did when chasing the doe out. This was all explained to me in real time by the tracker, who was growing excited.

I trusted this tracker and her dogs pretty implicitly, so when she began to get visibly restless and talk in an Outdoor Channel shout-whisper, I knew it was time to get serious.

“He’s in here! He’s in here! They’re going to find him! Your buck, Frankie’s gonna find him!”

The dogs were coursing about looking to regain the buck’s scent. The lab was intent and moved quickly with her nose down. The dogos used their noses but their eyes as well. Frankie, the big male, had a habit of looking down the length of stretches of creek water (smart dog).

It was clear that the dogs were on to something. I was convinced, but unprepared for how quickly proof would come.

The first thing that occurred was noise, a noise defined chiefly by the sound of crashing branches and splashing water. The noise violated the silence of the creek bottom. It was accompanied by a chorus of dog voices, the high and excited yapping of the lab, the we’re-on-your-ass-now chorus of the dogos. The buck didn’t so much appear as materialize in front of us, and he was close.

Really close. Like, dangerously close.

The whole thing took about three seconds, but the human brain being the amazing thing that it is… it might as well have been a three-hour movie. Adrenaline, I think, is what does that to us. “Slows down” time. But it doesn’t really slow down, I understand, rather it’s that we take it all in so quickly, we’re so alive in that moment, the memories record so well that it feels in hindsight that time had slowed down.

We are in those moments, by definition, more alive.

How close was this buck? Twenty feet? Less. I can’t give you an exact distance. So I’ll say he was the distance from your bed to your bathroom door, and moving directly towards us. Quickly.

We had been standing right next to his bed. We were standing directly on top of the path he had chosen to flee the dogs. The dogs were behind him, negating the chance for a safe shot.

The best we could do was to get down low behind the limited cover available (the wispy top of a downed sweet gum sapling) and hope for the best. He was too big a deer to want to be that close to in a state of panic, but he was about to be on top of us. I was closer to the deer, so I tried to shield the tracker somewhat and braced for impact.

My plan had been to try to take the blow and roll backwards, going under the deer as he charged over. Let him bowl me right over like a Brahman cow, and I’ll work on avoiding his antlers at all cost.

I got lucky. You know those “the deer jumped over the log I was sittin behind” stories? Well, the deer jumped over the “log” we were sitting behind. At a distance of about five feet, he and I made eye contact and he shifted just enough to not change anything about my physical health or wellbeing, leapt and cleared the branches of the downed sapling.

We had made eye contact. Just as casually as if we had passed each other in the grocery store. I looked into his eyes. Dark brown. Like all deer eyes really. Dilated in the dark creek bottom. Expressionless, except for a tiny shred of something that looked like annoyance or contempt. The bullet wound in his shoulder was just a patch of clotted blood and dark red muscle tissue. He was wounded, but barely enough to make a noticeable limp.

He was there and then he was gone. The dogs swarmed over the downed tree and lit out after him.

I’m going to stop here for now. I’ll cover the rest of the tracking job in another post this evening.

TL;DR: The deer was wounded, but not badly, and had lain down not far from where we gave up the track. The dogs initially struck on the doe bedded with him but returned and flushed the buck at point blank range. After narrowly avoiding a collision, I got a good look at the buck before he bolted with the dogs trailing behind him.

Fantastic storytelling. I've had the privilege/misfortune of using a tracking dog before and it is truly amazing what they can do. I follow a guy kinda local here who posts most of the tracks he takes and it is astounding.

 

[RobertD]

Fantastic storytelling. I've had the privilege/misfortune of using a tracking dog before and it is truly amazing what they can do. I follow a guy kinda local here who posts most of the tracks he takes and it is astounding.

Thank you and yes, this was my second time watching it happen, first time on a deer of my own, and it's some serious entertainment, even if it is brought about by bad circumstances.

Later in the day the tracker showed me an IPhone video of the same three dogs baying and then catching a small whitetail buck. Pretty spectacular.

 

[EastTNHunter]

Glad to know that he’s ok and didn’t waddle off somewhere to die a slow death and not be recovered

 

[RobertD]

III. The Return

The unexpected meeting with my buck was the second and final time I'd run into him. The dogs bayed him in the creek twice, but each time he would manage to escape the creek for the open country above, where he'd run down the length of the creek a ways before losing the dogs and plunging back down into the bottom.

We repeated the same process a few times before calling them off. I felt satisfied leaving the buck alone, especially considering how persistent he was in staying on the farm and in the creek bottom.

By then it was too late to hunt that evening. All we could do was pack up and leave.

It was a long week at home waiting for a chance to get back to the woods. I did have time to burn some powder and make sure my rifle and scope are still solid.



Can confirm that it was never the rifle's fault.

Now I'm westbound and down and ready for three days of hunting.

 

[RobertD]

Back in the woods...

 

[RobertD]

Today's scenario: A redneck sentry line along the eastern bank of the creek.

I am back where I shot the deer the first time. My dad is further north in a tripod stand that looks goofy but has been the most lethal spot in our time on this farm. My cousin is down from Middle Georgia, and he is sitting in a big water oak to the south of me.

This farm is bigger than just this stretch of creek. There are some mixed ag/CRP areas and a big stand of red oaks worth hunting. My dad and cousin will want to hunt those spots some as well, so I won't always have backup flanking my position.

The wind is favorable to setting up our little firing line so we chose to do it tonight. Maybe one of us can get eyes on him.

 

[Mallardsx2]

Is the rut finally starting to happen down there? So strange how the rut differs across this state.