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Friday A.M.  The view from my morning stand I hunted this morning in the same spot as last evening, and thankfully the wind had died down by this morning. It was a beautiful, sunny morning, but pretty slow in terms of buck sightings. I saw 7 does and fawns, some at about 40 yards, and some at a few hundred yards. I think maybe I need to do a little more hard thinking on a good morning spot for this area, as the deer really seem to leave the fields very early. Friday P.M.  A view from my evening stand towards one of the heaviest trails - occupied at the time by this doe  A trail coming from the grassy hills.....  ....going into the brush, and towards my treestand I was eager this evening to hunt the stand I set up on Thursday to try and ambush the bucks I saw Wednesday evening. I got settled in my stand about 4 p.m., and by 4:30 I was already seeing deer. From my perch about 17 feet up, I could see much of the grassy hillside where I strongly suspected deer were bedding.  My stand is situated about 17 ft. up in the bigger tree  A view from my evening stand toward the north - and the sunflower field  A view from my evening stand toward the northwest  A view from my evening stand toward the south - where all the deer came from The first deer I saw at 4:30 got up out of the grass on the hillside, as did a number of other deer over the next few hours. At around 6:30 I saw a group of 3 deer get up out of the grass and start heading my direction. Even at that distance (600-700 yards) I could tell that one of them was a good buck. As he worked closer over the next half hour, I could see that he was a nice 10-point, solidly in the 135-140" class, a beautiful buck. To my strong dismay, shortly before the buck started working his way towards me, the wind started swirling. Oh great! I knew this had the potential to be very bad news, especially if it started coming out of the east. Well, guess where it switched to? That's right, out of the east, which would blow my scent to him right before he came into my shooting lane. There was nothing to do but cross my fingers. He worked closer and closer, stopping to thrash bushes and trees along the way, and then before I knew it he was at 28 yards, but not quite yet in my shooting lane. I needed him to take about five more steps for that. I never got those steps. He suddenly got a whiff from my direction and turned tail to run. I could see glimpses of him through the brush, but never enough for a shot. He wasn't spooked too badly, because he only ran about 30 yards and then stopped. He looked for a second like he might even come back, but he didn't. He and the other two, smaller bucks, eventually wandered off out of sight with no shot opportunity. That was very disappointing, but I had high hopes he would show up one of the next two evenings before my hunt was over.  This forky came by early  Followed shortly after by this doe....  ....And her fawn I did see a total of 6 bucks this evening, but he was the biggest and none of the others were quite what I was looking for, so I let them pass. Check back for tomorrow's Hunt!
Joshua Flournoy owns and manages the Livehunts.com web site. Joshua resides in east Texas with his wife and four children. |
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