My Anniversary Whitetail Outing.

June 26th has a certain significance to me. It is my wedding anniversary.  So it is a bit odd that I would find myself out in a hedgerow surrounded by soybeans on this particular evening. I had just chosen a location and gotten myself settled in to await what I hoped would be the arrival of some of the neighborhood mature bucks when my phone vibrated once. It was alerting me that I had a new text, it was from my wife and  it read something like this, "OMG it's our anniversary I totally forgot."...Clearly that made two of us! Moments like that are when I am most grateful for my wife because she generally takes what could be a serious issue in a lot of relationships and does not bust my chops about it at all. We texted briefly about our crazy lives and then I settled in to wait.

     I had fairly high expectations for this location as a premier scouting location because of its commanding view of three separate soybean fields. All of which are directly adjacent to excellent bedding cover. At 6:30 A lone doe entered the field directly in front of me and began to move in my direction> She made it to about sixty yards before ending up directly in my wind. She quickly decided to feed elsewhere. check her out.

You can see a lot of flies on her, which is pretty normal for this time of year. she never gave any indication that she had a fawn nearby but she looks to bemature so I would guess that she had one stashed somewhere.

As prime time approached several groups of deer entered the fields. Unfortunately none of these groups were bucks. I watched until dusk and then took an opportunity to sneak out with out disturbing most of the deer in the field.

It did get me to thinking about bachelor group positioning from year to year. I will try to elaborate  more on this tomorrow.
     

My attempt at blogging.

       So in spite of having considered this at least a half a dozen times over the last year or so, until tonight I have not made the effort to start doing this. Most of you will probably be aware that last March my wife and I purchased a small farm in southwestern Monroe county in western New York. It is roughly 25 acres and although I knew it to be in an excellent area for both observing and hunting Whitetails, I never expected to have the sheer volume of encounters and sightings that I have.

Without rambling on indefinitely about what I am hoping to write about, let me just say that I am hoping to document for myself the work that I do on my property to increase its  ability to hold deer and grow big deer and my endeavors to observe, photograph and hunt for whitetail deer.

 I know most people who might see this will have little to no interest in reading it and I am fine with that. If it is never any more that my personal journal and I can go back and reflect on the deer and the work I have done to make my property better I will be content, but if I can use it to disseminate my experiences to the 5 or 6 of you who I think might actually read it then any who read along can take some small measure of enjoyment from my love of the whitetail then will find this all the more rewarding.


So that is the introduction to what i am blogging about, but I would not feel right about it if I did not put a little content in my first post. I will try to add as much media as I can to show what I am writing  about.

The above photo is from Sunday June 17th, my first night in the fields to the north of my house. I am attempting to locate the bachelor groups that I know are near. Conditions were not ideal with some fairly strong thunderstorms just to the west of me. I did locate a bachelor group but it consisted of mainly yearling bucks with only 1 mature buck being visible. 9 bucks in all came to the field I was watching. The bucks appeared early around 715pm but they really just entered the field, fed briefly and the bedded down in the hay lot I chose to sneak out when I felt that I could get out without disturbing the deer 

I snapped a few photos and took a little video but nothing terribly exciting. I hope to get back out on Sunday.