Ennism's Hunting Season

[Valley Lad]

I'm getting geared up, tuned up and psyched up for the October 1 deer opener in Ontario! I saw lots of deer in my hunting area on the weekend and lots of people are regularily seeing a nice 8 pointer within a couple hundred yards of my food plot.

Ontario has issued thousands of additional tags for WMU's with high deer densities. My WMU (63B) is one of them and I've puchased an additional tag that is for antlerless only, any weapon as well as an either sex tag for my cousin's farm in neighbouring WMU 67. In total I have 3 tags and could buy more (up to a total of 7) depending on the area and availability.

Here's a couple pics of my food plot. It's about 1 acre, L-shaped and one side borders a heavy cedar swamp. Lots of sign in it and the deer should hit it hard once the other food sources get killed by frost.

http://img.villagephotos.com/p/2004-8/819349/FoodPlot1.JPG

http://img.villagephotos.com/p/2004-8/819349/FoodPlot2.JPG

http://img.villagephotos.com/p/2004-8/819349/FoodPlot4.JPG

[Valley Lad]

...14 hours until legal shooting light! Going out for the first time tomorrow morning. It's been a very long time since I last hunted (Dec 26/03 to be exact) - I hope I remember what a deer looks like!

Hopefully I'll have picture of my first bow kill for everyone on Tuesday morning!

Happy Thanksgiving to you and yours.

[swamper]

Good luck this weekend. We look forward to seeing pics on Tuesday.
Chris

[scooter]

Good luck ennism! We expect pics!! :twisted: :twisted:

[Valley Lad]

Sorry for the long delay.

Thanksgiving weekend was a bust. Only one fleeting glimpse at a deer while on stand.

Went out Oct 23/24 and drew on a small buck just as it was getting dark at less than 15 yards but couldn't see my pins through my peep and had to let down.

My cousin 'guaranteed' me a shot on his farm at a 7-pointer he'd been seeing every night from a particular stand in their pasture as it travelled to a recently planted field. He said it would be by the stand at 6:00 p.m. Kinda cocky huh! Well he lied to me.... it showed up at 6:20!

I'd been ready for it for over 30 minutes and when I saw it approach my shooting lane I started to draw. As the cams were about to roll over it looked right at me. What could I do? I had to come to full draw or I'd make too much noise letting down. It just stood there at 20 yards broadside looking at me. It wasn't alarmed, it just didn't know what I was. I put the 20 yard pin on his boiler room and put a 100 grain Spitfire right over his back!!!!

He jumped behind a bush, I swore, dropped my bow on the platform of the ladder stand, grabbed by quiver out of the tree, pried an arrow out, dropped the quiver, picked up my bow and nocked an arrow. What was the buck doing? Standing at 30 yards broadside watching me. So I drew my 2nd arrow and drilled him! I could see half the arrow sticking out as he took off.

We waited a couple hours to track him and ended up jumping him a couple times. Eventually he ended up bedded down in the big field where all the other deer were feeding. More than 3 hours after I'd shot him (turned out to be a liver shot) we still couldn't get close to him without pushing him further so we decided to leave him for the night and come back at first light. We also had to get permission to enter the farmer's field he was in.

At first light he was exactly where we left him - but with company! Damn coyotes!!! They had eaten everything from the front shoulders back and had pulled at or bitten everywhere else. There wasn't a piece of meat left that I was willing to eat, and I'm not that picky!. We pieced it back together to take a couple pictures and left it for the coyotes to finish.

http://www.bowzone.ca/cgi-bin/albums/2004trophy/ace.jpg

Not exactly how I imagined my first bow kill. I did manage to get a small buck and a coyote (REVENGE!!!) during rifle season and I'll be back in a tree with my bow this weekend.

[scooter]

Congrats on your first buck ennism! Sorry to hear about the recovery though..but I guess coyotes need to eat too.

Sucks they were on it so quick.

Scott

[Valley Lad]

Thanks for the congrats and condolences at the same time!

There's a few things I'll do differently when I go to recover my next deer. I didn't read the blood sign close enough. There was lots of it which we took to mean we'd find the deer quite quickly. Despite the numerous articles I've read on recovering game and due to my excitement we neglected to note that the blood was bright red and didn't have any bubbles to indicate a lung hit. Had we noted that we would have backed out and waited 4 hours to begin tracking instead of the 90 minutes we gave it. I'm sure the long blood trail made finding the deer easy for the 'yotes.

I guess if it wasn't for "my" deer the coyotes would have eaten another deer or some farmer's livestock so nothing was really wasted. Just bad timing I guess. During rifle season we had gut piles that weren't touched in 3 or 4 days. Wrong place, wrong time.

[WOOKIE]

Ennism, hindsight is 20/20. What counts is that you did recover the buck. Too many times we hear stories of guys that hit an animal, look for it for a few minutes and give up. You did the right thing.