More About Stickers
Posted By
Bill Winke
at
11/22/2008 12:00:00 AM
I think my neighbor may have the sheds off this deer. I can’t say it is a buck I have ever seen before. The most interesting thing about this deer, from my standpoint, is the range he was covering during the rut. We filmed him on October 30 and on November 8 from a stand that was about a mile away. If I was going to hunt that buck, I would have been hunting him near that stand. However, the spot where Mike shot the buck is only about 200 yards from where Chad Lathrop and I filmed him in late August – the first time I laid eyes on the buck.
This brings out two things about deer behavior that I think is worth noting, and I probably should have included this in the show. First, the buck had the personality to cruise during the day. The other two times we had seen him during the season he was moving well after first light in the morning and Mike shot him well before last light in the afternoon. He was a cruiser. Some are nocturnal and some aren’t. He wasn’t – thankfully.
Second, he had a fairly good-sized range. Not that a mile is a long ways to a whitetail, but all in all, he moved a lot and had a fairly good-sized range. That is how most bucks die young.
Deer have personalities just like people and generally those that move a lot during the day never live to be as old as this buck. Either he simply had a mediocre rack through the years that no one wanted on their wall, or his behavior changed as he got older. It sure could have been the latter. I have seen this before. When bucks get old, they sometimes seem to lose some of their caution. That is not the case all the time, but fortunately it happened this time. Watch Episode 19 if want to see this hunt.
