Home Forums Hunting & Shooting Deer Hunting After a 39 year hiatus, another Whitetail

Dink? My hairy white azz...

Congrats my friend. that 7x57 is awesome. If i wasn't on my death bed in August i would have masterminded a way to cheat you out of it...

Nice Buck!!!

Ive got a 700ti I picked up here MC rebarreled in 7mm08

Great Buck, story and rifles. Thanks for sharing. Congrats.

It's been raining and the wind has been fairly brisk. SuperCore and I opted to stay in and get caught up on sleep and chores. I also managed to get everything together for a post detailing our hunt so far.

Report From Deer Camp, 2023

I bet you won’t go on a hiatus again 😂 nice buck dude

Congrats, Folically_Challenged, on a fine "dink"!

Beautiful buck! Buck of a lifetime! I count myself blessed anytime I can fill a tag, no matter the size of the rack, but I'd love to get one like that someday!

VERY cool Joe!

+1

Shaman - good to know that you are enjoying the finer things of life. Keep at it.

Excellent! Congrats!

Folically Challenged, congrats on a great hunt! And kudos to Shaman for being a good friend. My first centerfire was a 788 .243 Winchester that
My Dad bought me when I was 14-15. Killed a ton of groundhogs with it, but no deer. I hunted in Ky with it once near Falmouth. No deer that hunt. I still have my 788. Refinished the stock a while back.

Ron

Outstanding!

Wow!

I was adding FC's info into the official camp deer log. FC managed to pull off a few records.

First off, FC's rack is probably the #2 camp record and is the first time we've actually harvested an 11-point buck. Furthermore, his buck only weighed 165 lbs liveweight. That is by far the leanest buck with a big rack we've recorded. The #1 rack, the one I took in 2007, went 270lbs. The antler growth versus body weight indicates a major change. My guess is that overall nutrition of the herd is up and promoting accelerated antler growth. FC's buck is probably a year younger than mine.

He's also the first fellow to take a deer at our camp with the mythical .285 OKH round. Given the provenance of the rifle, I am not going to argue with the likes of Elmer Keith. Heck if I can hunt with a .275 Short Rigby (7mm-08) and the .30 Briar Light Magnum ( 30-06). FC can have his .285 OKH.

By hunting on the cusp of the new moon, He shot his buck on one of the youngest moon in the records, .55 days. I track moon age for each kill. There is a huge preponderance of deer taken in the waxing moon, and nearly no deer taken in the last quarter. The average moon age for a kill is 12.41.

Our SuperCore, the day before, shot a doe under the oldest moon on record, 28.71 days.

FC also managed to take a buck at 65.5 F, the warmest we've ever harvested a buck. The average is around 45F.

I wasn't aware that all such parameters were recorded on the hunt. It lays bare your Teutonic heritage... and database mgmt background...

FC

Mining the Deer Log

I started a Lotus 123 worksheet way, way back and then lost it in the divorce. After we got the farm, I started keeping it again in Excel, but struggled to get back the original data. Eventually, I was able to find a source of historical weather data and got a pretty good estimation of the conditions for the previous 20 years of data.

Nowadays, I've got the weather station. As long as I get on it within a day or so, I have pinpoint information of what was going on when deer are taken.

When I started to write, I saw all sorts of claims about weather, moon phase, etc. The only way to be sure what was bunk was to keep my own records. Your two deer are the 93rd and 94th records in the log. I have to admit to all sorts of biases. For instance, everyone at camp tries for a time to take a buck before filling a doe tag. As a result, the majority of doe in the log are taken in the afternoon after Friday of the first week. Also, the log shows that your best bet for taking a buck is before 1000 ET of the Rifle Opener. That's because we often see a decent buck on the first morning and then take it without waiting for something bigger to come along. Of course, your monster belies that trend. However, I can say unequivocally that the chances of sighting a buck with a good rack goes down as the season wears on.

What you shot was the epitome of our large bucks. They're very mobile during November and cover a very large range. I doubt we ever saw him prior to your encounter. We tend to only have 1-2 mature bucks on the farm at any given time. Our happy little doe herd keeps them coming. You were as much of a surprise to him as he to you.

I also started keeping a turkey harvest log. This has been far less revealing. Bottom line: turkeys are about as random as you can get. Identical conditions on the same day in different years produce nearly opposite results.