Last season wasn’t as good as years past or this year around my stomping grounds. This year was great. I hunted all but 1 day of our 16 day rifle season and hunted the first 4 days of muzzleloader before I left to go hunt CO. I saw deer every time I went out, the least amount I saw in a day was 3 and on 2 occasions I saw 34. Saw 9 decent to really good bucks on opening day and 8 the second day.
We have two places that we generally hunt that have pretty much opposite habitats that are 14 miles apart. The east place is tall grass pasture with a wheat field between two creeks with oaks, walnuts, pecans, and other trees. The west place is rolling limestone foothills covered in buffalo grass and wild plum thickets. As a kid we’d always see piles of deer on the east place but rarely a decent buck, lots of basket racks and always several bucks that only grew one normal antler with the other usually being a gnarled stub. The west place always had low numbers of deer but when you’d see a buck, odds are that he would be a nice one. Nowadays we still have the poor antler characteristics on the east place but gone are the days of seeing 30-40 deer a day out there. The west place on the other hand has experienced a boom in deer numbers unlike we’ve ever seen, it’s pretty cool to be able to glass from a high spot and see deer out on every ridge top. Of course seeing 4-6 bucks in a day that would make 130” or better is pretty cool too.
