Home Forums Hunting & Shooting Hunter's Campfire Lost my East Texas Lease

That has also been my experience over the last 20 years I've been employing spin cast feeders. Does come to the feeders, bucks in the rut go nuts and chase does. That's typically when one has the opportunity to take a good buck on a low fenced lease where there is sufficient groceries that an animal does not have to come to the feeder to exist.

A couple examples. We had a 160 acre place in east Texas from 1961 until 2007. A friend and I kept three feeders going for three years between 2004 and 2007. We fed a corn/roasted soybean/green pea/protien mix. We had game cams out on each of the feeders. In that three year period we did not have one picture of a buck in the daylight. Lots of pictures of does, day and night. Bucks, and some good ones at that would show up, generally between midnight and 5 AM.

Here is a buck I called "the Claw"



I and several of my buds had this buck on game cams that were at different locations at our 1,700 acre trespass lease. In three years his image was captured only at night, never in the day. In fact, not one of nine guys had ever actually laid eyes on him. I was sitting at my only ground blind on my birthday, Dec. 21, two years ago IIRC. It was in the gloaming of that eve when I saw him walking behind a pen where I had a feeder. If you don't have a pen, hogs will consume every kernel of corn before anything else other than coons gets a chance. I watched him for only a couple minutes. This pen is 30' x 30' hog panel. He came in from the back right side of the pen, walked the length of the pen, right to left and something spooked him. I typically set up my blinds north west of my feeders as our prevailing winds are from the southeast. I don't think he got my wind but I could tell he was getting ready to bolt. I managed to thread a bullet through the hog panel on both sides and make a good hit. I could tell from the "whop" of the bullet.

One last example from a lease in Woodsboro Tx.

Unlike my Reagan wells lease, at the Woodsboro lease I have cell service. Consequently at the one pen I have there, I have a game cam with a modem on the pen. I also keep a feeder going outside the pen, situated about 100 yds. down a sendero that runs about a mile long from the southwest on my left to the northeast on my right.

Here is a typical sequence, taken while using a Tamron 150 to 600 lens on Canon 7dMk2 which has a 1.6 crop factor.

Buck at the end of the Sendero to the left of my stand.



buck at 300 yds +/-



buck at +/- 200 yds



buck at +/- 100 yds.



A nice mature six point cull.



Fifteen members on this lease, each having a contiguous 640 acre plot to hunt. No one had seen him before, and I had no game cam pix of the buck.

Oh yeah, feeders do one thing really well, they keep hogs in the area. I generally set up a feeder early in the year. I will not hunt it for several months. That way the hogs get it in their piggy little brains that this is where the groceries are. I generally keep five feeders going, throwing about 100 lbs of corn, protein and milo per month. I have two pens, one that is also set up with a trap door for trapping hogs. I go up at least once a month, sometimes twice. Usually take 3 to 5 hogs each time I go. Like the saying, perforating hoglets is not a passion, its an obsession.


ya!

GWB