Home Forums Hunting & Shooting Canada Alberta Whitetail 2022

Well the 'G2 Sticker' buck is still alive and I did not see the mythical 'Tank' buck either.

Today I shot the buck I called 'Cheater'. No doubt about it. He was the #3 buck I had as a target buck. I had vids and pics of him all summer. Note: the location where I shot him today is about 2 miles from where I had most of the pics and videos of him.

So what happened today was this:

I found a wicked logging trail, that winds between cutblocks, with a big island of bush that it ran through.

At 9:00 I had a doe come out just 20 yards from me. As I grabbed the video camera to film her, I spooked the doe. When she ran away I definitely saw a fawn plus another larger bodied deer, and I thought I saw a flash of antler... dammit!

Well I moved on down the bush trail and I was sitting in a perfect vantage point. Just a wicked spot to catch deer walking the trail or crossing back n forth. I sat in that spot from 9:00 'til 11:30.

And then at 11:30 I just decided to go for an amble. Why? Well just my stupid luck kicking in again. :love0025:

As I was approaching a cutblock, just past where I'd seen the doe and 2 other deer earlier, suddenly there was a buck walking right toward me scent trailing.
I dropped to a knee and turned on the camera I have mounted on my rifle scope.
It was a super cool buck. Normal right side, left side was a non-typical club kinda thing that went straight up. Wow!

Immediately I decided to pass this deer up and just let him come towards me.
At about 30(?) yards he suddenly saw me, spun hard and bounded away into the cutblock.

Well what I didn't know was that the doe, fawn and the buck I'd seen at 9:00 were out on the edge of the cutblock. When the gnarly antlered buck ran, he ran right into them. As I hit the edge of the cutblock the 3 of them went bounding away.

The buck looked pretty good running away, but no chance for me to shoot, as they went up over a hill and out of sight.

I continued down the trail and 100 yards further, I saw the buck come back up over the hill and he stopped and was looking back to where I had been when the 3 of them ran.

I took a look and he looked 'good enough'. I didn't grab the binos and study him or anything. Took a good rest on a tree. I turned on the camera I have mounted on my scope. The deer is barely visible in the video, as he was a good 250 yards away. I never took the time to zoom the camera.
At my shot, I could not tell if I'd hit him or not, but I saw his tail give a little spin. Then he disappeared and I didn't know what had happened.

Well I went over there and he was stone dead. After I saw his tail do the little spin flip thing, he collapsed in his tracks.
My bullet entered right behind his left leg and exited in front of his right shoulder.
I guess I can still shoot haha.

I can tell you that when I fired on this buck I had no idea that is was 'Cheater'. It was just a good looking deer.

The browtines are distinctive in how they laid out. The left browtine in particular, you can really see it, and then there's the extra point in front of the G2, which I called a cheater point, hence the name 'Cheater'.

This is now the third buck I've shot which I had pics/vid of prior to hunting season.
I am a lucky son of a gun...

Nice Whitetail.
I am hopefully going to get out for a 5 day solo hunt next week, I like the last week of November for the best time to have a nice buck step out, around here anyways.

Congratulations, nice buck. He looks really healthy.

Cheers ~

Same here the last week of November is always the best.

You know what.......We used to have a great Whitetail population around here, no problem filling tags.
I haven't shot a Whitetail in 7 years LOL.
Someone decided to help the Mule deer out and open a General open season on flat top WT. That was the end of the Whitetail pops, which was the goal.

Trouble is.......some of the regions were poor Mule deer country to begin with, the WT took over an unsuitable habitat for Mule deer, but now the WT aren't there either. In general, BC is a poor region for growing deer, fire is the best method, agriculture next best, which we don't have alot of around here.

I want to go Whitetailing on the Prairie's LOL.

Demonical & 673;
Top of the morning to you both, I hope that the day is behaving for both of you and your respective yours.

Congratulations to Demonical on the nice buck! It looks like a dandy for sure.

As you mentioned 673, the antlerless season for whitetail has pretty much finished them off down here too. We used to see them reasonably often but haven't seen more than 4 whitetail deer all season this year, which is appalling really.

For sure I agree with you that the habitat is marginal at best, especially combined with winters where the snow compresses the herds into limited amounts of food and easy predation.

I'd be hunting this morning but for the second time this season the mighty Dodge is in the shop for fairly major repairs - what can you do?

We'll get it back next week if the parts come in and hopefully go look for a whitetail buck then.

Good luck on your hunts all.

Dwayne

I have always thought if I could only hunt deer 3 days of the year, it would be Nov 19-20-21.

But I'm tending more towards just hunting everyday available, and understanding what stage of the rut it is, then hunt accordingly.

The deer are always in the bush... just like with fish, they gotta eat, so if you do your homework, you always have a chance if you get out in the bush.

Demonical;
Morning again, thanks for the reply.

For sure over the years we've had the best success on whitetails towards the end of November. The added benefit in my experience is that even rutted up whitetails still make decent table fare which isn't always the case with mulie bucks. We've killed a couple of them when the season used to end on November 15th that were decidedly stronger in flavor.

Regarding where the deer are, you're correct that in some areas they'll always be away from trails and roads. That's the non urban ones of course. Here we have town mulies, but not that many whitetails that live in the cities. Penticton had about 250 mule deer living inside city limits a couple years back according to a bit of a count the MoE and city did.

Barring hunting inside city parks, we typically hunt as far away from roads or quad accessible trails as we're able to walk that day. Of course when it snows one gets to see how many tracks are in a given area. As well in years like this where there's now 3' of snow at the 5000' level and 2' at 4000', the herds are already down into the wintering grounds so we can take pretty good inventory of what's there.

In '96 we had a huge snowfall that really compressed the herds and for instance one February morning I personally counted what I recall as 100 mulies and 50 whitetail on the mountain behind the house in a 2 hour hike. That winter was tough on them and while the mulies bounced back a bit, the whitetails didn't somehow and then with the antlerless season introduced for them it further reduced the herd.

For sure if I wanted to travel a few hours east or north that would change my odds of taking whitetails, but locally there are perhaps 15% of what we had 25 years ago.

We had die offs from extreme winters in Saskatchewan too and I'd imagine that must happen in Alberta too, but it's somewhat different than heavy snow winters here in BC as far as I can understand it.

All the best and again congrats on a wonderful buck.

Dwayne

Too bad on the Dodge, look it up in the dictionary and it says...to avoid or evade.

If your snowed in down there then there isn't much you can do about it, we may get a good melt next week and be back in business. I go on one mountain and there is almost 3ft of snow, over to the next yesterday and there was only 1ft and I was able to get around without chains no problem.

I saw the nicest Whitetail I have seen in many years yesterday, dead, in a pic on my buddies phone. His buddy shot it near my house on his land, which is agricultural. Probably the 2nd biggest I have ever seen from around here, ever.

You can not generalize Trophy Deer Movement like that in my opinion.

There are many factors that come into play to determine deer movement. I can say this based on 22 years of bow and rifle hunting WT and Mullies in Alberta.

I can also say with absolute certainty, that the big boys move way more during the last week of November than any other time before that during the hunting season.

Cheers ~

There is a point where hunting for an elusive buck and hunting for any buck at all needs to be weighed carefully.

I was 9 days hunting on the same knoll, saw a nice buck on day 8, we knew he was there. In 9 days that was the only deer we saw, period.

I have been hunting this area 45 years, shot all my bucks there except one, I park my truck in the same spot every year. Gonna go back in there next week and give it another try this year lol.

673:
Morning my friend thanks for the reply.

On the Dodge thing..

When we bought it back in '09 I think it was - it's an '03 and I wanted an '03-04½ because of the combination of body style, transmission and lack of emissions stuff.

Anyways when we picked it up, I said to my mechanic, "I've got good news and bad news... I found a Cummins truck finally!"

He stops me and says, "Never mind, I already know what the bad news is!!"

It's been for sure a love/hate relationship with it 673 in that I do love the Cummins and a few things about it, but some of it - like the front steering components are pretty poorly designed. We've had 2008 parts installed wherever possible which are visibly and physically bigger, but it's still way smaller than the newer ones.

We used to say that if a guy could get a Ford Super Duty with a Cummins and an Allison transmission, it's be perfect. I'm still not sure that's not true.

Neighbor buddy who I hunt with has an '06 Duramax and while it will climb better than the Dodge for sure and has lots of power, it's not been trouble free either.

Nothing is anymore and honestly having had a 4x4 pickup on the place since '81, I'd have to honestly say we've dumped more maintenance funds into them than all the cars and SUVs for sure.

Midweek I found a bit of a scrape up where I Could walk in, so after the weekend rush is over and hopefully the truck is back from the mechanic we'll slither up there and do some calling and rattling.

It's interesting that the good whitetail was living in your backyard so to speak, but not surprising really is it? The country down in the bottom of the valley there makes good winter food for them for sure.

All the best with your hunt.

Dwayne

KillerBee;
Top of the morning to you my friend, I hope the sun is out on your side of the big hills and you're well.

Regarding your thoughts on big deer, I'll say a hearty "Amen" and toss a couple stories from the farm days out as examples.

We had a short season for deer back in the early '80's then in Saskatchewan and they'd just started a primitive firearms/bow season so I was packing a muzzle loader one season at least back then.

Anyways since we were on the land all year, one would assume we'd know what was living in the area for deer, but one wouldn't be correct in that assumption.

One night during harvest, I was running fuel to a combine at between midnight and 2:00AM which I recall as a bit unique as it'd usually get to tough to combine - the stalks don't thresh out and it plugs the combine - at night. This night it stayed dry so we kept running and there I was maneuvering a F350 4x4 around the sloughs to get to the combine lights out at the other side of the quarter.

We had aircraft landing lights on the headache rack of all the pickups so we'd avoid stone piles, ditches and sloughs, so when the light hit this particular slough, there in front of me were two decent whitetails bucks - say 130-140" bucks - and an absolute whopper. The two smaller bucks stood there staring at me and the big boy dropped like he'd been shot!

I wanted a better look at it, so I circled the slough slowly and backed up a couple times to pan the lights on it. The two smaller fellows stood there the entire time and I only saw the nose of the big one come up once, then it dropped down and so help me Darren it either belly crawled out or what? I don't know as I never saw it again.

Another morning after season was over, we were about to head out to church and were just finishing morning coffee. My wife pointed to the bush on the edge of the quarter we lived on and said, "Look at the size of that middle buck's rack!!"

They were about 300 yards away as I recall, maybe a bit less, but again two were decent bucks and one looked way, WAY bigger than the other two and nobody in our family had seen him before that.

Lastly, we used to pay my brother's boys to look for sheds since they'd end up in the tractor tires and wreck them.

I've still got a couple sets in the garage here, they're bucks I'd give my eye teeth to shoot here in BC, but stuff we'd see once a year at least out there in eastern Saskatchewan. Anyways one year one of the boys showed up with one side of a very typical looking 6 point that I scored and it was 89 and a bit inches....

Again Darren, nobody had seen it alive in the day or the night, but there it was...

We're not surprised we don't see the big ones here in BC because the country is just so huge and there's not that many deer in such a large chunk of real estate, but even in Saskabush where there were roads all over, we didn't always see the truly big ones.

All the best.

Dwayne

Nice buck and thanks for the video. Brought back a lot of memories. I was fortunate to hunt between Carson Pegasus and Swan Hills in the early to mid 2000s. I’d love to do it again someday.

Good morning Dwayne, how are you doing sir? Just saw your response this morning, sorry for the late reply.

I too can recount a lot of different stories where I have watched big bucks do things that made me realize just how smart and elusive, they are. They do not get to be B&C studs, by being stupid!

I consider myself a "Subsistence Hunter" and not a "Trophy Hunter" and spent more time hanging out in trees bowhunting then I ever have rifle hunting and got to witness a lot of different behaviors, the one I will tell you about now was the funniest.

I was set up in a tree line overlooking a barley field, when the light was about to fade, I call it "The Witching Hour" the last 30 minutes of shooting time, I noticed a couple of does at the edge of the tree line about 80 yards away, surveilling and observing the field. I watched them as they stood there for about 5 minutes. Then I notice a really nice buck (180 class stud) come in from behind them and to my astonishment I watched him push the does out into the field, by shoving them in the butt with his antlers, so the does jumped out into the field and I watch the buck stand there and watch the field to see what would happen.

How smart is that! That buck never did come into the field he just stood there watching the does until the light faded away until I could no longer see him. Who would have known that bucks are gentlemanly like an adhere to a "Ladies First" policy lol.

I have been blessed to do a lot of bowhunting for deer, and I can tell you that the older and smarter a buck gets the more Nocturnal they become. I have found that the best way to hunt the big boys is to find where they are bedding and to set up a stand way inside the tree line and as close to their bedding area without disturbing them. That way you can catch them as they transition from the bedding area to their feeding area. Being 60 to 80 yards inside the tree line is a good place to be since they mill around under cover in the trees until the lights go out, then they will hit the fields.

The best time to hunt them with a rifle here is the last week of the season, when the does are in estrus and they move around a lot and cover a lot of ground looking for willing participants.

Have you finished your hunting season yet, or has the snow melted some so you can still hunt?

Have a great Sunday my friend~

KB