Home Forums Hunting & Shooting Deer Hunting How many guys hunt NW blacktails?

Jeff,

Try a treestand yet?

jim

I tried one once. At the end of that day I wanted to turn the guy on myself. It had to be the most boring day of hunting that I ever experienced.

I have only hunted in Oregon but have taken blacktail, mule deer and white tail.

On public land I find the blacktail hardest, the white tail second and the mule deer third in difficulty.

My sample of white tails is pretty small, I have only taken four of them. Two were does. They share the Wallowa County area with mule deer and are becoming seemingly more numerous each year especially in agricultural areas.

Really big blacktails are primarily nocturnal and live in brushpiles that are tall and dense. I have only killed one truly large one in my life that wasn't living behind locked gates.

I'll give a blacktail tip i found works. Get a good topo map of your hunt area. Every deer bed you find, mark it on the map. After hunting the area a few years you will get a good number of beds marked,with a good idea how they decide on the locations. Then you hunt every one of these beds by sneaking in and glassing them from cover. Eventually you will catch a mature buck in its bed. I spend more time looking for new beds to mark on my map than hunting deer.

Black tails are a interesting animal they live in different geographic areas in the Northwest. Northern Cal and Southern Oregon its a lot more open than here in NW Oregon and NW Washington. The biggest bucks seem to grow down south and along the Pacific Crest trail. Jeff is right though our deer numbers are way down due to HLS having taken their toll over the last 10 years. In the old days up in NW Oregon if we did not see 10-15 deer a day it was a bad day, now if you see 3 in a day its a good day. Still fun to hunt them when the October monsoons hit and they start moving and the bucks start to roam a little bit more in the day light. The biggest deer I have ever shot in NW Oregon was a big 4 point he weighed in at 140 lbs ( dressed out) the majority of the deer up here will weight between 80 and a 120 lbs.

My Dad, Son and I with dads buck.

[img:left][/img]


The son's buck
[img:left]http://[/img]
My son and a couple cousins packing out a meat buck.
[img:left][/img]
Dad, son and I with dad's buck that year.
[img:left][/img]
This is what a nice week in camp looks like.
[img:left][/img]
A decent buck from 06. With one buck tag a year you want to pass up the dinks but don't get to greedy or you'll go hungery.
[img:left][/img]

Are all those deer in SO. Nice looking deer, the picture of the truck is a classic.

No. I think it could be real productive though. Boyd Iverson (the "Blacktail Trophy Tactics" author) is big into them.

I got my first blacktail by sitting, watching, sitting, and more sitting. Finally it was just inevitable! The buck I killed was the only deer I saw that year though.

Yep, that's it [bleep].

So from June 2008 till April 2010 you've killed 6 more blacktails? Tough keeping up with the lies ain't is asswipe


http://www.24hourcampfire.com/ubbthreads/ubbthreads.php/topics/2273717/3

I knew you wouldn't let us down Steelhead. When a guy like Jeff O has diarrhea of the keyboard, he can't help but get caught in his lies. I'd put the actual number at about 10, if I were a betting man.

Bump...

[bleep] abacus must be broken.

Damage control is a science...

After hunting whitetails in a half a dozen or so states back east, I found hunting blacktails to be more difficult when I moved to Oregon in '06. They are not as patternable as whitetails and often cannot be hunted in the peak of the rut (most general and controlled seasons in Oregon end by the first week of November). The terrain can be a little more difficult as well with large expanses of wilderness and the deer scattered. Firs being the predominent tree on the western side of the state also impacts things as the cover remains relatively thick long after the leaves would have fallen off of hardwoods and increased visibility.

It is definately a change to have a go at blacktails.

I love hunting Sitka Blacktails..

I have taken Blacktails, whitetails and mulies all in Washington. These are some of the things i have learned so far:

The only times i see big blacktail bucks, is jumping them from a bed(or catching them in one) or in a hellish wind and rain storm. If its sunny nice warm weather during hunting season, i might as well stay home or find a mulie farther east.

I have seen Mulies and Blacktails in the same basin sometimes. Now i see mixed groups, i have 2 does and a fawn that come to eat apples at my tree by the house. One doe is a mulie, one is a blacktail. Seeing less and less true blacktails every year(east of the pacific crest that is).

Big W,

How do you tell the mule deer and blacktails apart, size of glands on the legs?...thanks...jim

Usually you tell the difference by the tail, but also by the coloring of the body, especially around the face and head.

Steelhead's quote of my comment made me go count horns on my Wall of Dinks <g>. Indeed, I'd killed 16-17 in June '08 when I posted that. Killed 4 since then (2 bucks, 2 does). So I've actually killed 20-21 blacktails. Hunting, that is; killed a couple more also with a gun. I'd say that's "about... 22" of them, as I said, or close enough for me.

In the early 2000's Oregon was still issuing "additional" doe tags, so IF you had access to the mostly private land units (Central Melrose was the one I had access to), where they issued those extra tags, you could get 3 tags total for the year. Which I did several times, and only didn't fill all three one time.

But for Pete's sake... really? REALLY?! All horned up over this [bleep]? After all... it's not like Steelhead never messes up a number by a bit.