Nope. About a four and a half hours in the shack and no deer. I got the card out of the trail cam when I was done hunting and checked the pictures out on my dad’s computer. There were a bunch of deer at my shack about a half hour before I got there. One picture shows six or seven of them together. So, I just missed them.
It was snowing the whole time and a bit cold too.
I took this first picture at 12:45 PM. I took the second picture at 5:00 PM. Notice the snow buildup on the window.
Every other day, my dad goes out and gets the card from the trail camera he has strapped to a tree in front of my hunting shack. For those not in the know, a trail camera is a camera that you leave at your hunting spot. It has a motion detector and takes pictures of animals that cross its view. So, my dad gets the pictures off the card and either emails them to me or I look at them when I’m at his house.
There has been a lot of deer activity around my shack. Some of the pictures show up to five deer in a single shot. A six-point buck keeps returning. I think it’s the same buck, anyway. The other night he made himself at home, laid down on the ground and posed for the camera.
I want that buck, but I’d happy with any mature-aged deer. It’s really the meat I want, but I won’t complain if I get a trophy.
There has also been several pictures of four-point bucks and good-sized does.
Though there has been much deer activity around my shack, the times they show up are not very favorable. They’re most active around the shack between 8 PM and 11 AM, with a couple having shown up at around 3 PM.
Because I can’t drive, I can’t always get over to my mom and dad’s house before 3 PM, and it’s especially rare that I get over there early in the morning. So my hunting times are usually between 3 PM and 7 PM when it gets dark, or now that we’ve set the clocks back an hour, I’ll be coming in at around 6 PM.
And the deer don’t seem to show up between 3 PM and 7 PM, whether I’m out there or not. I will probably spend a night at my mom and dad’s house once in a while, as I’ve done every year during hunting season, so I can get out to my shack before sunrise.
But, according to the trail camera, it seems like no matter what time I head out in the morning, I’m just going to scare the deer away as I enter my hunting area and they probably won’t come back until night. That’s what it seems like, anyway. I hope I’m wrong and that I can get in position before the deer show up.
If there wasn’t a law against it, I’d probably spend the whole night in the shack so I’d already be there when the morning deer come. But you can’t do that.
So, at my mom and dad’s house today, I walked around to the backyard and saw this. I got excited, dug my cellphone from my pocket as quickly as I could, before they noticed me and took off. I took the picture, went back inside to tell my dad, and he tells me they are the turkey decoys he bought.
Sheesh.