Surprise! Surprise!

I don't know how, but I discovered a video of a buck that I somehow overlooked during the peak of the rut! In late October, I set my new Bushnell HD camera over a scrape that I've been set up on in years past. The camera was facing west southwest, which was not the best conditions for afternoon/evening pictures, but that's just how it had to work. Anyway, what was happening was as the sun would warm up in the middle of the afternoon, it was tripping the sensor on the camera and so every few days I was getting a series of several videos with nothing on them. This probably happened on more than a handful of instances. So as I saw several day light thumbnails on my SD card, I probably ignored them. I still uploaded them and kept them, telling myself that I'd go through them at season end and delete all the garbage to make more room on the computer. Well lo, and behold, as I clicked into the first video in the series to check it, into the frame walks an unidentified buck! He walks right to the scrape in broad daylight (9:41am) on the 16th of November! Now this would be the Wednesday after our rifle season. I hunted the day before and two days after with the bow, but this just gave me a bit more hope than I was having for the 2012 season. 

This buck looks to be a 3 year old 10 point that's got a broken right G2, a broken left G3 and about half of his left G4 is chipped off. So he'd probably be a gross 120+ deer as a three year old. I for sure don't have any photos of this buck this year, and I'm not sure if I can place him from last year either. The only buck that I'm considering this to be, is the buck I called Lucky last year. I passed him up because I wasn't sure if he was 2 or 3 when I had him at 25 yards on November 16th (exactly 1 year earlier) at about the same time of day!

I called him Lucky because he was lucky to be alive. Most hunters would've shot him, and that's the classic mistake of Minnesota. I did end up getting a few pictures of this deer after the encounter I had.

Mom also picked up one of his sheds from his two year old rack back in the cedar swamp laying in a puddle.

The deer had a big body for a two year old and his rack was above average for that age too - good mass and  nice brows. If this is Lucky in this video, and he survived this winter, it means that he'll be a four year old this coming season, which makes him Hitlist material.