New Horizons

The older (and hopefully wiser) I get, the more I learn about the average size of a whitetails range at different points throughout the season. Take for example a major scrape that I monitored in 2010. Not counting yearlings, I had two different two year old and two different three year old bucks come visit the scrape between the 16th of October and the 5th of November. This scrape was less than one mile from an entirely different population of deer - two blocks of woods separated by two agricultural fields and a road. Doesn't seem like much, but for whatever reason, I never got any bucks from the west over this scrape, and I never got any of the bucks from the scrape on any cameras I had two the west. They just didn't overlap. So, with this lesson learned, finding these natural breaks in the deer populations is very interesting and might eventually lead me to a bruiser someday. I've been keeping track of these two bucks Twigs and HighRise since last year. It's not very far south from this same scrape that I mentioned above, but I'm wondering where the bucks from the scrape spend their time. Most came to and from the scrape from the east-southeast, so I set out east of the gravel road a half mile and created a new mineral site.

This site is not only in the exact middle of the section, it is 1.5 miles due north of where I have been keeping track of Twigs and HighRise. I should get a photo of one of two bucks (if they survived) that visited the scrape as 3 year olds in 2010: The Big 8 and Future 12. Big 8:

Future 12:

After I set up that new mineral site to the north, I traveled even further south of the Twigs/HighRise Mineral Site to set up another site alone the river. This site is on the fringe of uncharted territory. My hope is very similar with this site - I've moved two miles farther south and west in hopes of tapping into a new population of deer. Fingers crossed, possibly even a giant. This site was set up right near the river bank, which doubles as a travel route for cruising bucks during the rut. I'm guessing there is a few deer to the east, in a 30-40 acre woods, but I'm guessing the bucks bed near the river further north and west, which is very far off of any road or human access.

It remains to be seen whether there are any number of deer on this far south site, but my gut tells me that because it is along a waterway, it will natural bring deer (as well as plenty of other critters) past the mineral mix. One last note, I tried a different technique this year. Where I established these mineral sites, I used a 50/50 mix of trace mineral salt and calcium carbonate to see if I can help replenish or maintain good skeletal health during the antler growing season in hopes of bucks being able to pump more growth into the antler department. 

On a different subject, mom managed to pick up antler that must've been dropped a year ago. It was a little four point from a 2 year old that had a busted G3. She found it north of the landing up by the last logging road. I don't recognize the buck, then again, I didn't recognize the buck at the scrape this year - could definitely be from the same deer.

To end my afternoon up at the hill on Thursday, I walked through an area where mom said she found a carcass and sure enough I found it. It was from a shed buck that had been there for at least one year. It looked to be a decent buck. Probably from a three year old. The skull measured slightly smaller (13") than Crazy 8s (13.5") and my Refuge Buck (13.5"). The bottom jaw suggested older than 2. Maybe we'll never know, unless we find a shed that has a huge piece of skull on it. The skull was missing quite a bit of bone, but the odd thing was that it was porous like it had naturally shed that way, or like it wasn't from him kicking it off. Regardless, we lost one buck to somewhat natural causes - brain abscess.