Pencil's Got The Spotlight

On the 8th of May, I put out some Whitetail Institute 30-06 mineral mix that Steph and I bought for my dad's birthday. We dumped about 2/3 of it in the shack field on the stump there. Mom just checked that camera on the 21st of May and had several pictures of Pencil diggin' into it. So it seems to be working.

It's good to confirm Pencil's whereabouts and that he's putting on some good antler development early. He's three weeks ahead of where he was last year, which was about two weeks behind. Now that he's five years old, we should be able to get a better idea of what he was genetically designed to look like as a mature deer. I'm going to guess him in the low 130s and that he'll have either some great blading on his brows or he could even grow some splits on them. He's got significantly more mass than the last two years and so it should be really fun to watch him this next two months. There still aren't any mosquitos to speak of. Amazing. Another noteworthy item for that shack field camera was that there were multiple bucks coming in that will be either two or three year olds this year. One of them might even be a four year old. There might be an opportunity to try to protect young bucks this year and give ourselves a fighting chance of killing Pencil. If we can focus on him and him alone, we'll let more young deer survive. This would also be another great year to take out some does. Also the last time I was out to check the camera by the Little Hill, I ran across some morel mushrooms. I ended up picking about 7 or 8 of various sizes. I brought them home and mom and dad cooked 'em up and ate them.