Rifle Season 2012 - Sit # 16, 17, & 18

Well, Rifle Season 2012 is finally here!

Opening morning (3rd) brought SE winds, which is perfect for the Crazy 8 Stand. Hopefully I can call it the Pencil Stand soon. Saturday was the one and only day of rifle season before daylight savings kicked in. Legal light was 7:44am. At 8:39, I spotted some feet moving under some spruce bows. It looked to be heading towards my camera. I lost the movement for about a minute or two and rather than risk never knowing what it was, I blew the grunt call 2 times. About 30 seconds later the deer showed itself and it looked to be a buck. I got the camera on him as best as I could. Once I figured out it wasn't a shooter, I just tried to get some good footage of him. He came in to about 20, then to about 15 and circled all the way downwind of me trying to figure out what I was. After he made his first pass, he actually came in even closer to sort of grid the area. Eventually he walked off. I did recognize the buck - it was the buck that Zach had on his camera in early October that we first though was an older deer. Turns out he is just a two year old with a monster body. He had 4 inch brows and about 6 or 7 inch G2s. He will be a really nice buck in two more years.

After that, at about 11am, I had two fawns come running right to me. They kept looking back and I was looking for the doe and the likely scenario was that she was being pestered by a buck. Sure enough she showed herself and there was a buck right behind her. All very exciting, except it was the same two year old that I had just seen a couple hours earlier. I climbed down and went in for a nap in the afternoon.
Steph came up Saturday afternoon and we had a bite to eat and both headed for my permanent stand. I sat on the ground and filmed her, but we didn't see any deer. Dad saw several deer that day including a few different yearling bucks. Mom saw one.
On Sunday (4th), Steph and I were at church in the morning and needed to take care of some things after church. We got up to the hill around 3 and I wasn't sitting until about 4:15, which gave me about 1 hour. With a slight ESE wind, I headed back down to the Crazy 8 Stand. Although I swear I did hear deer on two separate occasions, I saw nothing. Steph said that at about 4:50pm, She had a deer sneak up on her out of nowhere on the front end of the east strip by my permanent stand. Dad saw a doe and two fawns. Mom said that she saw a doe that was distancing herself from her fawn and that as she heard something out her window and tried to switch windows, it took off.