North Dakota - Open In AUGUST!! Sit # 1

So after gaining permission to bowhunt on a large piece of private land in North Dakota, it's been a very interesting challenge to try to figure out how to hunt a brand new property like this. Most of the places that I hunt, I have known my entire life. Starting from scratch is a very new process. About three weeks ago, Steph and I cruised around the perimeter of the property at dusk on our way back from Grand Forks, just to try to see what crops were planted where. After jotting down that basic information, I was able to go home and look over the maps and try to put together some sort of camera strategy first of all. After locating what I thought would be the best natural food sources, I hired the help of my friend Ethan to help hang cameras with me on the 17th of August. I hung the first camera down in the bottom bean field after noticing a ton of browse on the beans, but very few tracks. We laid out a Trophy Rock and some corn to hopefully get some type of inventory of the deer using that 20 acre bean field. Next we went up to the west side and found another enormous bean field that had a nice browsed area and hung camera number two. For the last camera, I wasn't concerned with the amount of pictures I would get because I figured that the corn wasn't ripe quite yet. There was a corn field near the center of the property, up on the high part of the river bank. We set the Wildview there with just a Trophy Rock in front of it. Something happened to that camera because it never took one picture in the two weeks it was there. Stupid. While we were glassing from the overlook, some of the locals saw us and stopped to chit chat a bit. He told tall tales of big bucks and of course tended to contradict himself a bit in his stories. After we didn't see any deer, we took off.
North Dakota's archery season opened on August 30th at noon. I really didn't imagine that I would hunt opening evening, but through several events, I was able to. I met up with my friend Zach and we checked cameras in the mid-late afternoon which told us a few things:
1) There was a reasonable age structure in place.
2) The genetics were average to a bit above average.
3) There are enough acres of food-providing habitat to lead us to think that we may have only scratched the surface with the amount of deer and the caliber of bucks present. Time will tell.
We set up for the evening hunt in a bit of an observation spot. We tried to play the wind and again, just try to learn more about the property. On the northeast corner of this 160 acre bean field, there was a little bowl where the beans dropped out of sight from the main road. I'd say this bowl was almost 40 acres. So a huge portion of the beans were very secluded from any road noise and pressure. As we pulled along the two-track field road, we drove under some white oaks that were just starting to drop acorns. We saw a hog trail coming out of the beans to the fallen acorns. So we backed up and just sat on the edge of the woods within about 40 yards of the acorns and still up the ridge enough to overlook this bowl in case something big came out from somewhere else. As we were setting up, we had a yearling 6 point sneak right up behind us within 10 yards! Zach got some good footage and as it got later, we had another 6 point yearling sneak around us and circled back towards us. They both were very curious. Those were the only two deer we saw that evening. It was really cool to be hunting deer that you knew were in full velvet! Crazy. While we were pulling down the Wildview, we ran into another bowhunter who was sitting at 4:30 in 85 degree heat! I apologized for intruding and we got the camera and got out of there. So apparently I won't be the only one hunting out there. Hmmm.
Here's the top five deer that we found on the cameras:
1) 4+ year old 8 point with a split brow - should gross in the mid 130s.

2) 3 year old 8 with crooked brows (might call him cowboy) - gross 120s.

3) 3 year old 8 with short brows. A little wider - might gross 115.

4) 2 year old 9 with one intense brow! - gross 110.
5) 2 year old 8 with decent brows. - gross 110.

So that's a pretty good starting point. As the corn ripens and the beans yellow, I'll be moving my cameras for the following two weeks. I'll move them the next time I can get down there. So I'll have about 4 weeks in each spot. Should be interesting.