Chicago Style Sheddin'!

Man, it's fairly clear that a person could make a haul living in Chicago. If a person planned it out right, you could pick up quite a bit of bone in a weeks time with good boots, and a little preseason scouting. The tough parts are that some parks have people visiting every single day feeding deer and picking up fresh antlers. It takes some work to find the herds of deer that are tucked away, let alone bucks worth chasing. Luckily, on my first morning, after eating a meatball sub and warming my toes up, I stumbled upon a place several deer had been hitting pretty hard. I dropped off this little ledge toward the river bank and as I was scanning the areas these deer had been digging, I spotted a couple good beds I figured I better investigate more closely. As I walked up to the beds, my eyes rose back up the ridge and BINGO. The old familiar curve of a mainbeam. It was a nice 4 point shed.

After I pulled it out, I knew I had at least one bigger buck in this woods and I hadn't encountered any people tracks. On top of that, this shed was mostly covered in snow, telling me he dropped it about a week or more earlier. I slowed my pace way down and scoured the area. I went back up the ridge and back down. I walked all the way back out to the river bank. Thankfully I did, because when I turned around, there was number two! The match to the first one. This one was also a big four point that was no more than 40 yards from the where the first one was laying. It was tucked behind a big tree so I couldn't see it until I got out a ways. In the snow, this one looked a little bit smaller than the first, but it actually turned out to be the better side.

The first side, the deer's right, measured 57 2/8" and the second side, the deer's left, measured 59 3/8". With a 16" inside spread, that puts the buck at 132 5/8" gross. I figured he would net 129"or so.

On my walk back to the hotel, as I was about to walk out of the woods, I saw a city police car parked in the park's visitor lot, right where I was headed! My mind was racing as to the city having an ordinance about removing any items from the forest preserve areas. I know they banned metal detecting last year, so I panicked. I hid the sheds at the base of a tree and walked out of the woods right towards the cop, not knowing if he wanted to talk to me or not. I walked right past his car and just kept walking as to not seem suspicious. Had he already seen me in the woods carrying antlers? Was he going to get out and steal my sheds? I just kept walking. At this point I'm about a block away and I have no plan. My mind is racing about a mile a minute when I figure it out: I'll go into this gas station as  if it were my original destination. I'll buy something, ask for a bag and walk back past the cop. Maybe he'd be gone. So far so good, except the cop is still sitting there. Phase two of the plan was to just walk past him again pretending like I'm headed home and once I make it out of sight, cross the road and dive back into the woods. So far so good. What a rush! I felt like a 13 year old again. Haha. I made it to the antlers without him seeing me. I put the antlers in the grocery bag and started inching my way back to the cop. By the time I got to where I should've been able to see him, he was gone! I headed straight back to the hotel with a grin from ear to ear.
That was day one.
The second trip out was on a warm morning and I decided to try look on the other side of the river - a place I had never been. After having my mind blown as to why there were so many deer right by the road/bus stop, I figured out that people were feeding them there. Since it was close to residential areas, people could watch the deer from their homes and leave corn around. The bus stop was literally trampled with tracks. I started a grid and the tracks got to be less and less. The further north I went, the more the tracks picked back up. I didn't bump that many deer so I wasn't really looking for them that diligently, when all of a sudden there's a full racked buck staring right at me at about 15 yards! He scared me. I was frozen. The hilarious part that I eventually learned was that I didn't need to respond to these deer like I would an encounter back home. These deer saw me coming too, except that meant for them, the possibility of food, so they approached me! We had a staredown for probably about 5 minutes before he took off walking. My next experiment was to sprint after him seeing if I could get him to jump high and maybe jolt an antler off as he ran away. So I took off running through the brush with no luck. I crossed an opening with a long driveway into the park. I ignored it and kept going north until I got closer to the river. Finally I jumped two deer. One had a decent 9 point rack (130?) and the other was a busted up 8 point. They seemed less tolerant of people. Anyway, as I worked my way around, I came to an area where the deer had again trampled the forest snow. Sure enough, I pop out onto this hiking trail and its all starting to make sense. This is an area that people frequent to watch the deer. They feed them and talk to them. They even can park their cars, lay down some feed and get back in their cars to watch them! It's literally like a zoo with wild animals. So now I knew I would have some competition when it came to antlers. At this point I was starting to see more bucks, too. I walked back in the brush where these deer had come from. I was bumping more and more deer. I would say that in total I found 10 different bucks and probably 25 antlerless deer. Eventually, when I got back into my grid system, I found an antler. It was hard to tell what it was, but that's half the excitement. I pulled it out and although I was a bit disappointed, it was another shed on the year! Here's where the story gets good. So now I'm carrying around an antler as I'm gridding these deer infested woods. I've already had 4 or more good bucks within 20 ft or so. Now I have a weapon. I ran into a big old buck and threw my antler at his rack. Miss. He didn't seem too bothered so I picked it up and followed him around until he let me get back into range. I hit him in the back! He didn't like that too much. I got on the tail of another 3 year old 8 point and threw the antler underhand quite a ways and hit him square in the side of the head! He wasn't having that. He shook his head pretty hard. Finally I was about to give up on this strategy, when a little yearling 6 point walked up really close, thinking I had food. Boy was he wrong! I tossed the antler at about 10 ft and Bullseye! I knocked one of his antlers right off his head! I could hardly stop laughing. I wish I could've gotten that on video! Maybe next time. It was hilarious. So I ended the day with two more sheds and that made 4 for the year! I look forward to my next journey to the land of the trapped Auschwitz deer.

Still Holding

Today is January 22nd and very few bucks have shed yet. I would guess that by the end of the month, that would change pretty significantly. There have been a few yearlings and maybe some unidentified two year olds that have shed, but besides Pencil, the only buck that has shed is a young buck we're calling TurkeyFoot. He just has a common base G2. Odds are, he won't have it next year. Anyway, he dropped his normal side. A person should be able to see lots of new bucks drop in the next week or so.
The deer are still heading out to the Soybeans. I really should check out some of the other spots that I've seen lots of deer tracks. Depending on the other people, there may be an antler or two just laying out in the open.
The prized antlers remaining are really the three year old 9 point, and a few two year olds. Not much too be thrilled about.

One Season Ends And Another Begins - Let 'Em Shed!

Well Auld Lang Syne came and went. New Years Day is upon us - 2014. I guess I didn't kill any monster deer this year. I did learn a lot of lessons in the woods that nobody can take away from me. I think the most important lesson was that there are preferred areas for mature bucks and that a new buck can move in and take over at any time. Although I never was able to confirm it, there was rumor of a giant that was spotted in a bean field this late August. A clean 10 that supposedly had 12-14" G2s. We'll see. What we do know is that Blacknose was shot at least once and that Pencil slipped through the cracks once again.
He's the first buck to have shed this year - sometime between December 27th and 28th, he dropped his left side. I have not confirmed how long he carried his right. He for sure still had his right side still attached at 4:44am on December 29th. I imagine that as he bed down that early morning. His right antler will be very near his bed. In fact, the morning of the 28th we had a lot of blowing snow (probably 1.5") and when Pencil came into the camera on the 28th at 9:44pm, he had snow on his forehead and a bloody pedicle.

I would bet that after being snowed on all day, he got up, shook the snow off, and POP goes the antler. So hopefully these two antlers are in the same little bedding area and I can find it. Zach and I were getting pretty close as we walked through some heavier brush. It hasn't snowed since, so basically any track thats fresh could be the best bet. We'll have to get back up in there, maybe Friday the 3rd.

Winter Solstice

As we approach the shortest day of the year, it's been kind of a head scratching late season. The deer seem to be scattered, and it's becoming more and more clear just how low the deer numbers are. We've also had some of the coldest weather we've had this early in a long long time. We've probably had 3 weeks of below zero temperatures and about 12" of snow to boot. What this has done is it has slowly pushed the deer out of the grasses and farm country and up into the northwoods. That's good for us, but with this new endeavor of trapping timberwolves, I haven't been paying as much attention to getting good pictures of deer in this late season. That's changing now as the wolf quota is 57 out of 89 as of today. We've got a week maybe two at the most to get something in the traps. It's already been a roller coaster with our bait sites. I did manage to snare one coyote - my first animal I've ever trapped. We hadn't had a bird or hardly a thing for tracks at our farther bait site, so we decided to pull the pin on that one. The day we went out to pull all the traps, there was a yote all tangled up in the brush. We proceeded to pull the traps and a few pieces of carcass in hopes of freshening up the closer bait site.
On monday morning, the 9th of December, we saw three fresh sets of wolf tracks coming into our bait site on the minimum maintenance road. Sure enough, from the truck I couldn't see my snare in the binoculars. I could see the brace wire, but nothing else. As we approached the tree, the site was demolished and there was a little blood on the ground and by the tree, but no wolf. We eventually picked up his running track where he drug brush and junk away from the site. After tracking him for a little while, it was just the snare that was hitting the snow on the right side of his track. SO CLOSE!! I was disgusted. Since then, we haven't had any fresh tracks in there. I'm hoping that they were not the only wolves to visit that area. As the deer are migrating east and north, we're coincidentally seeing less predator tracks. Maybe thats a coincidence. Maybe not. We'll stick it out in hopes of trapping a Twolf.

Today I placed four cameras out trying to get some coverage on the standing soybeans sw of the Tweeten woods.  I'm excited to see what comes through that area. I mostly want to know if Pencil is still holding his antlers. He should be. Then if I can capture him repeatedly, I'll know when to start the search for his antlers. I should back one camera deeper into the woods in hopes to pinpoint his bed. I've got a good hunch.