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.