Twigs? Is that you?

I finally got my Bushnell camera back from the company and guess what? It's a totally different camera! They stopped making my model and came out with a widescreen camera that only shoots in 720p. I was a little upset at first, but I thought I'd give it a try. I figured that my most likely bear attack spot was the refuge so I cabled the bear safe around it and hung it to the tree. Well it sat for a week and I figured I would make sure everything was ok with it and check what the images looked like out of it. This is a classic example of why you always should carry a point and shoot camera or a viewfinder of some kind with you into the woods. Since this camera shoots in widescreen and it cables at the top, most of the deers' bodies are half cut off. Since I didn't bring a viewfinder to check that out, I set it back just how I had it. However, the pictures revealed our stud buck to be growing quite nicely for the end of may.

He could be a dandy, we'll have to see what kind of genetics he shows off coming up from his main beams. Maybe he'll only be an 8. Maybe he'll be really short tined. I doubt it.
Setting this camera out in the refuge allowed me to take my broken cover - Capture to another spot. I chose to set it up along the river where I didn't really know what to expect. I had checked on the mineral site and just saw some deer tracks, nothing much, but thought I would try it there. I hung it on the 24th of May. That same night the batteries died. After the batteries died, it rained for about 2 or 3 days. I went back to check it and when I took the cover off, water poured out of the camera! My stomach sank as I thought for sure this camera was ruined. I took it home and of course the memory card didn't work at first. Eventually, I took the camera apart, dried the many pieces and put it back together and let it air dry overnight. When I dried off the memory card, and tried it again, I got nothing, finally I figured out that it would play in the point and shoot camera, so I hooked the camera up to the computer and loaded the images that way. The first deer into the mineral site was a yearling doe. All of a sudden a great looking buck entered the frame.

At first I thought this has to be a new buck. he's got great mass and his G2s are just starting to emerge. A few pictures later another decent buck walks up to the camera for a sniff. This buck looks a lot like HighRise.

Now I'm starting to think that the duo is back together again, so I had to scan through some pictures of Twigs to compare. The mass is a good match. The brows even are fine to me, but if this is Twigs, he is either going to be very palmated or his G2s are starting significantly closer to his brows than last year, which is totally possible. The other possibility is that this really is an entirely different buck, which would be fabulous. When you look at the faces, it's no doubt Twigs, but when you look at the G2 starting point, it doesn't look possible.

Needless to say, I'm very curious to see what this 5 year old and his 4 year old decide to wear for headgear in 2012. I did get the camera functioning again. I put a nice water tight seal around the outside. Hopefully that helps.

Meanwhile, up on the Hill, I managed to get one isolated picture of Pencil out on the edge of the cedar swamp.

It looks like his brow on his is going to have a hefty sticker or it will basically be a split brow tine.  He's really putting on the inches this year. Mass, points, length - so far he's looking like he very well could break 130". His body is about to take a big transformation as soon as he starts to pack on the food.
Speaking of food, the soybeans went from just poking out of the ground on May 20th, to about 3 or 4 inches on the 30th of May.

This creates a larger window of ample food to put even more inches of nutrients into that velvet covered eye candy. At the Refuge, they even planted corn in the Sanctuary. This is something that as not been done for many years.

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.

New Growth

The month of May is half over and we're finally starting to see some growth on these bucks. Not all, but the more significant bucks. There are lots of ticks this year which won't help the deer body health, but I have yet to encounter any mosquitos "knock on wood" out in the woods. It was so dry last summer and fall that I'm really optimistic that bug numbers will be down this year. Things sure are greening up nicely. I was looking at pictures of one mineral site in successive weeks and the green growth is fairly significant. I've been able to confirm HighRise's survival. The previous buck I thought was HighRise was definitely NOT. He's got a good start so far and I fully expect that to continue. Notice the amount of green foliage in just five days:

The deer are sure fond of the trace mineral salt where it's never been before in their lifetime. I'm thinking I just might have more bucks to choose from than I once thought were even alive. This mineral site has produced at least four different bucks so far and there were only three at the end of the year last year, and I'm not convinced that I've seen Twigs yet, which is a little concerning. He shed early by last winter's standards and I'm just hoping he wasn't injured.  Time will tell. If he's alive, he'll show up soon.
I haven't been back to check on the mineral site to the south by the river, I'm sure it's been discovered by now. I started a new mineral site about a mile west of the new north site. So I have four new sites spanning about 8 square miles. It really should be interesting to see how and which deer use them. This latest site is in a spot I thought about beginning last spring, but never got around to it. It's a ways off the road, but the deciding factor was the placement of this year's soybeans. It seems that there will be an adequate amount of beans, they're just spread east and west - more of which ended up being on the east side of things. I also drove out to the Refuge to check my one camera out there. It had been sitting for exactly two weeks and there were 226 pictures on there. There was a one buck that was further developed in the antler department than the others, but again, there are about 5 different bucks coming in and it's only been set up for about 3 weeks or so.

I would say that by the end of summer, we should have some significant bucks on that camera. The night before I got to the camera, the same bear stopped by to show me what he thought of the stump and the trophy rock. He must've thought it was some kind of easter egg hunt and proceeded to pull the stump into two pieces. Jerk. He's a big bear, no question.

Creeping Death

 

I'm not sure if it's good or bad, but I finally got a picture of a Black Timber Wolf. Wolves come in all phases of color, but black just isn't very common. The downside is that there is a new wolf running through the area. Another incredible thing is that we've been running at least one trail camera for 6 years now. 1 camera in 2006, 2 in 2007, 4 in 2008, 6 in 2009, 6 in 2010, 9 in 2011, and in 2012, we'll be running 9 or 10 cameras between mom and dad and I. In all of these seasons we've had around 20 pictures of timber wolves and NONE were black. So, this is a new wolf to our area, or he's managed to slip by the cameras. This is not a small wolf either. The top of his shoulder is probably 30" or so. The stump in the picture is about 24-28". It's 36" to the center of my hip and 40" to the top of my belt. This wolf is big. I really hope I get a chance to hunt wolves this coming fall/winter. It will be a serious challenge, but very worth the experience. I'll have the .357 ready, that's for sure.

Also while out and about I got some more tasks done. I got some trace salt out on some of the salt licks and I started a new one. I've been wanting on along the woodline that borders what has been standing beans for the last two summers. There was rumor of it getting put into corn this year. I don't think it will grow personally, but whatever. The deer have become conditioned to using that area each fall and winter so I need to adjust to them. I made my way out to the Little Hill, where I got the picture of the black wolf along with a few bucks have come across the stump. There was one good lookin' buck, which I would bet is Bullwinkle, just by the mass already in process.

This might be his last year. I'd love to get a shot at him and get an accurate age on him. He will for sure be 7 this year, if not 8. A few other bucks are starting to find the salt, but it's a little too early to identify them.

I also checked the camera I have out in the Refuge. Sure enough, a bear messed with it a little bit, but didn't spin it enough to keep from taking pictures. Luckily after that a decent buck came through. Well, it was two bucks. The older looked like he was going to be a 3 or 4 year old this year. We'll see what he turns into.

These salt licks need a little rain to push some of the salt into the ground. The gravel roads are dry as can be and it seems like every farmer is seeding wheat. It's really going to be an interesting year. There's almost zero soybeans out on the south end between John's and Pete's. In fact, I have yet to find anyone whose planted soybeans anywhere near The Hill. That could make for a poor diet. I'm really hoping there will be some beans up close to the hill again. Last year it changed a lot of things, but this year,I'll be ready for it.There will be sunflowers NE of Orville's, which will pull deer and more so bears into that area.

New Horizons

The older (and hopefully wiser) I get, the more I learn about the average size of a whitetails range at different points throughout the season. Take for example a major scrape that I monitored in 2010. Not counting yearlings, I had two different two year old and two different three year old bucks come visit the scrape between the 16th of October and the 5th of November. This scrape was less than one mile from an entirely different population of deer - two blocks of woods separated by two agricultural fields and a road. Doesn't seem like much, but for whatever reason, I never got any bucks from the west over this scrape, and I never got any of the bucks from the scrape on any cameras I had two the west. They just didn't overlap. So, with this lesson learned, finding these natural breaks in the deer populations is very interesting and might eventually lead me to a bruiser someday. I've been keeping track of these two bucks Twigs and HighRise since last year. It's not very far south from this same scrape that I mentioned above, but I'm wondering where the bucks from the scrape spend their time. Most came to and from the scrape from the east-southeast, so I set out east of the gravel road a half mile and created a new mineral site.

This site is not only in the exact middle of the section, it is 1.5 miles due north of where I have been keeping track of Twigs and HighRise. I should get a photo of one of two bucks (if they survived) that visited the scrape as 3 year olds in 2010: The Big 8 and Future 12. Big 8:

Future 12:

After I set up that new mineral site to the north, I traveled even further south of the Twigs/HighRise Mineral Site to set up another site alone the river. This site is on the fringe of uncharted territory. My hope is very similar with this site - I've moved two miles farther south and west in hopes of tapping into a new population of deer. Fingers crossed, possibly even a giant. This site was set up right near the river bank, which doubles as a travel route for cruising bucks during the rut. I'm guessing there is a few deer to the east, in a 30-40 acre woods, but I'm guessing the bucks bed near the river further north and west, which is very far off of any road or human access.

It remains to be seen whether there are any number of deer on this far south site, but my gut tells me that because it is along a waterway, it will natural bring deer (as well as plenty of other critters) past the mineral mix. One last note, I tried a different technique this year. Where I established these mineral sites, I used a 50/50 mix of trace mineral salt and calcium carbonate to see if I can help replenish or maintain good skeletal health during the antler growing season in hopes of bucks being able to pump more growth into the antler department. 

On a different subject, mom managed to pick up antler that must've been dropped a year ago. It was a little four point from a 2 year old that had a busted G3. She found it north of the landing up by the last logging road. I don't recognize the buck, then again, I didn't recognize the buck at the scrape this year - could definitely be from the same deer.

To end my afternoon up at the hill on Thursday, I walked through an area where mom said she found a carcass and sure enough I found it. It was from a shed buck that had been there for at least one year. It looked to be a decent buck. Probably from a three year old. The skull measured slightly smaller (13") than Crazy 8s (13.5") and my Refuge Buck (13.5"). The bottom jaw suggested older than 2. Maybe we'll never know, unless we find a shed that has a huge piece of skull on it. The skull was missing quite a bit of bone, but the odd thing was that it was porous like it had naturally shed that way, or like it wasn't from him kicking it off. Regardless, we lost one buck to somewhat natural causes - brain abscess.