The day we always dread

[megasupermagnum]

here in ga and fl a lot of people have trailing dogs,atleast 3 to 5 in each county on the blood trailing registry,some do it for free or tips and some charge,alot of people want call for a doe unless they know its one that works for free or tips,folks keep them purty busy around here,some of the good dogs are over 100 retrievals this year already

It isn't super common here yet. Dogs were not allowed for wounded big game tracking here until 2015-2016ish if I remember right. They finally allow the use of dogs for tracking wounded animals, which they never did before. I do not know anyone personally who has a tracking dog, although a bird dog may suffice. I never had a trained dog, never hunted with a dog at all, so do not know.

[Rcmaveric]

Wastefulness sucks and hurts. Specially when something had to die in the process. Make the best out of though, life lessons need to be learned and the coyotes needed a free meal. Atleast you got a picture and trophy to remind you. Dont beat yourself up.

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[Martin Luber]

Around here, NY, if you don't find it by nightfall, the coyotes will. The next day there will be only bones. It's creepy. Don't be in the woods at night.

[Smoke4320]

If you are a deer hunter it WILL happen sometime. we try to do our best to find them but sometimes it just does not work out

[Martin Luber]

And don't die in the woods up here either!

[Texas by God]

It happened only once to me( so far, thank goodness). I got too excited and pulled the trigger just as the buck jumped a fence running straight away from me. I was using a 7.62x39 with the Russian hollow points and I think it raked him similar to the stupidly named Texas heart shot. I found blood and a piece of rib bone the size of my thumb. A neighbor and I searched the briar and thorn tree choked ravines and canyons for 6 hours that day and 3 hours the next. An early spring flood washed his skull and spine out into the open a few months later. There’s no telling how many times that we got close to him then and the rest of the season. It is a bad feeling, and to this day I won’t take hurried shots on a running deer. I’ll wait for another one that presents a better shot. I agree with waiting a bit before going to find the deer, I’ve had to help find deer for fellow hunters that flushed their not quite dead yet bucks. If you wait, more often than not they may circle back to near where the shot took place. Hang in there, you did the right thing!

[megasupermagnum]

Hurried shots are never good, but moving shots just kind of come with the territory out here. You see guys on TV hunting deer milling around field, eating stuff just standing there. I have never seen that play out in the real world. Even in the summer, you don't see deer eat out in a field until right at the very last light. You can find them foraging in the forest sometimes, but deer don't wander out into a farm field to eat until dark. They obviously travel through farm fields, as this buck did, but stand there for seconds or minutes and eat? No. Until this buck, a bleat has normally stopped a deer unless they didn't hear me. This is the first one that ever spooked from it. Even though you can get them to stop sometimes, it can be tough to get them to stop in an area you can shoot them. And if they don't stop, well, nothing you can do then. I can tell you the number of deer I shot that stood still on their own, One. It was a small buck, came through, stopped to eat a twig off a branch. Besides that, it is about half that I stopped, and half moving deer. Besides this buck, I've only ever shot one more at a full out sprint. The longest shot I ever took on a deer was a decent buck, he was slowly walking towards me, and I shot him at 60 yards. I easily could have let him get closer. I know I sound like a broken record, but I can give you a list a mile long of deer I have killed, and lots that I had to let go, that I would have WAY preferred a shotgun with buckshot, and this buck was one of them. Instead of a nail biter with a rifle, if I had had my Pedersoli sxs loaded with some 0000 buckshot, I likely would have cartwheeled this buck right in his tracks. It is getting to the point that if the DNR won't allow it, I might just do it anyway and just tell them it is slugs.

[Texas by God]

I’ve never tried a bleat call to stop a deer, but whistling loud often works. We live in different worlds, it’s rifle country down here. I’ve only killed two deer with muzzleloaders( one rifle, one pistol) and two deer with Blackhawks. All the others with rifle. I’ve only killed one feral hog and an alligator with a shotgun. We see deer at all times of the day, both in the hay fields and wild growth and woods. Thanks for the talk, good hunting to you.

[megasupermagnum]

Yes, I think what it is, is that I'm in an area with quite a bit of cover, but it is often separated by thin travel lanes. I'm guessing you are out in open country, as much of the plains is. Deer on this property have a choice, they can happily live concealed through the day. They don't get that luxury in more open farmland. The few times I hunted down in southern MN, I was surprised by how different the deer acted. That buck was in central MN, and was traveling from heavy cover, to heavy cover. My strategy boils down to getting between where deer are, and where they are going to on funnels, which often involves even more heavy cover. Deer don't waste time moving through funnels. You can't see it on that map, but most of that green grass is thick cattail, with lot of the tall grass you can see in that buck picture. Off camera, is a tangled mess of old dead trees and thorns. Deer love these swamps, but shooting them there is not like you see on TV.

[rogn]

Just a mention here. I've spent more time than I like trailing deer in woods, fields, marshes and some of the worst briar patch swamps you could imagine. What Ive seen on numerous occasions when you run out of blood traii that to say it just disappears. Take a look for right angle turns or sometimes a backtrack. What Ive seen frequently is when they go from one type of habitat to another is an about right angle turn, then they usually go less than 20 yds. The craziest one Ive seen was one that crossed from fieldworker to woods and disappeared along with a garden hose blood trail. It had turned at 90* and jumped 20 feet over a 6' briar patch and died in mid air.
Just wanted to add that little oddity of trailing.

[pls1911]

After nearly losing a doe, I began to hunt in the morning through early afternoon, photograph till evening dusk.
I've come to dislike field dressing in the cold and being pressed by the approaching dark.
Viewed a few nice racks, but I don't eat horns anyway.

[megasupermagnum]

After nearly losing a doe, I began to hunt in the morning through early afternoon, photograph till evening dusk.
I've come to dislike field dressing in the cold and being pressed by the approaching dark.
Viewed a few nice racks, but I don't eat horns anyway.

Well that isn't the way to go. That is letting a bad situation beat you.


I managed to kill one coyote off this buck as bait. I likely missed a second, or at least it wasn't dead on the bait. I didn't look very hard. If you look on the map in post one, I set the bait in that V in the swamp, in the north west corner of Dana's land. I then set a blind up on the hill about fifty yards west of the red dot. This gave a perfectly clear 217 yard shot to the bait. Unfortunately I grossly overestimated my ability to shoot in the middle of the night. The first night I sat out there a day or two before a full moon. I could see very well. The problem is the moon was slightly to the east, which left the bait in a shadow. I knew about when the coyote would be there, as I had tons of trail camera photos. I got out about 8pm, and around 9pm they came in. When in the open over snow, I could see them in my Maven 8x42 binoculars, which are the best that money can buy. Snow was spotty then, and I could hardly make them out in the grass. When on the bait, it looked like a gray blur. Minnesota does not allow lights unless certain criteria are met, and a rifle disqualifies you. I finally made one of them out in the rifle scope, and shot that one through the lungs. It dropped on the spot. The next morning I checked trail camera photos, and found they were back at the bait at 5am! I came back a week later, and this time it was a few days after the full moon. The thing I did not realize was that "moon rise" changes by huge jumps every day. Not like sun rise, which changes a minute a day or so. This time I couldn't see anything until around midnight when the moon got high in the sky. Around 2am I could hear them chewing on the bait. I could hardly make them out. When one would lift its head, I just barely make it out. The next time one lifted its head, I tried to shoot it in the neck. Nothing was dead when I walked down there.

The real interesting thing is how many deer sniff the dead deer bait, and don't care at all. I had a very nice 5x6 buck, bigger than this one I shot, and he sniffed it, walked off, came back and sniffed it again, then ate some grass for a while. I'll be looking for his sheds here soon. It only took the four or five coyotes about two weeks to completely eat the bait deer. There is nothing but a skeleton left now. I'm probably going to pick up a roadkill deer, and set it out this weekend. I'm also going to move the blind closer. There is no good spot to set a blind or tree stand 75 yards away. Coyote's always come in from the west and especially following the treeline to the NW, so I have to stay on the east side of the bait. There is a peninsula about 40 yards away, and there is a down tree with a ton of brush that should hide a blind perfectly. You can use lights if using a shotgun. I was hoping to pick them off one at a time with the rifle, to try and get more of them. I'm there to reduce their numbers, not hunt them for fun. I'm thinking with shooting only 40 yards away, they will put 2 and 2 together and never return. I could be wrong. I've got a good buckshot load worked up that I can get multiple accurate shots off, and hopefully I can get two or three coyote in one go. Then if I figure out how to reduce the raccoons, the ground nesting birds should be in good shape. The turkeys and mallards have taken quite a hit the past couple years on this property. I'll be putting out some hen houses for mallards as well.