Originally Posted by
Land Owner
You are right about that. I have a "beaut" of a local 8-point, off of my land, that she put on a GOAT mold. My recourse is to salvage the horns, shoot another "big deer", save its hide, and ask another to mount it appropriately this time, meaning pay for it twice.
I keep a log of every hunt. What I see. Temperature, wind, direction, clear sky, fog, rain, humidity, barometer reading, moon phase, easy stuff at hand to record. I keep those hard copies, day to day, on a map of the property, which stand I sat, any one else there that day, what did they see, turkeys, bobcat, coyote, deer, hog, squirrel, armadillo, opossum, raccoons, targets, where? Trees dropping acorns, rubs, scrapes, map of the stand and its surrounds, yardage data taken over the years to every nook and cranny, how have conditions changes this year, just raw DATA, the stuff to fill up a day of sitting on stand waiting.
I transfer those notes to a spreadsheet. I color code days and time of day that I kill deer. I know how many does and bucks. I know how many antler points. It is like BASEBALL and the statistics that you can generate. I have a Gang Box that is 100% FULL of antlers from EVERY one I have killed, small, medium, and large that are not mounted on the wall and there are only very few of those. Once, I had them mounted inside on the garage wall. Maybe another day I will go that route again. The does, well, I am satisfied to know many of those in my Mind's Eye alone or through the pages of my notes and the spreadsheet(s).