I threw the car into park and ran inside, peeling off layers as I went. I traded my heels for wool pants, boots and blaze orange. I grabbed the gun and left. There was less than two hours of daylight remaining and a snow squall predicted for the next hour as a cold front moved in. It was 3pm when I walked into the woods and climbed into the Sky Condo. The big buck's tracks ran along the ridge to my right, so I turned my body to face in that direction. I was hoping that I would catch him as he did his loop. It seemed like a perfect night to have deer move. I looked to my left, scanning in front of the Sky Condo. I was startled to see three deer walking at me. The snow on the ground made...
While I have been away, I have been busy advancing my hunting plans for this fall. And joining new, exciting projects. One of those is DeerCast, an app created by the folks at Drury Outdoors to give hunters the best tools available to identify peak times to be in the woods and when the deer will be moving. I have had the chance to interview hunters who have used the app and have taken some impressive deer! There are a handful of us writing articles, the entire Drury family contributes and instead of waiting a year for footage to come out on television, you can see the videos almost as they happen. Some impressive deer are being taken this year and DeerCast is free! So far, more than 218,000 people have...
Dad assured us that deer move in the wind. He was confident that if we were in the woods, we would see something. He could be as confident as he needed to; he had tagged out and could stay warm. The wind was howling and with the Sky Condo breaking apart, I didn't waste much time getting into my tree seat in the woods. It had taken me a handful of years to be comfortable enough swaying in a tree during a windy sit, but I was ready. It was so cold that I had on my snowmobile boots with toe warmers, my ski gloves with hand warmers and a blanket over my legs to help keep the wind from hitting the backs of my legs. I had on so many layers! It was too windy to hear anything move so I just kept scanning from one side...
This is how I started my second week of deer hunting. I have never been so quiet in the woods. I was painstakingly slow and keeping my eyes peeled for deer. The week before, I had jumped two deer under my stand and I was determined not to have that happen again. I walked out and around our normal route into my stand. I was at a snail's pace. I would walk, stop and look. I would look again and take a couple of steps before doing it all over again. I watched for any movement near my stand. The leaves had fallen off the trees from the wind storm the weekend prior so I had a better view of the area. I could not see any movement near my stand so I paused next to our trail camera to look around and...
All over social media, there were posts about the rut; has it started in your area? have you seen any chasing? how do you know? what's the moon phase? As much as I would have loved to have had some concrete answer to those questions, I had never seen proof that the rut was on. Until that second week in November. Hubs was out hunting on the 10th and I was in charge of the kids and making our way up to my parent's house to hunt on the 11th. It was windy and cold and I had opted to stay in and not hunt that evening, but wait until the next day. I was holding the baby and watching the leaves blow across the lawn when I saw a doe emerge from the bushes around the pond (see down pointing arrow.) She paused and...
This past fall, my routine became almost comical. I would leave my backpack on the ground, climb into my treestand, get settled and unbutton my wool pants. Four years ago, I wore base layers with monkey-thumbs to hide the Queeze-Away bands that I wore around my wrists. I never got sick, but those early morning breakfasts and treks to the Sky Condo were a little more challenging when I was trying to hide a pregnancy. Dad makes sure that I am always secure and comfortable when I am sitting 10-16 feet up in my treestands but if he knew I was pregnant, I was not sure how far off the ground he would allow me to be. So, I kept my first pregnancy a secret during the entire season. I hunted, hiked and pulled the same 10 hour...
You could ask any deer hunter how the herd is in their area and get a different answer every time. We all want the best habitat, doe to buck ratio and a very limited number of predators in our area. What I didn’t know, is that like moose here in Maine, we have deer that are collared and monitored in order to help biologists understand the true health of the deer herd. I sat down with Maine’s deer biologist Kyle Ravana to ask him about the collaring program and what he (and IFW) hope to learn from it. Where are the deer that are being collared? And why those WMDs? Right now, we have deer collared in WMD 17 and 6 and want to expand into either WMD 8 or 1. 17 is good because there is usually a good mix of snow...
"All I saw was blue smoke" dad said smiling. One week after I shot my deer and rifle season ended, Dad was still hard at it trying to get one of those big bucks we still had pictures of. But, instead, he squeezed the trigger and got his first deer with a muzzleloader. According to Dad: two doe came crossed three different shooting lanes before starting to talk at him. When he decided to fire at the biggest doe, he lined up the sites and just saw the blue smoke and no deer. "I got down and walked to where I saw her last. The second doe was still standing nearby, so I knew she was down. When that second doe ran off by itself, I knew the deer was somewhere near by" Dad picked up the blood trail and tracked his...
The snow was melting and dropping off the branches and leaves. I had been in the stand for only a few minutes when I heard a deer walking off to my right. It was one deer and too dark to know if it was a doe or buck. Maybe it was the crotch horn. I closed my eyes and listened to the deer walking away from me. At least it didn't seem spooked; maybe it didn't know that I was there. The sky began to get brighter, indicating that the rain predicted was not coming. I dug into my pocket for handwarmers. I tried to keep the crinkling plastic as quiet as I could as I ripped the first side open. I waited before I opened the second warmer to keep my noise at a minimum. When I made the second tear, just...
