Deer Diary
Sorry for the delay in blogging. I will be back on the weekly writing. One outdoorsman wrote to tell me he hasn’t been able to sleep in the last few weeks since I was tending to expanding our paper to100,000 copies and handling some distribution logistics instead of blogging. I thought that was pretty impressive, a guy missing my writing like that. Then he signed off.
“You’re better than Sominex.”
Here’s to good slumber. I haven’t told you about our gun season. We hunt the far north. Vilas and Iron Counties hold our Wisconsin homes away from homes, and my family…my brother and nephews… hunt where our cabins are. We have had daughters and nieces hunt, and I even went through Hunter’s Safety with my niece, Angela, but they all quit, citing unusual smells and sounds in the November cabins.
Hunting has been poor here over the past decade, and as a family we have declined from 50-percent success rates in archery and gun seasons to not having hung a deer… in Vilas County anyway…for nine years. Obviously, our lack of success correlates with high deer predation by wolves and most recently a bone-head masquerading as a federal judge protecting the wolves, high predation by bears on fawns in spring, and poor deer management years ago including antlerless only seasons in the wake of the regular season even though few deer were here.
Things are improving. Protecting does is huge. Outlawing baiting and feeding is monumental. Deer are returning to natural foraging patterns instead of getting dumb and fat at the cabin feeder. Hunters will be forced to learn how to hunt again. The thing is, as you old guys like us know, learning how to take a compass (okay GPS if you must) and finding a natural funnel, or a swamp edge, or an oak ridge in order to find deer is a fabulous experience to discover. And the right thing to teach your 10 year old.
Only John and I hunted Vilas. Without seeing more than two deer a season for a decade Jim refuses to pay the out-of-state license cost coming from Minnesota even though he’s a Badger-Packer man through and through and his cabin is here. Steve had his clan at his cabin in Iron County and a young hunter shot a doe and they passed on a small buck or two. In Vilas John passed on a fork even though he hasn’t killed a Wisconsin deer in10 years and saw a few does.
But I thought I was in heaven. 15 minutes after first light on Sunday morning, a doe came off that swamp edge I was talking about, and from my portable stand I had carried in on my back at 60 yards on that same edge, I thought, “That doe is hot.” She walked awkwardly off the swamp right to left and her tail was straight out and remained out. I kept one eye on her and another on the swamp, leaving for an exciting few minutes and a need for an optometrist appointment.
When she was 70 yards in, I saw one flick of grey and immediately he began grunting. That’s the last I saw of him but his grunting never stopped for two minutes as he stood in there concealed among poplar and pine. She had enough time to make a 90 degree turn that would have brought him if he followed to a 50 yard shot. But then another 90 degree turn, which brought her right underneath my stand. All the while grunty boy never stopped grunting.
You know what a wary adult doe looks like when she knows she screwed up? I looked straight down on her back. She didn’t see me but she gave me plenty of nervous body english for me to know that she knew I was right here. Another nervous minute and she was full steam ahead, right back to Romeo and an exit from the scene exactly the way they had come in. Never saw him, but man, was that something for a deer-starved hunter to be thankful for in the northland? Yes, it was.
No, we didn’t hang a deer. But a modest number of does and bucks have emerged, and, most importantly, deer are not by the cabin feeders, and they are foraging for food as God intended them to.
Get in the woods.
Photos courtesy of Stacie Dowd. Would you like to read her stories? Check out “Deer Hunting” on this website.
Thanks for connecting with On Wisconsin Outdoors. Shoot straight.
Dick Ellis