I was able to sneak in one night of hunting this past weekend when I went down to shoot a couple of does before deer season ended. I was looking for a big hog that had previously been spotted but run across this on first after having the wind mess up my first stalk on another boar. There were patches of fog that night and that's the one thing that really messes up this type of hunting. Fortunately the hog got nervous and took off running out of the fog and stopped long enough at 137 yards for me to squeeze off a shot and drop him.

Good job Rattlesnaker!! Nice hog!

Keep up the good work! Did you get much rain?

Hardly any. We only got .2" in two different places that I checked. It's going to be a tough year for animals if we don't get some rain in a hurry.

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Originally posted by Rattlesnaker:
Hardly any. We only got .2" in two different places that I checked. It's going to be a tough year for animals if we don't get some rain in a hurry.

I think we may have gotten a bit more but it was pretty dry by Sunday. I took my girls down late Friday and we weren't able to hunt early Saturday since it rained off and on from about 1:00 or 1:30 AM to 6-6:30 AM. I didn't want them out in it and we aren't supposed to rut up the roads. It was already soaked in by 7:45 or 8:00 AM and the roads were just fine.

I am hoping that the brief showers will encourage some forbs to grow and a bit of growth from the brush as well. The deer have been hitting the prickly pear pretty hard the last couple of weeks from what I can see, and that doesn't look good to me. I understand them eating some but there is a lot of it gone in just the one area we walked that was intact the last weekend of the regular season.

I think we will need a tropical storm or its equivalent to fill up the stock tanks which have dried up.

Yeah, I agree that we'll need a very big rain or two to get us back to where we need to be. I think the three previous wet years have exacerbated the situation because all the game populations are up from normal carrying capacity. This is all anecdotal on my part but fat, healthy does tend to have more twins and triplets. Hogs populations are up as well with larger surviving litters over the past several years. Even many cattle ranchers increased their herds because the abundant grasses enabled the land to sustain additional grazing. Now, with the quick turn of events I'm afraid wildlife is going to suffer severely if we don't get some rain.

I went out to shoot a couple of does for sausage and I poured out a little corn along the road and the 12-15 deer came out about 25 yards behind my truck. I shot the first doe and the others only briefly ran off before coming right back to the corn I'd just put out. I shot another and they did the same thing. I probably could have shot 5 does. There's just not much to eat out there right now.

Everyone's tanks are going dry it seems. Pretty depressing to walk up to one and see all the dead fish stuck in the mud.

We were covered up with deer -- but I could not get my daughter the shot she wanted on a hog. The hogs moved on after the season looking for food elsewhere, although we did see quite a few and given one more day to hunt would likely have gotten her one.

Our last spot to try to take one was on a place where the road crosses the big creek bed (now mostly dry). We put out a little corn and were getting out of the truck when a buck showed up about 50 yards away. The only time he left was when a coyote crossed. He stayed from about 9:30 until 10:00 when we went into camp:

Nice deer. Big 8? I'd estimate him to be 23" wide. What do you think? He doesn't look real old to me.

Big eight, except his brows are short (one is broken) and his G-2 is snapped on one side. One his spread, don't get me lying but he is not narrow.

Here he is from the side:



Some of the deer have been aged (from tooth wear) higher than we expected this year so I don't know if he is young or just thin. he does not look real old.

may be a shooter next season. of course rain or lack of is the ultimate factor. for all our manipulations, nature makes the ultimate call. Kurt.

His face looks fairly flat and thin without any extra skin. His legs look unusually long for his body, which looks very thin itself, with no real belly on him. I can't imagine that he's a 3 1/2 year old deer but that's what he looks like to me in those 2 pictures. Kind of looks like a 13 year old boy. Of course, I have to keep in mind that it's post rut so he may just be extra lean with significant loss of fat and muscle from running does over the past month plus. I'm revising my spread estimate upward, I'll say 24".

If we can get some rain and keep the coyotes off him this summer he will have to stay off the main road next year! Of course, if he looks 4-1/2 next year he should get a free pass.