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Last week I was invited to join a young friend on his ground one evening to do the rounds and see what we would come across. He has some 400 h of farmland that he manages along the River Rhein. A young farmer of 23.

I had to cancel last minute and go to my own concession as the wild boar were and are in the crops - potatoes, peas, beets, wheat and rye - and we need to get them under control. I called my young friend and excused myself with a rain check for another time. He fully understood and said he would nevertheless go out for a drive and a walk.

I arrived at my concession around 20h00 and drove along boundaries and internal tracks checking the fields and crops.

I spied a bright orange spot in the peas and looking through my Swarovski binos made out a young roe buck, with his antlers below the tips of his ears and not a particularly large or strong body. I glassed him for 10 minutes and decided to take him as a cull / management buck.

Chambering a round in the Rigby .275, I stalked in to 75m along the edge of the woodland, took a rest on a tree and shot and dropped the buck. All very no nonsense and almost clinical. Not a real hunt but rather a management cull. A yearling weighing 11 kg dressed and nothing to write home about. We have a lot of roe deer so this was one to take off. I checked and gralloched the deer and then took up in a high seat hoping for a pig.

The interesting twist was that at around the same time that evening my young friend was out in his concession and he too spied a roe buck at last light. He made a successful stalk and dropped the deer with his Blaser Professional in .308 from 100m.

He was elated - not only was this the first roe buck taken on his ground in over 5 years but the buck was old. Very old. Some 6-7 years based on his teeth. He was still celebrating when I headed for home at 02h30 having driven a sow and her piglets out of the sugar beets where I was sitting.

So the older hunter took the yearling on a concession boasting lots of roe deer, literally hundreds. And around the same time the young hunter took a truly old, old buck on a ground that is almost void of roe deer! An interesting combination!

Here some pictures of the two bucks -

















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Thanks for posting Charlie.

Thanks Charlie. Good to hear your account of some successful hunting while we're withering in the heat here!

WAIDMANNSHEIL

Good eats there Charlie.
use those horns for tooth picks!

Mix with bbq sauce and mushrooms!

Make sure you line the hardware up
nicely so the cook is happy when you
leave!

George

Tricky you are doing some hunting at the moment.
Nice report.