wooly

Usually between 20-30 fresh dead ones for the season but this year may be a few more with the lack of snow durring hunting season. I don't count the old skulls that I find towards the total dead deer..only dead ones from this fall/winter. I think I'm at 6 dead deer so far (4 bucks- 2 antlerless)

Thanks NFA-ADK! I wanted to spend the day hiking since most of the snow got rained away last night. I decided the best way to do this was to get dropped off down in town and hike my way home through the woods. Considering the distance, I expected to find more than I did but adding one more fresh shed to the season total aint so bad I guess. Here's #10...a little 4pt side with a nice long,flat, brow tine and a little base booger point. Also found another old dead buck to hang on the shed. We'll see how the weather pans out but right now it looks like the weekend will be best for the next hike.

Beauty! Bucks like that have a way of never finding there way back the following season in my woods. Hope you get to watch him grow another year!

I'll betcha there may be an antler or two laying around out there right now....but I've been wrong before!

I dunno....I think too many guys are too quick to assume poaching at the first sign of a dead deer in the woods. Easy to speculate but that deer could have been killed by anything.

Never happen! Squatches use internal electo magnetical impulses to jam todays memory card recording capacity. This is also why no clear video footage is available out of thousands of encounters world wide with hand held cameras and recorders either. Often the "knocking" a squatch hunter hears is the bigfoot destroying a trail cam once he feels he's been detected. Squatches were originally released in NY by the DEC to control the cougars not compete with them. The field seems to be leveling out and I agree that deer numbers may be compromised in areas where squatches and mountain lions have learned to co exist.

Every year about this time we (I) see a whitetail highway that leads right out of town from the higher elevations. I'm talking what appears to be every single set of tracks from individual and smaller family groups of deer that converge on this migratory path towards the valley like spokes on a wheel over a few weeks period. To look at the amount of activity on a daily or nightly basis does not appear all too impressive. Considering the constant direction of traffic, and distance traveled through some of the toughest terrain ahead that doesn't take the path of least resistance...well, it's pretty easy to see we get non local whitetails that may be filtering through from several towns over. I've actually hiked this super highway for the last 4 years now with 13 miles being the max I've covered of it without ever reaching a deffinative end. It truely is something to see, but I wouldn't go so far as to say that all these "tracks" were any accurate indicator of how well the deer population survived the hunting seasons locally. Obviously, once you get in your buggy and take a ride through the valley it becomes obvious where all these deer are going, but to those not farmiliar with what has happened, it may appear that deer #'s in this wintering area were unaffected by hunting.

Being sold as a set for $160. Both cams perform flawlessly. Will not seperate. Pics available upon request. Ran these Moultries this fall- looking to run another brand next fall. Cam #1 Moultrie L-50 white flash. 2 shot burst mode color day and night photos color day video(no night) opperates on 6- c batteries Cam #2 Moultrie D65IR 28 LED's 3 shot burst mode color daytime photos B&W night time photos and video opperates on 6- c batteries

Well Dave, at this point there aint much you can do but VOODOO,lol Print his picture out and cut his horns off. Open a can of corn and toss the antler cutouts inside. Check your field for fresh drops in the morning,lol

Tough crowd here, but very helpfull if you contribute something once in a while. I know I got a lot of support from this group when I was looking for some online votes for a friend of mine on facebook. Good bunch of people here if ya take the time to get to know us...untill then, no votes!

I looked into welfare once. For 1 person max benefit was 335/mo. If rent was 400...335 went right to the landlord. That wouldn't even cover the rent so I doubt many welfare cases have much leftover to afford a caddilac payment even with a family of 4 collecting. My guess is daddy's pimpin' momma, and the kiddos are running rock for a ride like that,lol! So in a way, they are working for what they get and all that tax money you've invested is kicked back to the system through fines and blood money seized,lol

Thanks! Yeah, that's my Kodak. I'm not sure how it happened but it's not on the lens. I'll have to carry the Nikon all all my hikes from now on. It just gets heavy on the neck some days and sometimes I don't have room to back up with the 70-300mm lens on it.

First of all, thanks to all for following along. I was hoping I wasn't boring you all but I haven't seen many fresh pics rolling in here lately so I figured why not. Depends...sometimes I just cut the antlers off the little ones and throw them in a seperate box. Other times I'll take the whole skull if it's not too stinky for my pack and a buck I like. I usually just throw the skulls in a snow bank in the backyard and by spring they're cleaned up good enough to hang on my shed outside as some rough euros. I hear ya there. There's always the risk of bumping bucks by starting too early. I haven't really seen anything too impressive to worry about running off this year after season so my goal was to collect as many as possible before old man winter finally took hold. Looks like he's definately here to stay this time and things will slow down for me a bit now. Of course, I'll still be out looking for a few of those snowy ATL's and fresh drops but I'm guessing the bulk of my sheds from here on out will come in March and April primetime. Basicly what I've collected so far this year are just bonus antlers from small areas I've meticulously picked through. I'll give them another look when we melt out in the spring, but this way lets me concentrate my efforts on high percentage areas when all the horns have finally hit the ground! Good luck when you do get out to cover some ground! Hmmm, not sure why you ask that. Could be any number of things on my lens. My cameras really take a beating durring shed season. I'm pretty sure my little Kodak pocket cam has some dead pixels in the center of the frame...that may be what you're seeing.

A country that treats it's heros like that obviously doesn't appreciate... or has forgotten what these guys have personally done for it. Our government has the ability to make things dissapear or appear as if things never happened the way they did. It should have used some of that in this case.

With snow in the forecast tonight, I decided it might be a good day to go look for the mate to the big 5pt. No luck with that so I moved on to another block of woods. Saw a few antlerless but nothing to get excited about. I did however find another little horn. #9 is a fresh little spiker...maybe a 2pt with his point broke off near the main beam tip. Found another dead doe too. At least from 20yds away across a raging creek I didn't see any horns on it. Didn't take my big camera today so I couldn't zoom in on it.

About 2 weeks ago I got permission to shed hunt a local gun club propperty so I decided to hit that today. It's not all that big but it's got some good thickets and swamps I wanted to check out. No sheds today but I did come across a dead buck. It's been a bit frustrating to this point. All my dead bucks have been missing their racks before I could get to them. The owner of the club told me they were having problems with one of the neighbors trespassing, littering, and hunting drunk. I found a tree where the DEC officer had thumb tacked his card to it in a ziplock. On the flip side it said..."call me, I have your treestands" LOL. I know this dope and he's a real winner. I didn't get far when I saw he'd been in the area recently. I packed them out and they cleaned up pretty good,lol! The mountains were icy blue still so I'm pretty sure they're freshies,lol I just got this propperty to hike so I don't need crap like that laying around and I'll get the blame for it and loose my new access. Last year I picked up 18 just like these not far from here. Ive seen this guys land before. I swear he leaves a trail of cans so he can remember his way home.

All this talk about sheds made me wanna play with my horns this morning too,lol! I don't have all of them anymore. Ended up selling a washing machine box full of them at my garage sale years ago when I was clearing house for my divorce. Should have about 3x's as many by now, but I can't count them anymore. Kid gotta helluva deal for $6.00.

For field tip general spot practice I like my bag. Very durrable and exceptional life expectancy with field tips. Broadheads a no-no! Hard to beat a 3-d target for realism, practicing angles, and unmarked kill zones just like the real deal. Feels good to let the broadheads fly on them before season too. I've never owned a block.

After yesterdays match set, I immediately knew I had this bucks antler from last year back at home too. I thought this was a pretty interesting comparison of just how little it is possable for a buck to add to his rack size with another year under his belt. If I didn't have the antler from last year, I would have guessed yesterdays set as another 2-1/2 yo when in reality he's 3-1/2 yo now. Pretty good example of just how inaccurate it can be to judge a bucks age by antler characteristics alone. Makes me wonder how many other horns in the box that may be much older than I first expected.

Absolutely- the best is yet to come but this weather is hard to beat for some early January shed hunts! Where I bumped antlered bucks from today I hope they don't go back into. If they drop in these brushy fields it's gonna take a lot of luck to stumble upon them with any consistancy, but that's a good piece of info to keep handy when things get slow. Good luck next hike WNYB!

Hey, thanks a lot ny hunter. Glad you enjoyed your visit! Now back to the sheds! #7 and #8 are in the books! Eventually I need to rename this post "franticly finding freshies"! It's on now! Crazy day kept me locked up at home and only left me 3 hrs to hike. Just thought I'd make the rounds and check the cams pulling one that was in a scary high traffic area. Before I could reach that last cam I came across this dead shedhead. Looking closer there were 3 spent shells right next to his skull, a set of quad tracks that ran through the fields, and fresh foot prints the last few days. I hope nothin' screwy is going on here. Bad guys beware, very few folks have ever seen me shedding and I have a decent zoom on my cam to catch any funny stuff you may be doing. This area is very thick and the perfect place for someone to hide something thinking it will never be found. This is so true that even the deer use it to hide their horns. In a little 5x5 clearing, my eyes about popped outta my sockets when I saw these guys! Touching!!! This is the actual ATL from above! I also saw 3 bucks still packing both sides today. Got a good one on cam still packing. And got a shed head on cam. It's getting contageous now. There really starting to drop steady already!

That sounds like 90% of the posts about mysterious monster bucks in the deer hunting section of the forum,lol.

No need to let some of the negative comments here rattle ya too much Forest. Learn from some of the helpfull pointers others have offered and hopefully next season we'll get to hear your hero story with a quick, clean kill. Don't loose that enthusiasm you have either. You may need that in the future to motivate you through even tougher endings to a days hunt. BTW- no need to appologize. I've read a lot worse stories on here.

Pretty sharp looking kit! I almost expected to see a Harley logo on it somewhere.