Headed back out and took my muzzleloader, I couldn't get out of work until late so I only had a little over an hour in the woods. The place where I am able to gun hunt doesn't have any trees that you can really climb, so I sit on the ground. After about 20 minutes or so I say a flick of a tail and looked over and sure enough here comes a doe and fawn down off the hill into the thicket a little over a 100 yards away. Sadly this is also right along the property line. Needless to say I watched the doe and fawn for 35 minutes feeding on honeysuckle hoping maybe a buck was with them or other deer. I also was waiting on the doe to cross the property line and come out into a clearing. Well needless to say I didn't see anything else and the doe and fawn but stayed in the thicket and never gave me a shot, so I eased out of the woods and left them eating and there for another day. However, on my way leaving the property at about 6 pm I got up the road 2 houses and 8 deer crossed the road in front of me and one of them was a really heavy 8 point buck. Wish I would have seen him while I was in the woods, but I am not sure if he ever even makes it to the section of woods I was hunting since he crosses the road over to a different section of woods.
Well, another hunting trip and no success. I plan to take the bow out and try for whatever is moving this weekend, maybe even tomorrow afternoon.
We haven't gotten any pictures of bigger bucks since around the 27 of November, which means either the bucks have been doing all their breeding and might start moving again here in the next few days, or rut was about over and now has really slowed down. Everything I have seen leads me to believe the bucks have started to turn to their more winter patterns and have returned to their core areas. This means that if you were seeing a buck back before rut and he vanished, good chance if he is still alive he might be back soon. But this also means for a lot of us that the thought of one of those giants that was out wondering outside his comfort area maybe be a thought of the past. The best thing you can do this time of year is hunt near a good food source, bucks and does alike should be hitting food sources hard here in the mid Atlantic based on the activity I have seen.
Good luck to everyone this final weekend of gun season!
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