MY 2007 MN SHOT GUN BUCK

I have been hunting hard since opening day spending most of the day on stand both Saturday and Sunday, The rut seems to be just starting to shift in to high gear in my area, I have seen some bucks chasing does but not with the intensity that the peak rut brings. If this cool weather sticks around I think the guys hunting the second season 3B are going to see allot of action. Both Saturday and Sunday I sat in my pop up blind just inside the woods looking out over a bean field. Right next door to the bean field is a 40 acre sanctuary with allot of pine trees that no one is allowed to hunt. There is usually allot of movement in and out of this 40 acres in the mornings and evenings and I did see quite a few does and some small bucks but not one of the shooters that I was looking for. Monday morning brought a change in the weather with winds from 20 to 30 mph. I sat in my blind until 10AM without seeing a single deer and I knew it was time to change my game plan. I decided to take a short break and go home for some lunch and a short nap.

With the high winds also came the cooler temps which any deer hunter knows is a good thing. I knew if I was going to see any deer movement at all on Monday afternoon I was going to have to get to an area that was sheltered from the wind, as you can see from the first pic my hunch paid off. I decided to sit in one of our ladder stands part way down a gully with some very good trails running through it. I climbed in to the stand around 2pm and settled in for the evening hunt, this bad boy showed up around 4:30PM and I dropped him where he stood and the rest is history. He is a ten point with a 16 1/2" inside spread, well he would have been a ten point if it was not for the busted G4, Oh well nothing that the taxidermist can’t fix. His G2’s are roughly 9" and his G3’s are roughly 7" long, dressed out he weighed in at 180lbs.

This third pic is a view from the ladder stand, the wind was blowing so hard that at one point a small dead tree above the hill from my stand started to give way and started falling, luckily it was off to my left just a bit and fell and landed on a long branch from my tree. You can bet that I was saying a thank you prayer to the man upstairs that the tree did not land on me. I won’t tell you what I said as the tree was falling.

This has been a very hot stand for the first three days of the season, on Saturday morning my Daughters Assistant Principle Jared Christensen shot a very large doe on Saturday morning and this 9 point buck on Sunday morning both deer from the same stand. This was Jarrad’s largest buck to date and he had not shot a deer in a few years so we cut him some slack on the size of deer we normally like to see taken from this property. Just remember Jarrad next year does and wall mounters only, I just can not help to think what he would have looked like next year.

Best of luck to everyone this year and remember lets all be safe out there.