• Help Support TNDeer:

Are heavily hunted mature bucks with big racks that survive just lucky?

I don't know if they are lucky or smart. I call it instinct with a good memory of danger.

I do know that daylight camera activity decreases substantially after the first week of rifle season.
I do know that if you hunt a spot and he smells you, he likely ain't coming back unless he is with a doe in heat.

Like others have said. If you don't kill him your first hunt in your best spot, your odds go way down especially for that area. He will still smell your scent several hours into the night after you are gone.
 
Woodsman10 said:
Stuff like this on some of the land I have to share with others have really made me dislike deer hunting. Or that area specifically. At least I have other places.
Click to expand...
I hear ya. It's just the norm here now. You have to be quicker to get it than the thermal and drone guys. Pretty much Every buck will come to the bottom fields in the Summer, they won't stay up high in the mountains, so they will always get spotted and talked about. That's where the roads are. I will say that we did get a TWRA warden finally this year after not having one for quite awhile. He did spend a lot of time trying to keep a particular buck alive from the thermals and drones. He did make a few cases but the big fish got away of course.
 
PickettSFHunter said:
I think there used to be some skill to it on the bucks part but technology has pretty well made it luck around here for a big one to make it. Once a big one is spotted here during the summer, it will have all resources known to man after it until it's dead. That includes of course an army of cell cams, thermal scopes, and thermal drones. It ain't hard to bait one up to a cell cam, get a drone in the air when it comes, and track it until you can get ahead and get a shot. I knew one really big buck that survived that very scenario this year(probably only because they mistook his running buddy for him in the thermal scope when taking the shot), that buck moved over across a big holler out of the area after that incident but was then legally taken thankfully. Many other big bucks have not been so fortunate and get killed.
Click to expand...
Only an asshole with no woodsmanship would use all that tech to kill a deer. What thrill is in that?
 
best buck i've killed had never showed up on cameras on any surrounding properties. he followed a doe onto my side of the ridge... have read that they'll wander over 20 miles from their normal range during the rut. mistakes will be made...
 
I think it's important to differentiate between very larger-antlered mature bucks and small-antlered mature bucks. Small-antlered mature bucks may die of old age simply because their antlers didn't interest picky hunters. That buck may have learned nothing during his lifetime about avoiding hunters, because hunters didn't want him! He may have walked right by numerous hunters over his lifetime but learned no valuable lessons about survival in a hunted environment. Large-antlered mature bucks, different story...

Deer, just like people, have different personalities. This is genetic. Who with pets hasn't seen this? One pet is as gregarious as all get out, constantly wanting to be at your side, while another is so jumpy and skittish you would swear they don't even live in your house. Some bucks are born ultra-cautious. Some are not. The cautious has a distinct survival advantage, just by luck of genetics.

Although deer probably can't reason (it takes an imagination to reason, and researchers have found no evidence any animal species on the planet has an imagination, with the exception of humans), the certainly can learn through trial-and-error. And once they have learned a survival technique that works, they will keep using the same trick until it doesn't work. Then they will try something else. In addition, as others pointed out, habitat and terrain play a role. Bucks in farmland, being shot from 300 yards away, have little opportunity to learn they are being hunted. However, bucks in thick and/or steep terrain, where shooting distances are very limited, have many more opportunities to get close enough to a hunter to detect them and try a way around them. If it works, they keep doing that.

And of course, the biggy is hunting pressure. The more pressure, the more they learn. I've seen example after example of this. I've worked on properties where bucks are not legal for harvest until they are mature. On very large properties practicing this type of harvest, I've never seen such dumb 3 1/2 year-olds! They have never truly been hunted. They encounter hunters and nothing bad happens. They learn nothing. This leads to some fairly dumb 4 1/2 year-olds!
 

Latest posts

Back
Top