Last weekend, the weekend of 11/4/11 and 11/5/11, I went bow hunting 3 times with no success. I went for morning and evening hunts on the Milford Neck Wildlife Management Area – Penuel Tract. The morning hunt was from my favorite stand (#3), which is positioned back off the main access road, further than most of the other stands, and positioned overlooking a field that is normally planted with various grasses and surrounded by clover. Now that the main fields on the WMA have been cut (sunflowers, corn, and soybeans), the deer have been confined to feeding on a smaller set of fields. There is a small field of what look like turnips by stand 7, and a single line of some new crop around the perimeter of the field in front of stand 3 (see photos).
I arrived at the stand about 1 hour before legal shooting light and got situated. Besides my normal sprayed coating of cover scent on my clothing, I added some doe estrus urine to my boots, as the bucks have officially entered the seeking phase of the rut. The doe scent definitely worked, as a small spike buck appeared from the woods about 45 minutes after dawn. He was cruising for does, and moved too fast to present a safe shot with the bow, but did wander within easy kill range of the stand.
My afternoon hunt that day was in my neighbor’s stand positioned over an uncut soybean field. There was no activity at all that evening.
The following afternoon (11/5), I moved to a stand that I have yet to hunt. I hunted from the #4 stand at the Penuel Tract, which is positioned in the woods at the end of a dividing line of woods between two cut fields. Again, there was no activity, but I had begun to expect that from the beginning of the hunt, as the wind was blowing across me into the woods where I had seen the most activity, and there were 3 other hunters using stands 5-7 this evening.
Regardless, I continued to take pictures of my surroundings…
Deinert in Delaware 