it is amazing how many deer are on the island and how difficult the hunt can be, good job.
Truth.
There are somewhere in the neighborhood of 200-250 deer harvested per year on Whidbey, which sounds like a high number...but it's a huge island, the biggest in the lower 48, and there are a lot of deer there.
There are three types of land in south Whidbey (where we hunt); the towns of Clinton, Freeland, and Langley, and some parks around them, where there is no hunting. Not surprisingly, you can eyeball a metric shitton of deer in those places every night, and even a few around during the day. These deer have small home ranges and probably never leave the city limits their entire lives.
These are not the deer we are hunting.
The second type of land is semi-developed land outside the city limits...yards, farms, neighborhoods, a couple of golf courses. There is no hunting in the neighborhoods and golf courses, of course, and since the farms are sheep and cattle farms, there is no hunting on them, either. The rest in this category are literally people's yards. Those yards border on the heavy woods and get visiting deer all the time, and those are the ones that make up the bulk of the harvest...the homeowner shoots them in their back yard eating on their apple trees. The great majority of those 200 some odd deer are shot by residents in their yards...making morning coffee, look out the window and see a deer, grab gun from behind the door...BAM!
We aren't hunting these deer, either, except for one house on a 40 acre parcel we have permission to hunt...that owner doesn't mind if we shoot one in their yard, but we don't sit around and hunt it, it's where my rig is parked and where we start and end each day.
The last kind is the kind we hunt; an 80 acre parcel and a 40 acre parcel of mostly undeveloped land. There are some cleared areas, some meadowy-type areas, but almost all of it on both parcels is solid bushes and trees, with deer trails and short views. Steep, brushy, big trees, little trees, really swampy bottoms. It is shittty to walk thru, and there are very, very few spots where you can sit and watch an area and feel like you might see a deer...in most areas you would have to have one literally walk up on you while you were sitting.
That being said, I think that's how most of the handful of hunters do it, they find a spot where they can see 50 yards and sit there all day and wait for a deer to walk up on them. It works, but it's boring as hell and not very productive. As far as I'm concerned you may as well go somewhere where you can use your rifle and go sit on a clearcut all day with a thermos of coffee and update your facebook status hourly.
I like to get in the bushes with them, and creep around in the bushes, covering a few miles a day on game trails, and walking up on bedded down deer, or on deer that have got up to have their mid-day leg stretch and snack. (most of our deer there are harvested mid-day, otherwise they just aren't off their beds).
There aren't many hunters out there who are successful (outside of the homeowners shooting yard deer)...it's the crappiest terrain, with the sneakiest deer, in a place where it is virtually impossible to move without making a ton of noise. It's rarely windy, and rarely rainy, so it's almost always silent in the woods.
We team up occasionally and try and drive an area to a viewing spot for a shooter...it hasn't worked for us yet, for two reasons. One, the deer won't move unless you literally step on them, they just hunker down. Two, even if you drive one in front of you it will have to walk into a very small shooting area for the guy waiting at the other end, and the math says that it's unlikely, they just walk right by the guy and he never even knows it was there.
Last year I watched a buddy of mine walking up a trail. I was already tagged out, and was watching him from about 100 yards away, on one of the few "roads" in either of these parcels. "Roads" is in quotes because it was a road when it was originally logged, they are grown over trails now. He stepped to the edge of the "road" and stood up on a log and peered into the woods...and a deer came out of the woods right behind him, looked right at his back, and walked right behind him and into the bushes on the other side of the road.
It walked thru thick bushes, across the road ten feet behind him, and back into the thick bushes...and my buddy never even heard it. Makes me wonder how many are doing that around us in the bushes all day when we don't have a vantage point to see them! (Nick and I were both tagged out at this point last year, and I called a buddy to come out and hunt with us, and he went straight to that spot and shot that deer the next morning, a decent three point).
Their patterns are really erratic, and even with game cams cataloging their movements, there isn't a lot to learn except that there are a lot of deer around at night and they don't come out during the day.
On the 80 acre piece of land we had a handful of cameras and one would catch a deer on one night, and then again three nights later...and then he'd be gone for two weeks, and then show up on a cam a mile away, and not ever show up on the cams in between the two.
This happened repeatedly.
I can say this, though...the deer I shot two weeks ago showed up on a cam eight weeks ago, once, and we never saw him again. When I shot him he was 200 feet from that cam as the crow flies.
On the 40 acre parcel the landowner has permitted about half a dozen people to hunt there, and in the ten years since he built his house on the parcel there have been a grand total of four deer harvested there...the fourth one being the one we got last Saturday afternoon. Two of those four deer were shot in his yard. I jumped a giant three point with a doe there a month ago, but no chance to shoot, and that's the same one that Nick shot at and missed the following week. I also missed one there last year, as did one of our buddies.
There are five people with permission to hunt on the 80 acre parcel. One of the fellas had open heart surgery and almost exclusively sits in his truck on a cleared area and waits for a deer to come to him, he's not up to hiking up and down all the steep hills in the bushes. That has worked for him more than once over the years.
Not sure how many total have been killed there over the years, but we have done pretty well there. I shot one there this year and last year, and two of our buddies each shot one there last year as well. It's also where I missed one this year.
That's the parcel where we had all of our game cams, and even though we saw about a dozen different bucks on the cams ranging from young spikes to an absolutely behemoth four point, and everything in between, we only saw two deer in what was probably seven hunting days there this season...the one I shot, and the one I missed. Nick spotted the one I shot the night before but didn't get a shot, but I did the next day not far from where he saw it, and where it was on the cam two months earlier.
All this is to say that yes, there a lot of deer around there, and yes, they are the hardest animals I have ever hunted. To be able to be consistently successful there has been far more fulfilling than all of the other deer and elk hunts I have participated in over the years. They were fun, too, but I finally hung it up for quite a long time because they never really felt like hunting...they felt like shooting, and didn't tickle me in the right places.
This hunt completely does. I already can't wait until next year.
Fish on...
Todd
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