A day like no other - part one

Our third weekend of trying to fill my daughters deer tag had us doing an overnight-er out of a nearby town.  Only nine more days of the season remained.  Even though this was a trophy deer hunt that she had drawn we never really looked at it that way.  We were looking for a mature buck, and her criteria to start off with was four points or better.  There is no doubt there are some good sized mule deer in the unit we were hunting.  The problem was the weather this year wasn't quite cooperating like it should.  The weekend before saw some extreme cold temperatures and snow in the higher elevations, which was a good sign as it gets the deer on the move, and gets them migrating more south into where we were hunting.  Unfortunately that weather didn't hold and it warmed up again.  All the deer we had run into had been herding up and contained one or more bucks in them, but finding those herds was tough as they seemed extremely spread out.

To say our first day was unproductive is in understatement.  We hunted a few different areas and saw absolutely no deer the entire day.  I could hardly believe it myself as we have seen deer every day that we have been here hunting.

We did see some of our usual buddies though.  Interesting seeing so many of these birds around while we were hunting.  These birds are magnificent, and if you would like to learn a little more about them then you can start here, sage grouse are pretty interesting birds.

My daughter was still in good spirits though as the day wrapped up and we were headed into town.  If your ever in Grand View, ID I recommend the Owyhee Restaurant, they make a great homemade pizza, as my daughter can attest to, unfortunately that's all I can recommend from that town, maybe we were just hungry...I may never know.

The next morning had us up bright and early in time to get to a spot we had seen deer previously.  We got to our vantage point a half hour before any sign of light.  In our favor it had snowed lightly the night before.  We glassed a herd that had a decent buck in it and decided to make a stalk on it, but in the end things didn't work out unfortunately.

These harvester ant hills out in the Owyhee's are everywhere, I had no idea what they were till I came home and my wife remembered what they were from one of her nature classes she had taken.  It would have taken these guys 18 months to two years to build this mound, I feel bad now for having destroyed one to see what it was, at least they have job security now when they come out of hibernation in the spring.

Stay tuned for part two.