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DAY 2

Sunday Morning Hunt

What a difference a day makes. I hunted my namesake this morning. It felt like a great deer morning, calm, clear, and frosty. I started to see deer at first light - working their way across the grasslands. By 8:00 AM I had two bucks under my stand, one was a small 8 and the other was a spike. These two bucks hung around most of the morning, hitting on does which passed by. It was rather funny to watch them, like two nerds at a high school.

The does just kept coming. By 10 AM I must have had 20-30 of them work their way up the hedgerow past my stand. I kept waiting for that mature buck but he never came. It was a surprise to have such little activity in this stand on such a cold, still morning.

Sunday Afternoon Hunt

I didn't think the afternoon hunt could be slower, but, I was wrong. I sat the Calvary Creek stand, the place where I had killed my '03 buck. I was entertained most of the afternoon by a portly raccoon. He would climb trees and scurry around clumsily. I don't get to watch many raccoons back home so this was a treat.

It was almost too dark to videotape when a pair of fawns fed toward my stand. Twenty minutes later, and now pretty dark, a whole batch of does moved in and fed around me. Again, I kept waiting for a buck to show. One group at a time they filtering out to the wheat field behind me. Typically we see more bucks than does this time of year but for whatever reason, today was ladies day in Kansas.

The other guys fared the same. Lots of does and little bucks. Kyle Meintzer (CA) saw a buck just at dark that made him think about dropping the string. But he passed him. Bill Urban (NJ) and Ron Baxley (AR) had similar days' as me. It really warmed up and that may be part of the reason the mature bucks laid low.