As a kid, one of my favorite pastimes was hopping in the back of Dad’s pickup (no topper) to go looking for deer during the last hour of the day. My brother, Steve, and I would stand in the bed of the truck with elbows leaning on the truck cab. Dad would drive dirt roads (not fast) and visit numerous green fields within 5 miles of our western Wisconsin cabin. He’d slow the pickup to a crawl as we approached a likely field. (I’m sure Dad would be arrested for child endangerment if he did it today.)
Because Steve and I had better visibility due to our higher vantage point, we’d drum the metal cab as a sign that Dad should stop the truck. We didn’t carry binoculars back then, so it was tough to see the size of velvet bucks in the distance. And now that I think about it, we were far more interested in quantity than quality. It was all about how many total deer we could see during our 45-minute adventure.
I was reminded of these good times when Dad, Mom and I went looking for deer over the Independence Day weekend. We drove the same gravel roads we traveled 45 years ago, and the same fields were home to numerous whitetails. That said, not everything was the same. For starters, I wasn’t standing in the bed of the pickup! Instead, I sat in the passenger seat while Dad drove; Mom occupied the back seat of the Ford Crew Cab. And yes, we all wore seatbelts.
Another difference is we all had binoculars, and Dad and I were more interested in quality than quantity. Mom began keeping track of the total number but stopped counting when we topped 100 whitetails.
I also don’t remember a time when we saw so many mature bucks. In fact, I’d say 20 of the first 100 deer we glassed were bucks that will grow racks scoring at least 120 Pope and Young Club points this fall.
We didn’t spot any giants; our area isn’t a hotbed for world-class trophies like famed Buffalo County and other well-known destinations. Our county receives tremendous hunting pressure during the annual 9-day firearms season (centerfire rifles are legal; tags are over the counter, even for nonresidents), and the patchwork of woods and farm fields are relatively easy for teams of orange-clad hunters to conduct deer drives. Simply put, in the past several decades not a high percentage of bucks survived to 3.5 years or older.
In my opinion, the reason our area has more mature bucks this year than usual is we had a massive storm hit during July 2019. A couple tornadoes accompanied straight-line winds of up to 85 mph. The severe straight-line winds lasted nearly 20 minutes, and combined with torrential rains, leveled a high percentage of trees throughout the county. The devastating storm made it all but impossible for deer hunters to walk through the woods, which means the whitetail harvest in the wind-damaged areas was much lower than normal during the 2019 and 2020 firearms seasons. Bucks born in spring 2018 that would have made up most of the gun harvest in fall 2019 survived. And they didn’t get shot in 2020, either. And now, in 2021, they will be 3.5 years old by deer season. In other words, at no time in my life have so many mature bucks walked the woods in my hunting area. Exciting!
