Busy, Busy, Busy!

Well, things are picking up at work and it seems like I haven't had a chance to catch my breath, let alone update my blog.

I'm sitting in a hotel room in nowhere Arizona and finally am getting around to making a new post though.

We stopped by the land on the way back to Lubbock after visiting the in-laws for Thanksgiving and I was able to check my trail cameras. Had quite a few decent pictures, and one pretty nice buck that I hadn't ever seen before. Maybe next year I'll be able to spend some more time down there and be more selective on shooting a nice buck.

New pictures start on page 10 and go on to page 12. http://padens.com/v-web/gallery/album08?page=10

Here's a couple pictures of the new buck I hadn't ever seen before. I had several pictures of him over about a week time frame with many of them in the daytime.
Nice tall tines on this guy.
Some more pictures of a bobcat. I'm really hoping to get one of these guys in a trap this year.
One odd thing is that I didn't have any large sounders of pigs on camera this 2 week period. I did have a few different boar hogs that were hanging around pretty regular, but they were 100% nocturnal.
I moved a camera over onto my field where I had been seeing all the action last time I was down there. If you click on the picture to enlarge it and look really close you can see my tripod stand in the background right over the back of the doe on the left. It looks like a little black dot in the trees.
This buck looks pretty young. Not sure if I've seen him before or not but he looks like he has potential. Of course since I passed on the tall 11 I didn't get any pictures of him during these 2 weeks. Hopefully he is just being camera shy and someone else didn't shoot him.

I did find out that I had a water leak at some point and will be getting a water bill for 9,000+ gallons of water that leaked sometime during the 2 weeks. I have been letting my neighbors tap into my water supply instead of having to haul water out there, but unless I can figure out what caused the leak and make sure I can avoid a repeat of it I'm going to have to re-think our agreement.

I did get a chance to go pheasant hunting last Saturday and brought a couple birds home. I may get a chance to post on that sometime.

Well, that's it for now.

Nathan

Shot an interesting buck last weekend...

I'm pretty sure I have 3 years worth of trail camera pictures of this guy and am guessing his age at 7 1/2 years old based on his jawbone. I did a crappy job of getting good pictures of him as it was after dark by the time I was able to get out of my stand and go get him and I was by myself . I guess I'm going to have to get a little tripod to carry around with me.

Here he is hanging.
The first odd thing about this buck was that the broken right antler was completely detached from his skull plate. I'm pretty sure that it was broken 2 years ago and since it was detached from his skull plate he never was able to drop that antler and grow another. It never turned white, but it does look like it has been hanging on there for several years.

Here is a picture after I skinned his head - http://padens.com/v-web/gallery/albums/album07/buck_skinned.jpg

I'm just going to link it since it might be considered a little graphic. Kind of hard to tell, but when I skinned it, the antler was completely detached and meat had grown all around where it had broken. It wasn't much of a jigsaw puzzle because enough bone was missing that it didn't fit back on the skull plate anywhere.

Here's his jawbone.
I have the jawbone of the buck I shot last year that was aged by the lab with cementum annuli at 8 1/2 and based on that jawbone and the trail camera pictures I'm fairly confident this buck was 7 1/2. I'm going to go ahead and send the lower incisors off to get aged anyway. I'm starting to collect some pretty impressive jawbones though!

The buck weighed in at 162lbs on the hoof which was 10lbs lighter than the 8 1/2 year old I shot last year. This guy had some heavy tarsal staining and looked like he was about to get going with the rut right around the corner here. I did get some good video footage of him before I decided to go ahead and take him, if I figure out how to get that uploaded I'll do that. My Sony video camera has a weird codec and it is a pain to resize and upload.

The last thing that was interesting was that his right shoulder was fused to his vertebrae with some VERY thick cartilage that was almost as hard as a bone. I had to hack at it pretty hard to get the shoulder off. I should have taken some pictures of it but didn't. When I butchered him, his shoulder muscles were developed a little differently than you would think. I didn't spend a whole lot of time analyzing it, just enough to know that it wasn't exactly normal and I assumed it was related to the shoulder being fused to the vertebrae.

Putting it all together I'm wondering if this guy got hit by a car on his right side or something. I just don't think his antler could have been broken off inside his head like that from fighting and that would explain the shoulder too.

Not a trophy that is going to end up on my wall, but a very unique buck that I was proud to harvest. I don't even know how you would begin to actually score something like him.

I just seem to be shooting these guys after their prime instead of during their prime. Maybe they are easier to kill once they are over the hill than when they are truly in their prime.

I'm not 100% sure, but I'm pretty confident that this is him 2 years ago. He was a pretty nice buck then!
Here he is 4 days later with his right side broken off.
A closer picture of him after the break. This doesn't really fit with the hit by car theory since his shoulder looks fine here.
Here's a couple pictures of him last year. He was just a smooth spike on the left side last year. Maybe he got injured during the summer and that's why his left antler grew funny. In the first picture it does look like some scaring on his right shoulder.


I have some trail camera pictures of him from this year as well. He seemed to be a range shifter as I didn't have any pictures of him during the spring or summer during any year, but he seemed to show up in the late fall.

I did see the 3 1/2 year old that I've been following since last year a couple times and could have easily shot him. I'm sure hoping that he makes it through this year and I get a crack at him next year. I don't think I'll be able to pass him up next year.

I had a novel started on the hunt, but haven't gotten a chance to finish it and figured no one probably wanted to read it anyway so I went ahead and posted this. Been super busy at work and gonna stay that way for a while.

That's it for now.

Nathan

The cape is at the Taxidermist!!!

Well, the cape is at the taxidermist!

Hunted hard on opening day in New Mexico, ended up putting 9 miles on my boots according to my gps. I was mainly hunting 2 sections of land that were between some crop circles to the south and a couple circles to the north. This area is generally referred to as the sand hills and it pretty much lives up to it's name. Plenty of sand and plenty of hills! I never did think to just take a picture of the terrain I was hunting in, but it really was some neat country.

I was worried going into the hunt that it would be more of a "shoot" than a "hunt". I had visions of going over there and getting out by a crop circle of alfalfa or peppers and using my spotting scope to pick out the best buck and then moving in on it and closing the deal with my 7mm Remington Magnum. That was not the case at all!

I pulled our travel trailer over there and spent the night so I could be ready to go early in the morning on opening day. I set my alarm for 5:00am and was at a spot that I had picked out when I visited the weekend before at 5:30 waiting for shooting light. The deer clear out of the crop fields long before daylight so the idea is to pick a spot between the fields and their bedding areas and catch them heading back to their beds in the morning. The prime time for deer movement is early in the morning until about a half hour after sunrise. I did see some deer, but only 5 does and one small buck, but nothing even close to what I was looking for.

Around 8:30am I started walking to see if I could find any promising spots to be sitting the next morning and 5 miles later I was back at the truck. I moved to a different spot on the east side of the property around lunchtime and found a nice tall hill that gave me a good view of the surrounding area. I bumped 3 does near the hill and thought it might be a good place to eat lunch and see if I could see anything moving. I ate lunch and got restless, so I put my backpack back on and started walking, looking for sign and thinking I might bump some more deer out of their beds, maybe even a good buck. No such luck, but I put another 3 miles on my boots according to my gps. Between the sand and the hills, I was getting pretty tired by the time I made it back to the truck this time and decided that my evening hunt wasn't going to involve as much walking!

I went up to the north edge of the property thinking I might catch some deer moving into the alfalfa fields before it got too dark. I sat down around 2:00pm and sunset wasn't until 4:50 so I brought a book along to read to pass the time. Around 4:30 things started looking interesting, but I didn't see anything moving. At sunset I wasn't very optimistic, and I got distracted by the sunset and took some pictures with my camera. I'm not a good enough photographer to really do it much justice (and I was using a little cannon point and shoot camera), but it really was a beautiful sunset.

After taking several pictures (I did disable the flash), I looked around and thought I saw a deer standing there looking at me a couple hundred yards away. I carefully picked my binoculars up and sure enough, it was a deer, and it was a buck! We had a stare off contest for what seemed like forever but was probably only 3 or 4 minutes, and then he started coming my way. I was tucked up under a bush and in full camo except for my hat so I guess he couldn't see me very well. It was pushing legal shooting light, and I could see that he was a decent buck, his antlers were as wide as his ears (generally considered 24" for a muley) and pretty tall, but they weren't very heavy and I could only count 3 tines on one side so I ended up passing on him. He moved off to my west toward the alfalfa field and I waited 10 or 15 minutes until it was pretty dark and then stumbled back through the sand hills to the alfalfa field and then back to the truck. The gps showed a measly 1 mile on my boots on that trip for a total of 9 miles for the day. I was tired!

I was in bed by 8:00pm and set my alarm for 4:30am the next morning. I was going to go back to the big hill on the east side of the property and see if I could catch some deer moving through back to their bedding areas. It was overcast and foggy and I couldn't see much past 200 yards for the first hour or so, but it started to clear up a little and I had pretty good visibility around sunrise at 6:15. After 2 hours on the hill I still hadn't seen a thing. It was quiet and things just seemed dead. I was second guessing myself on passing that buck the night before, and I was really starting to think I should have taken him. Coulda, shoulda, woulda...

I decided to start walking instead of just sitting there, and about 300 yards to the west I bumped 3 does out of their beds. The predominate wind is from the southwest and pretty much all the deer I had bumped from their beds were on hillsides facing north. I checked out a spot that I had seen from the hill that looked promising, but didn't see much sign there. Went over the ridge and saw a spot on a north facing hillside that looked pretty deery. Some good brush at just about the right spot. Started walking toward it and about 100 yards away from the brush, HE popped up out of some grass. He was only about 50 yards away and it was pretty easy to tell right away he was a shooter.

He was looking straight at me, but I didn't want to wait for a better angle, because once an older buck like this one starts moving, they generally don't stop until they are long gone. I just dropped to a knee, pulled up and shot. He just stood there. I automatically chamber another round every time I fire, so I shot again and hit him solid. He struggled for a few seconds and then went down. I was surprised that I missed from 50 yards, but chalked it up to nerves. I called my wife and told her I had a big buck down, but I didn't know how big.

It all happened so fast I didn't have a chance to take my backpack off or anything. It's kind of funny that I've been collecting all these gadgets (range finder, gps, removable bi-pod, spotting scope, etc.) and when it comes down to actually shooting something it seems like I rarely if ever end up using them. This was just a bam, bam transaction. From the time the deer stood up to the time he was on the ground was probably only 10 to 15 seconds. When I caped him out it turns out I didn't miss with the first shot, but it might as well have been a miss. It was a through and through flesh wound on his right shoulder that would have hurt for a while, but almost certainly wouldn't have been a fatal wound. Hard to believe that I made a bad shot from that distance, and even harder to believe that he didn't even flinch or jump or run when I hit him with that first shot, but I'm sure glad he stuck around and let me get that second shot off!

5 minutes later I walked over to him and he was BIG! 6x6! He definitely is an older deer and his antlers have great character.Tailgate tape job has him at 181 7/8! Biggest deer I've ever killed by far. (My 2007 Muley was 145") I caped him out and quartered him on the spot, and his quarters, backstraps and some neck meat wouldn't all fit in one cooler! He was easily over 250lbs on the hoof. He's at the taxidermist now, but he said he would let me have the antlers back and his jawbones until he gets the cape back from the tannery. I'll score him again when I get the antlers back now that my hands aren't shaking and I'll send the lower incisors off to the lab to get a solid age on him. My gut feel has him at about 6 or 7 years old.

The only negative was that since I was hunting by myself, I was using my backpack for a tripod and my camera on a timer. I've used the timer before and the pictures turned out fine in the past. On the viewfinder the pictures looked okay, but it turns out that the camera was focusing on some blades of grass right in front of the camera and not on me and the deer. You can get a general idea from the pictures, but I sure wish they turned out better. I know to clear the area in front of the camera better in the future.

The focus on this one is better, my head is just chopped off!

I stopped by the house to unhitch the travel trailer before heading into town to meet the taxidermist to drop him off, so we took the opportunity to get a picture with Eli. He thought it was pretty neat! He doesn't refer to it as shooting a deer, he calls it "booming" a deer. So according to him, I "boomed a big deer"!

I did recover the bullet and was pretty impressed that it had lived up to it's advertising. I was shooting Winchester E-tips and they advertise 90% weight retention and good expansion. I found the bullet just inside the skin right next to the right hindquarter when I was quartering it out. The bullet had traveled about 3 feet to get where it was at and looked just like the ones in the advertisements. The rifling marks from the barrel were very distinct on the black bullet.

Well, that's about it for this novel. Overall I would have to say it was a VERY successful hunt.

When I took it into the taxidermist he said that was a deer of a lifetime and it is true so far for me. I don't think I'll quit hunting though!

I'm actually planning on going hunting on my own property toward the end of this week. I don't think there are any deer close to that size on my property, but there are a few on my hit list that I would like to see in person. A 150" whitetail would be about the equivalent to a 180" mule deer and I have a couple bucks that might be pushing that mark. Having a buck like this at the taxidermist will make it easier to pass up that 130" 3 1/2 year old if I see him though!

That's it for now. Nathan

Newest toy is here!

Well, my new electric golf cart is here! I'm pretty happy with it. I talked them into throwing in a few extras and they knocked a little off the price so I went ahead and got one of the camo ones.

I've already sent 2 referrals to them who ended up buying carts as well, and I've told a bunch more about them so I think they should still be okay after knocking a little off the price. After you figure in the electric vehicle credit of $5,335.60 on this model, it costs less than most 250cc 2 wheel drive ATVs.

Here's the cart home and unloaded. It has a full windshield that the demo cart didn't have and I really like the look of the black seats and black wheels over the tan seats and steel wheels on the one that I demo'd. It's street legal with blinkers, a horn, lights, etc. The new one seems to be a little tighter overall and doesn't creak and squeak like the demo version did, but I'm sure after enough bumpy rides it will get some creaks and squeaks of it's own.

Here's another picture of it. The back seat folds down to a platform and I'm going to build a wooden box that will sit on the platform that I'll use for hauling things like logs and rocks along with things like my chainsaw, etc. That way I won't have to strap things down and I think it will prolong the life of the platform and the seats underneath as well. I already bought a winch for it at Harbor Freight and will also be buying a gun rack for it off ebay. We took a little family drive around the property with it when I got it home and were rewarded by seeing a couple small mule deer bucks on the western edge of the property. We would have probably still seen them if we were on a 4 wheeler or in the pickup, but I don't think the cart being very quiet hurt anything. We got within 100 yards of them before they saw us and decided to run away.

I'll be heading out to New Mexico tomorrow evening for opening day over there on Saturday. Hopefully I'll be updating the blog with a successful mule deer hunt before too long!

That's it for now. Nathan

Trick or Treat... My 100th Post

I thought about making some kind of special post for my 100th post, but instead I'll just keep doing what the blog was intended to be, keeping an online diary of what's going on.

Of course Saturday was Halloween and we took Eli out Trick or Treating. I still have yet to see anyone giving out tricks instead of treats on Halloween, but I guess at some point that was an option!

Eli dressed up as Superman for Halloween this year and seemed to enjoy it quite a bit. Our church has been doing a "Trunk and Treat" for several years and we did that this year for the 2nd time. We probably had around 200 trick or treaters stop by our tailgate in right at 1 hour while we were there. Eli made the rounds and nearly ended up with as much candy as we gave out!

Here he is in his Superman costume. I think he was expecting this guy to pour the entire bowl of candy into his bag! He really seemed to enjoy passing out the candy to the other trick or treaters, but there were a few that scared him and instead of giving them candy, he covered his eyes! You probably can't see me in the picture since I'm dressed in all camo. ;-)
Some of our friend's son from church also ended up dressed as superman. I think they were discussing who the real superman was here.
I uploaded about 3 or 4 months worth of pictures into Eli's gallery last night, and am now pretty much caught up. There are a lot of pictures from this summer and fall in there including some from the elk hunting trip to Wyoming and several others. I really thought this picture of him in the sunflower field was cute. He is starting to say "cheese" for the camera, the only problem is that when he says "cheese" and smiles really big, he generally closes his eyes!
Here's a BUNCH more pictures of him if you are interested - http://padens.com/v-web/gallery/album09?page=4

Well, that's about it for this post. Some beautiful West Texas fall weather recently here. Hope everyone is doing really well.

Nathan

Busy Week!

Well, last week was a pretty busy week for me. It started off with us coming to an agreement with our neighbors (at the house) to buy 8.8 acres of land from them. They have 17.4 acres now and don’t think they need that much land, so we’re going to buy it to keep from having any other neighbors move in. Probably paying too much for it, but it is the tract that is closest to our house so this gives us a nice buffer zone now. Hopefully we will be able to close on it within the next month or so. That will put us up to 51 acres of land around the house.

I scraped my hand while cleaning my fish tank on Sunday, and didn’t think much about it since I’ve done the same thing dozens of times, but the next day it was starting to look infected. By Tuesday it was pretty bad and my entire hand was swollen and red. Wednesday morning it was even worse so I went to the Dr. He prescribed 2 different antibiotics and it really didn’t start to get much better until Friday evening. It’s almost back to normal now.

Watching the weather forecasts, there was a 50% chance of rain on Wednesday so I decided to go down and plant the 33 acres of wheat on Tuesday. My hand was too sore to do much with at work (I was barely able to type) but I felt like I would be able to drive the tractor with it. Last time I was down there planting I had put 600lbs of wheat in the grain drill thinking that it would stay dry instead of hauling it back and forth to the trailer like I did with the other 900lbs. I checked it and everything looked good so I started planting. After running about 5 acres I checked and on one side hardly any wheat had gone through the drill and on the other side it was about 1/2 gone. I was messing with some settings so I thought somehow it wasn't set right so I went around a few more times and the one side still wasn't planting much and so I dug down in the seed and discovered big patches of sprouted seed down in the bottom of the drill clogging several of the openings. Evidently some water had gotten into the drill and puddle up in the bottom and caused the problem. I cleaned it out and everything worked fairly well from there out.

After an hour, my tractor started to run poorly, and it seemed like a fuel delivery problem. I normally pull the grain drill in 6th gear without any issues, and it was bogging down badly in 6th gear and even struggling in 5th gear a little. I cleaned the radiator, and air filter, then messed with the fuel bleed valve and then cleaned my fuel filter and that seemed to solve the problem for a while. I didn’t really have much to clean the filter with though. I was just taking it out and blowing through it – you gotta love the taste of diesel fuel in the morning! The second time I cleaned it I dropped it in the dirt. Not a good thing. I ended up having to finish in 5th gear and even dropped into 4th a couple times. At less than $3 and a whopping 2 minute change out time, I probably should keep a spare fuel filter with the tractor.

I finally got done planting about 30 minutes after dark with 1,500lbs of wheat seed in the ground. I ended up running out of seed with about 1 acre to go in the middle of the field, but I am planning on planting that in something else this spring anyway. I’m actually starting to get the settings on the drill figured out. The seed bed was pretty ugly (I just had them disc in all the standing vegetation including tumbleweeds, old sorghum, etc.) but hopefully it will turn out alright. After missing the first rain in the forecast, it rained on it pretty good late Wednesday night, and it was a good thing I got it planted because it would have been too wet to plant it this weekend like I had planned on originally.

Okay, I’ve written a novel already and no pictures!

I still had other projects to get done on the land so I still went down there this weekend. Friday worked perfectly, with me getting down there and sitting in the new blind for a little over an hour and then shooting a 150lb boar pig. I stayed in the blind until after dark and saw several coyotes (they were 400+ yards away), and a few deer, but nothing that would have been a shooter even if it had been deer season (it opens November 7th). We still have a LOT of pig in the freezer, and my neighbors to the north of me were there at their hunting camp so I asked them if they wanted the pig and they said sure. That saved me from messing with it and I didn't want to waste it, so I gave it to them. It should be a good eater. Hunted again Saturday morning and not much going on. Shot at a coyote with my .22 Mag, and I think I hit it, but it ran off. Put up a new tripod stand on the edge of the fields that I planted a few weeks ago, most of the deer activity I’ve been seeing is on those fields so I think that will be a hot spot in a couple weeks still. While I was working on it a coyote came out into the field about 100 yards away and I was behind some cactus so it just saw some movement but couldn’t figure out what it was so it came over to investigate. It got about 25 yards away and I stood up and shot at it with my .22LR pistol, but I missed it. I put some camo netting on it to help it blend in and I think the end result was pretty good.
I need to remember if I put another one of these up to put most of the netting on it when it is still on the ground though, it took about the same amount of time to put the netting on it after it was in the air than it did to assemble the entire tripod on the ground! Of course the 25+ mph wind didn’t help much.

Here’s a picture of it from the other side of the small field. You can see the food plot is looking really good for only 3 weeks old. It is amazing what some rain can do!The next project was finishing my gate at the very front of the property. At one point in it’s life, one acre in the very northeast corner was sold separately from the rest of the property. It has a fence around it but no gate to keep people from driving into that corner of the property. When I first bought the place I had a trail camera stolen and had a few indications that people were trespassing and I’ve been meaning to put a gate in for a couple years now. Gates went on sale at Tractor Supply and I bought some and actually put the gate in a month or so ago, but then noticed some tire tracks just driving around the gate so I ended up putting a fence in. When it was all said and done I probably only put in 75 to 100 feet of fence, but it was still some pretty hard work. I only put in 3 strand barbwire since the goal is more to keep people out rather than keeping cattle. Hard to see the barbwire in the picture, but it actually didn’t turn out that bad.
Sunday was the last day of fall dove season so I went out to the pond at the house for an hour or so right before dark and ended up getting 5 birds. If I was a better shot I would probably limit out every time! Our dog “Baby” who is a full blooded Rottweiler goes with me and is actually getting to be a pretty good retriever. I ended up with 41 birds for the fall season. We have a winter season over the holidays for the first time this year so I still might get to 50 before the end of the year.

Overall it was a pretty busy week. I’m actually starting to think I might be actually getting older and should slow down a little bit!

That's it for now. Nathan

Electric Cart Demo - Food Plot Checkup

Well, I made an unscheduled trip down to the land today to try out a lifted electric golf cart. I saw an ad on craigslist for them talking about a big federal tax credit on them (64% of the cost of the carts I'm looking at) and started checking on it and everything seems legitimate on it. To qualify for the tax credit, it has to be street legal so it has a horn, blinkers, lights, etc., etc. I have kind of toyed around with the idea of buying an old golf cart and doing a bunch of work on it and then using it down on the land, but this ends up cheaper than about any option I was looking at and you end up with a brand new street legal cart with a 4 year warranty. Top speed is only 25mph but that's plenty for what I'll be using it for.

I test drove one at the dealership and was pretty impressed, but I wasn't sure if it would make it up the big hill to my hunting blind down on the land. I test drove it at my house and tried to get it to climb out of the caliche pit, but that was a little beyond it's capabilities (I'm not sure our 4x4 pickup could have made it where I was trying the cart). I've been waffling on whether or not to buy it and the salesman told me that I could take the cart down to the land and find out for sure if it would make it up the hill or not, so I decided to take him up on the offer.

My company car and the little trailer got called into duty again to haul the cart down to the land. The cart isn't huge, but it is quite a bit bigger than a regular ATV.

Here's a closer view of the cart on the trailer. It fit pretty well, but the front rack was a tiny bit too tall to fit under the front deflector on the trailer so I couldn't pull it all the way forward on the trailer. I still ended up with enough tongue weight, but I may go ahead and remove that deflector since I've never really liked it anyway. It also makes it a little harder to strap the cart down since you can't just loop over the front axle and ratchet it down.

Here's what I brought it down there to find out whether it could handle. Hills never look as steep in pictures as they do in real life, but you can get a general idea. I always put the pickup in 4wd to go up this hill, I don't think it would make it otherwise. The cart is 2wd and although they do make a 4wd version, it is much more expensive and doesn't qualify for the federal tax credit. Anyway, the goal of this trip was to see if the 2wd cart would make it up the hill. My 2wd ATV can go up it so I was hoping the cart could make it up it as well. Long term, I'm thinking that Eli and I would be riding to the top of the hill and getting into the hunting blind in the early morning instead of walking in the dark with a 5 or 6 year old. Well, it made it! Didn't have much of a problem at all. It felt a little light in the front end at the top, but the front wheels never left the ground so that was good. If it was wet it might not make it up there, but that's pretty rare around here!Here's another shot of the cart at the top of the hill with the new hunting blind in the background.
Besides running around in the dark in stealth mode (the electric cart is VERY quiet compared with an ATV) the other use for the cart will be chores. The back seat folds down to haul things. I'll probably build some type of a wooden box to set on the platform for times when I will be working down on the land. I'm thinking that it will be hauling a chainsaw, lopers, rope, weedeater, etc. when I'm down there doing habitat improvements. For now it was hauling a new tripod stand that I'm going to be putting up.
So, the demo was pretty much a resounding success. The cart has a few creaks here and there that I think I can fix pretty easily, but overall I was very impressed. The demo version is in camo, but the solid color versions are $400 cheaper so I'm planning on getting a solid color one. I had pretty much decided on black, but the only negative is that they are selling so well that during the time I was debating on buying it, all of the carts that are coming in at the end of October are already sold so it looks like I won't be getting one until mid November at the earliest.

While I was down there I was able to check on the food plots that I planted a couple weeks ago and I was very happy with how well they were doing. Here's one of the shooting lanes that I planted with the fancy mix with some added winter peas and clover.
Here's a close up of the plot. It looks like the clover and alfalfa are getting a good start.
Not the best picture, but here's the shooting lane from the blind up on the hill. Before I cleared the shooting lane, animals could move through without ever being seen.
Here's the smaller field that I planted in the Turner Seed Fall Deer Mix. The greener spot is where I added some extra rye, oats and clover on top of the mix. On this field I had the drill set too low and had to go over it several times.
Here's the 13 acre field that is planted in pretty much just a Rye/Oats mix. I added a tiny bit of winter peas to it, but not enough to probably matter. The tripod stand that I'm putting in will be in a pinch point between these 2 fields.
Part of what I'm planning on doing this spring is planting switchgrass for the deer to use for bedding cover. I've been researching out different varieties and trying to find some that will grow with our limited rainfall, but still get 5 or 6 feet tall. It is crazy that Johnson grass is growing that tall in this field and I didn't even plant it. I'm curious if it will stay standing this winter or if it will get knocked down.
In my last post I noted the bumper crop of berries on the chittamwood trees and it looks like the pigs are enjoying them for sure. I noticed that they are falling to the ground now and based on this it looks like the are pretty much eating them exclusively right now.
Always good to end a post with a picture of a big 'ol pile of pig poop, but that's about it for now. I still need to get back down there and plant the 33 acres of wheat and I may spend the weekend and try to thin the pig population down as well.

That's it for now. Nathan