Mike Kessler sent me this shot of a mule deer he shot on Oct. 21 during a trip to Wyoming.
What a great buck, and what a great picture.
I have several other local deer shots in hand that I'll post throughout the day. I want to get them all taken care off because things are going to go ballistic starting tomorrow with the opening of the early muzzleloader season.
Rodney Nipper is having what he calls his best year of whitetail hunting. These pictures (click the image for a larger image) support that.
Nipper killed the big six-pointer on opening day from a ground blind in Roanoke County, at range of 18 yards.
The heavy eight, which Nipper says is his best-ever buck, was killed in Craig County on Oct. 21, at a range of 10 yards.
Nipper has also killed a doe. I don't think you'll find too many hunters in Virginia who have had this kind of success this early in the season.
Kevin Keeney of Ferrum just sent me a great series of trailcam photos from a neighbor. He calls the series: "Before bear, bear, after bear."
The bear shot, of the animal's snout, is pretty funny. But I just love the upside down buck shot.
Here's how Keeney concluded his note: "You may want to suggest to your readers that it is a good investment to get a steel camera box, or metal cage to enclose their trail cameras in. The bears seem to think the more expensive the camera, the better it tastes."
Well put.
A reader just sent me this shot of a great buck captured a couple days ago on a trailcam on his property. This is the kind of deer that will cause a guy to spend some extra hours in the stand.
According to Roanoke Times weather columnist Kevin Myatt, warmer weather may be returning to the area soon. We can only hope it doesn't get too warm. Forecasts I'm seeing are calling for highs in the 60 and lows in the 40s next week. It would be nice to have some lower lows, but this is better than what we've had in some recent years. In 2003, for example, we had record temps in the 80s that week.
Deer still move in the heat, but not as much. Plus it can just be uncomfortable to hunt. Conditions look decent for Saturday's muzzleloader opener. Right now the forecast is for highs in the upper 60s and lows in the mid-40s.
Here I'm begging for deer pictures and I find this one while cleaning out my e-mail inbox.
I don't have many details on this trailcam shot except that the buck reportedly was on private land in Roanoke County, near the Blue Ridge Parkway (of course). His brow tines are only so-so but I guess I'd be willing to use a tag on him.
Bucks like this are moving around after dark now, but they'll will become more and more vulnerable during daylight as we move toward the middle of November.
As usual for the second half of October, the number of deer pictures and hunting reports coming my way has slowed to a trickle.
A combination of factors is responsible. This weather doesn't help. Yes, it's cool. But the wind is brutal and it doesn't look to get any better until maybe tomorrow afternoon. As a buddy just wrote in an e-mail, "Yikes! It's nasty out there!"
But even when the weather is good, hunting pressure is always lighter now than it is earlier in the month, when eager bow and crossbow hunters flood the woods for their first chance to hunt in about nine months. Deer are are also fairly easy to pattern early in the month as they are keying on relatively easy-to-identify food sources such as acorns.
This is a Eric Brittle, a Virginia Department of Game and Inland fisheries biologist who works in the Suffolk area. I got the shot from a friend at the agency, but I don't imagine Brittle will mind me posting it here. Because, well, wow!
Here's the story as Brittle wrote it: Read more »
Ralph Barton said he saw this bear twice while scouting his hunting area in Botetourt County this past summer. The area's good white oak acorn crop kept the bear around.
Several hunts from the stand were unproductive, but the bear finally showed up this past Saturday and Barton, pictured here with his 7-year-old son Chris, had his first bear with a bow after seven years of trying.
OK. This the kind of buck you'd expect Mark Drury to say about, "He's got good potential and could be really nice in a year or two."
But in Southwest Virginia, this is a shooter for just about anyone.
So why did Nino Ripepi pass it up during a recent bow hunt?
Because he was hunting at the Radford Army Ammunition Plant, and he was drawn this year for the doe hunt. (He got one, too.)
Nino said he saw six bucks, and he got good pictures of this seven-pointer and another eight. The other four bucks were all bigger.
He said action was so good all day that the hunt flew by. Now that he's done his doe hunt -- Radford has been using an earn-a-buck program for its quota hunts for years -- he'll get to start applying for an archery hunt.
Well, it finally feels like October. I actually felt it change.
Saturday morning started out mild and damp. Then the wind picked up and I'm pretty sure it got colder as I sat there in my stand.
Hunting was slow. I saw just one deer and it was too far away to even get a good ID on it. But I still love that spot. I think I'll rest it until later in the month.
I think it has potential as a decoy spot so I may try it with my little buck decoy the first week of November. That's muzzleloader season but I'll probably bow hunt if I have the decoy out.
This is when things tend to get quiet for a bit out there -- and I just this second got an e-mail from a hunter complaining about how slow it has been -- so I'm not crushed that my busy schedule will make it tough for me to hunt this week.
Oh, we have a new blog publishing system. Readers should notice a difference, but I hope I can be a little faster approving comments. If you have this blog bookmarked (and, thanks, if you do) you might want to bookmark it again just to be safe.
Keep the reports coming and safe hunting.
While growing up in rural Southern Oregon, Mark Taylor developed a passion for the outdoors while he and his younger brother tagged along with their father on fishing, hunting and camping adventures.
Graduating from Northwestern University in 1988, Taylor spent four years as an officer in the U.S. Navy based in Norfolk before moving into journalism.
After five years writing about the military for a Norfolk-based publishing company, he became the outdoors editor at The Roanoke Times in 1998. He lives in Roanoke with his wife and twin daughters.
