First Mature Buck on Public Land

In 2021 I graduated college and took a job three hours from home in north Jersey. I found myself in a new home with a clean slate, and no idea where and how to shoot a deer. Hunting a completely new area is a daunting task, it would be easy to greet the change with a lack of optimism. This would be my first time hunting public land, up until this point the entirety of my deer hunting has been on a family managed property on Maryland’s eastern shore. While I have been hunting for nearly a decade, my sphere of experience is admittedly small. I knew from day one I had a lot to learn but was eager to explore the new opportunity.

My journey started by reading and watching everything I could get my hands. I spent hours reading articles and listening to podcasts. The conclusion I came to from all this information was in order to be the most efficient in a new area, still hunting needed to be my go to strategy, at least for now. I would hike as far into a piece of public as I could, well away from the majority of pressure, concentrated near the trailheads, to find the most secluded bedding areas. Within the first few outings my plan produced mixed results. I was able to get a shot at my first deer all season, but I made a horrendous shot high and back, leading to what also happened to be the first deer I shot and didn’t recover. I wrote an article detailing this heart breaking experience you can find here.

Immediately following this experience I went back to the firehose for another drink, and kept learning everything I could. I began playing my access and wind correctly and continued to scour the property for the thickest bedding areas in the deepest sections of public land. I kept after it and a few weeks after that experience I found myself in the lowest point of the park, a swampy river bottom. A fifty yard square of open grass clearing bordered by a creek on one side, an thick briar patch on another, and knee deep swamp on the remaining two sides. It was on the edges of this grassy clearing that I found the highest concentration of buck sign I had seen on this piece of public. Every tree leading into the thicket was stripped of its bark from knee to chest high, fresh shavings littering the ground like a mulch pile. Hoof prints as big as my hand had worn a highway from the creek through the edge of the thicket and into the swamp. I was standing in a mature bucks living room and there was no doubt about it.

I was eager to hike back in for an evening setup but I couldn't screw this up. The overwhelming majority of the deer I had seen up until this point had been in a short window bordering dusk. I figured my best shot at this deer would be to catch him getting up from his bed and moving to food or water right at last light. I had to wait for the right conditions though, and the second week of November they came. A cold front bringing light rain and a northwest wind would allow me to slip in undetected and make my setup downwind of the bedding area with plenty of shooting lanes.

What was different about this sit, aside from the warm and fuzzies I had about my potential setup, was I was bringing a friend with me. Someone who had never once pondered the idea of hunting before today, but agreed to come along for the experience and to practice some new photography skills. Usually I have no choice but to solo hunt, so I was happy to have someone to share the experience with, and to keep me from hiking out alone in the dark. I’ll admit some fear of the dark still lingers on those pitch black hikes out of the woods alone. A partner always puts that at ease and hopefully serves as a much needed good luck charm.

It was a quick hike in and we setup around three in the afternoon, two and a half hours before sunset, in a dried up ditch leaned against a tree and surrounded by switchgrass. Our spot was as concealed as possible surrounded by uninterrupted shot opportunities out to forty yards. The wind blowing a heavy mist fifteen miles an hour straight in our faces. I got comfortable and waited for dark.

The howling wind gave us some liberty to talk in a low whisper and I was attempting to fill my buddy in on the string of events that led me to this setup. I had just finished explaining the abundance of sign in this spot and was getting to explaining the uncanny ability of mature deer to sneak up on you silently in windy wet conditions when my lesson was taught for me. I look over my opposite shoulder at the biggest buck I’ve ever had in bow range, bobbing his head and scanning the clearing at twenty yards. We both freeze, myself in preparation for him to glance our direction and my buddy freezing in fear. The deer stares right at us, doing a quick head bob in our direction before quickly deciding we were just a funny looking pile of grass, he then left the thick safety of his home swamp, carefully and silently moving into the clearing and towards the timber. Without any room for error I waited until the brief window when the buck moved behind a small stand of switchgrass and his sight was interrupted. It was my only chance and my window was closing fast, in one fluid movement I rose to a kneel, clipped my release on and extended to full draw just in time for his front shoulder to clear the tall grass. By this point he is staring and looking towards the source of disturbance, quartering away, clearly aware of our presence and preparing to take off. Without time to range him I took a confident guess on points I had ranged previously, put my 30 pin at the bottom third of his body, just behind the front shoulder, exhaled and squeezed my release.

Both our jaws hung in the mud, as he turns and runs for the thicket, blood flowing behind. The arrow buried halfway to the fletchings just where I placed my pin. I hit him perfectly. I checked my watch, twenty after three. We had only been sitting for twenty minutes, I had to pinch myself to make sure it was real. I had imagined a moment like this a thousand times in my head before, playing out each decisive moment in my mind and precisely how I would respond to each flicker of his ear.

To most it may seem to be just daydreaming, but at that moment it was mental preparation. I am a firm believer that because I envisioned a moment just like that in my mind so many times the night before, the morning of, and on the truck ride there, that when the moment came I knew exactly what to do and reacted appropriately. If I had to choose my greatest take away from this hunt it would be the importance of this visualization. Taking mental notes of where deer are most likely to come from and what you plan to do in the moment that counts can help keep you from freezing up and making the most of your opportunities.

We found him not far from where we last saw him, fifty yards into the thickest briar patch I had ever seen. He was a massive six point, with tall brow tines and g2’s and a good bit of palmation on his right side, all around a unique mature public land buck. I am undoubtedly very grateful he presented the opportunity to take him home. Even if he was a long heavy drag out uphill.