Lessons Learned from a Lost Deer

After moving to New Jersey last year I have spent my first season hunting a completely new area on my own. Until now my deer hunting career has consisted of long sits over corn piles on a piece of property my family has been managing for years. While I fully acknowledge the great fortune it is to be able to hunt a barely pressured piece of private land for free, it left me with a conflicted feeling towards White Tailed Deer hunting. I had little to no ability to make my own luck. I was to sit still and hope deer came near the stand someone else hung for me. I had too little control, the success of my hunt was left too much up to chance and other people's decisions for my liking.

I am entering the season eager to try something new and find my own deer deep in the heart of public land. With next to zero knowledge of how to be successful in achieving this daunting goal, I turned to google. I watched hours of videos and did well over double that in podcast listening leading up to October. The Meat Eater, The Hunting Public, Wired to Hunt, and Seek One Productions I found to be fantastic resources for creating a foundation of hunting knowledge for public land white tails. However, the take home message was unanimous across these sources, experience and knowledge can only truly be gained by getting out in the woods and learning through personal exploration. So that is what I did.

When you live in Jersey City and Midtown Manhattan is just outside your front window, there isn’t much hunting nearby. My choice for property happened to be guided by primarily proximity and for not too many reasons outside of that at first. With population densities estimated around 80 White Tailed Deer per square mile, I figured it would be hard to argue a lack of deer in my area as a reason for any spot in the state to not pan out. My first plan consisted of a couple of sits in my father’s old climbing tree stand. These few outings amounted to many hours without laying eyes on a deer.

After many uneventful sits in a tree, feeling as though I was never in quite the right spot I decided to throw out everything I thought I knew about bow hunting white tails and get aggressive. I had listened to hours of podcasts of guys getting aggressive and still hunting deer deep in the center of public land where nobody else wanted to go. With seemingly nothing to lose I learned as much as I could about still hunting and decided to leave the climber in the truck and commit to making the change for a while.

During my first few outings my technique was pretty simple. I dropped a waypoint on a peninsula of oak trees protruding out in a cattail marsh as far from any trailhead as I could find. From there I would work my way into the wind along the oak covered ridge bordering the marsh. I thought there I would find the highest concentration of deer in an area with abundant acorns close to the thickest remote cover. Sounds simple enough, but the conditions weren't quite in my favor. The morning frost melting and dampening the leaves was my only source of sound suppression on the remarkably still morning as I made my way in the dark to my first pin. From what I have learned, accepting that you will make a certain level of noise on the crunchy leaves is a requirement for success. Instead of trying to be quiet in impossible circumstances, making noises like a deer coming through the woods would be my best approach here. I stuck to a simple cadence of walking a couple yards stopping for three to ten seconds to listen and throwing in the occasional quiet grunt call. Accepting I would make some sound and camouflaging it as something else would hopefully work to my advantage.

I would be lying that I wasn’t tempted on multiple occasions to run back to the truck and grab my climbing stand when coming across scrapes and rubs. I had to remind myself that as much as this was a hunting trip it was also an exploratory trip to put eyes on deer for the first time. So I dropped pins with detailed descriptions as I went on each instance of sign I came across and ventured further in.

As I approached my first pin I lengthened my periods of pausing and listening. I had been on the move for around an hour and a half and doubt had begun creeping in, questioning the efficacy of my new strategy. I had convinced myself, certainly I had bumped every deer within a two hundred yard radius out of the area without me even knowing. My long pause of self doubt and pity was interrupted by a very deliberate crunching of leaves, the very sound I had been trying to replicate all morning. Deer were coming up from the marsh through the briars in a draw leading to the top of the oak covered ridge. I quickly moved to a more concealed position and dropped to a knee where I let out a couple grunt calls and a few stomps of my boot to draw them to me. The deer responded by picking up the pace, and before long two forky bucks snaked their way through the briars giving me just enough time to range the closest gap and draw back. I peaked around the big white oak tree I was hiding behind, grunt stopped the biggest of the two at fifteen yards and squeezed the release.

My racing adrenaline was quickly extinguished with dread as I watched the arrow pass through high and back, maybe clipping the furthest back of one lung if I was lucky. I sat at the base of the tree for an hour replaying the recently unfolded events in my head, and truthfully I felt as though I had done everything right. I ranged the deer, I drew back when cover was between us, I anticipated the right gap, and I grunt stopped him well within my confidence range. Everything was perfect, except I rushed the shot. I had target panic and instead of controlling my breathing and thinking about placing the shot, all I can recall thinking as the young buck closed the distance was, “ I can’t believe this happening” over and over ringing through my head. A totally avoidable rookie mistake.

I let that deer sit for three hours until I found my arrow, the bright red blood telling me I hit the deer while missing the liver and the guts giving me a sparkle of hope. A sparkle that petered out over the next three hundred yards of chasing pin drops up until the blood trail went cold. I did the best I could to recover the deer, cutting countless half circles ahead of the last drop but there was no sign of him. I had come to accept the fact I wasn’t going to recover the animal. I have harvested many deer and up until this point I had never had one make it further than one hundred yards before expiring. From everything I have been told, I was lucky. Everyone told me that this happens to everyone, and I certainly can’t think of an experienced hunter it hasn’t happened to. The remaining feelings of guilt and failure aren't any less crushing. I owed it to that animal to place an effective and merciful killing blow and I failed him. A flagrant error I will not allow myself to make again.

Part of the problem was my persistent lack of confidence in myself. I was questioning my decision the entire time and moments before the deer began coming to my call I had all but written my chances off. By the time they were in range I was still processing the fact my plan was marginally successful. Instead of gathering my composure and lining up my peep sight, I took an unfocused rushed shot. Had I been sure of myself in the moments leading up to the interaction, maybe I would have processed the situation differently and placed a more lethal shot. The truth is making a decision and sticking to it without second guessing myself is far easier said than done, but I have no other choice going forward. Taking those gambles is how you learn and grow as a hunter, and I need to approach each hunt with confidence.

Although, the last moments of my hunt are steeped in tremendous amounts of regret. I learned more from this morning in the woods than any hunt in my life. It was the first deer I had ever had ever shot from the ground, let alone with a bow at fifteen yards. Additionally, it was the first deer I had ever been successful calling in. It validated the effectiveness of my new strategy and my ideology behind location selection. While it didn’t end with meat in my freezer, I was extremely lucky to have that opportunity on pressured public land still hunting. Going forward, I think I have found my new preferred method for chasing White Tailed Deer for the foreseeable future.