Toxie Givens

The video below consists of video shot while hunting over Christmas break in Mississippi. One thing you will notice is the deer do not enter the food plots till dark and that makes filming very hard. Maybe next year we will have better luck and better video.

Rett Moore of Hot On The Trail, LLC located in Valdosta, Georgia sent me some of their DeerCON scent dispensers (www.deercon.com) to try out in the field. A few years ago, I tried to convert one of those home scent fans (I think made by Oust) for hunting use. Well, needless to say, I was not successful. Those things are truly made for use inside your house and I could never get the fragrance smell it came with out of the containers. When I received the DeerCon fan, I was already familiar with the concept.

The concept is to pour some deer lure on a pad and have the battery operated scent fan blow it out in the woods. You place the fans out in your hunting area before you hunt and turn it on. I tried them in the field and you can see me set them up in the video below.

The scent fan worked as advertised. I deployed them in my downwind path so deer would smell it instead of my odor. You can see a fawn come right up to it. That same hunt you can see a buck come downwind of my location and smell the scent and not me.

The only improvements I would suggest is to paint them orange, because they are hard to find in the dark, and install a toggle power switch. The push button kept getting pushed while unattended in my hunting bag. I would then notice the motor or sometimes the smell and realize it was inadvertently turned on.

In conclusion, I will definitely use them next season and if you use deer scent I would highly recommend buying a couple for your hunting ventures. You can buy them at www.deercon.com.

Our hunting over the Christmas break came to an end December 30th. We saw some bucks that were legal to shoot but we decided not to shoot them because of the management plan being implemented on the property we were hunting. Plus, we have higher expectations on what type of bucks we want to shoot.

My Dad and I killed some more management does for the new plan. Once again, I learned how hard it is to film yourself while shooting a deer. You can witness this in the video below of a doe I shot. It was so thick in this hardwood bottom that I actually hit a few tree limbs in my first shot and she made the mistake of coming back across and giving me a second shot. I also included me with my Dad cleaning his doe. A buddy of ours gave us a hunting knife and we were happy to try it out. Once again, it was too dark to get any video of my Dad’s doe and all we have is us processing her.

I am excited about next year on this piece of property in Mississippi. I know of 5 good bucks that are going to make it and they will be a lot bigger next year.

 

Now you guys know how much I love my trail cameras and I am amazed sometimes at what I capture on them. Placing a trail camera on a tree in the middle of the woods is the same as setting up a tree stand. You have to do your research with scouting. I think of my trail cameras as my hunting buddies that are hunting 24 hours a day during the year.

While hunting in Mississippi, I got quite a few trail camera photos of two good sized bucks fighting. When you put the photos together in sequence like I did in the video below, you can see the posturing and the bucks fighting. It is truly like Christmas morning when viewing trail camera photos. You just never know what is going to be on that next photo.

As we were doing our doe management, written about in my last blog post, I had a few occurrences with 2 young bucks. I show these encounters in the video below. I find it funny that the does come out after video light is gone but these 2 bucks show themselves with plenty of daylight. Well, that is hunting.

A great family friend gives us the privilege to hunt his 1,500+ acres of land in Mississippi. I have hunted in Mississippi all my life and the rut occurs in December/January time frame. This allows me to hunt the rut in Georgia in November and then move to Mississippi after Thanksgiving to hunt the rut there during the Christmas break. My Dad and I have been hunting this property for 4 years.

During the week after Thanksgiving my Dad and I spend a lot of our time getting ready for the rut during the Christmas break. We put trail cameras and deer stands up. We hunt sometimes if the weather is favorable. This property’s buck to doe ratio has never been managed. A game biologist suggested that we needed to shoot 20+ does this season to try to get back in somewhat of a check. This year we decided to tackle doe management before the rut. My Dad and I took 2 young does but unfortunately it was too dark to film. Shown below is the post hunt recovery video of our does. The group I hunt with on this property is up to 10 does so we are half way to our management goal.

I have been very fortunate the last few years to help first time hunters kill either their first turkey or deer. I have found that these hunts are very fulfilling and some of the most memorable I have ever had.

We have a great member named Bob, who is a retired gentleman, and has been hunting for 9 years. He told us that he always wanted to kill a decent buck, big enough to mount and hang in his living room. I told Bob to shoot any buck that meets his criteria regardless of our management rules. So going into this year, Bob getting a mountable buck was our number 1 goal.

The night the three Toxies where in the tower (previous blog posts), we heard Bob shoot up the power line food plot. Sure enough he called and said he had killed a nice 9 pointer. He was nice enough to do a post shot interview and he was touching enough that I wanted to include it in this post. You can see how appreciative he was to have taken a nice buck. This is what hunting is all about and I wanted to remind us all of this point.

My favorite kind of hunting is anytime I can hunt with my Dad and son. Since my Dad and I had tagged out with bucks, we decided to both sit with Tad and try to get him a buck. We hunted hard for 4 days but the weather changed and big buck movement stopped. We saw some small bucks but Tad has killed small ones before and I wanted him to wait. Shown below is a video of us 3 goofing off with some interaction with deer and a bunch of turkeys in a tower stand.

I am torn about this next blog post. I videoed a young buck that had hurt his left front shoulder/leg. As shown in the video below, he was limping pretty bad. I only have one tag left and 2 full months of hunting so I decided not to shoot him.

As to what caused this injury? I heard a big fight before I saw him come out of that area and I am betting he got gored by another buck. A buddy of mine saw him later that evening and could see a hole above his shoulder. In the video you can see him skittishly run away at the sign of another deer, just like you would if you had gotten beat up. The rut is violent and deer will die due to that fact.

As I am sitting there with this mercy dilemma, some does come into the food plot to start feeding. What does he do? It being the rut, he started chasing them even while badly hurt. The desire for these animals to breed amazes me and this proves it. I do believe in the circle of life so I am sure Mother Nature will take care of this by most likely a lucky coyote that is going to have a feast. Sad but that’s life.