Thanksgiving, Stump Carving, and Deer Reports

Well, Thanksgiving is perhaps my favorite week of the year!! I love everything about the season and especially love pumpkin pie and leftovers... I thought the picture was funny and speaking of Facebook, I am on there at Nate Herman so look me up. The Chef is also there look him up at Todd Kent...

We were out cracking ice today to stock a few thousand walleye, crappie, and tiger muskies and at one clients place north of Laura, IL there was a stump carver going to town turning a tree stump into some racoons!!




It was super cool to watch! He had some other awesome hand carved stuff for decoration as well:




So anyhow we had an awesome deer camp over the weekend for first gun season... what made deer camp awesome was just hanging out for 3 days not doing any work, but just hunting and hanging with the fam... all our wives and kids came out and many of them even came out hunting once or twice... we didnt see much hunting, but still overall one of the better weekends of the year! Brook even came out and sat with me on Friday evening!!

Normally on opening day we hear better than 100 shots and collectively see around 100 deer... This year however we probably only heard 20 shots and collectively saw about 40 deer...

Word on the street from many of my clients was this was by far the worst deer hunting season they can remember in the last 15-20 years... very interesting with all thats happening with the deer population and management...

Tradition of deer camp weekend, rolled into Thanksgiving week, followed by second season shotgun is perhaps the greatest time of the year!! We have alot to be thankful for, and never want to take for granted the opportunity and freedom we have to enjoy God's creation in the United States of America!

Shocking Big Fish and Heavy Winds

The impact of Sunday's storms and tornadoes will be felt here in Central Illinois for a long long time... Man o man how fast lives can change. About 1000 homes are destroyed, many of them just leveled to the ground:





I still can't quite grasp the whole situation... But know without a shadow of a doubt that even during a storm of mass destruction, God is sovereign and was there in Washington working miracles. Good can and still will come from this!

So this week has been definitely not a normal week. The last few weeks however have been filled with lots of shocking fish, renovating a cool dock, hunting pheasants and deer every spare moment possible, and just buttoning up the hatches for the upcoming winter season...











This dock before:


Dock during:


Dock after:


I am really hoping for a nice cold winter and excited for the prospects of good hard ice! Can't wait to start drilling some holes and catching buckets of fish:



Over the weekend we took the boys out fishing in the floating mancave and we had a blast!





So anyhow shotgun deer hunting is this weekend! Brook is coming out deer hunting with me!! For the first time in 9 years we dont have a baby so she has no excuses any longer and will be hunting alot more in the weeks and years to come... I hope the biggest buck in Illinois still alive comes walking by to eat our beans on Friday!!

Central Illinois Deer Report

Now I am gonna disclose straight up that in general I typically am biased towards proving conspiracy theories. There is something mysterious and adventerous about putting pieces of a puzzle together, basically in determining why people do what they do and why something happens like it happens. My mindset is that there is always more going on than what meets the eye...

So anyhow after this weekend I am jumping on the bandwagon that there are WAY more dead deer out there than what is currently being reported and that something may be killing them besides blue tongue and chronic wasting disease... something out of the ordinary.

Here is why I am thinking the way I am thinking. First off, since about mid-september I have been getting pics of dead deer from clients all over Central Illinois..lots of pics... Obviously folks dont take much time sending pics of small dead deer, so here are some of the more impressive pics:




Next, I have alot of clients that are farmers and they have been reporting more than usual amounts of dead deer while out combining...


Way more talk about this from the farmers than usual, been kinda interesting. Especially it sounded odd to me to be finding so many dead deer this year, following the big EHD die off of deer last year.. You see in my fish world, when you have a big fish kill one year, it really is odd to have another one the following year as the fish population is already low to begin with... (come to think of it there has been quite a few more than normal fish kills the last couple years....hmmmm)

I really started paying attention to the dead deer situation when I started experiencing it first hand. While walking properties with clients talking about their lakes and ponds this fall, I have found 9 deer dead and pointed them out to the landowners... half were in the water and the others were within 20 yds of the water.


Then as we have been monitoring alot of trail cameras, the overall deer numbers are down significantly, even from last year. What has been the most absent from our trail cam pics is the BIG DEER.... last year at ellisville farm we were watching the movements of about 12 bucks we would classify as shooters, this year we only have 4... at our kickapoo farm last year we were watching 4 shooters and this year we have none.

That same trail cam report isnt just from our farms, but almost identical for dozens of other friends and clients as well.... Chris Brackett said he is usually tracking about 10-12 shooter bucks from his hunting farm, but this year only 1...

Now lets talk about our hunting experiences this year so far... two weeks ago I went out with Jared overlooking a big food plot in Kickapoo... we sat in a redneck blind and filmed 21 fawns, 5 does, and zero bucks.... That has been the same theme about every night overlooking that plot... fawns without does are everywhere on that farm. 20-30 of them pile in every night...

Then at Ellisville we hunted this weekend and not much rutting activity happening there. Some small bucks were pestering some does, but only 2 decent bucks were spotted the entire weekend... even with 20 acres of food additional from last year to this year, our overall deer sightings were pretty low when compared from last year to this year...

So anyhow, there seems to be something up this year... Last year there were literally thousands of deer dead on farms all over Central Illinois from Blue Tounge, and this year again there are tons of dead deer... Back to Back years of massive deer kills is not going to be good for this hunting season and is definitely not going to be good for future hunting seasons...

All those fawns without their mommas probably wont stand a good chance of survival this winter when the coyotes run out of all the freshly dieing diseased deer to eat... oh yeah also with this winter being cold and snowy wont help them deer much either... The deer population overall has already been on decline for the last few years to begin with, but now I am thinking there are major changes up ahead. The time to be proactive could already be behind us...

My boys are super exicted about deer hunting with dad already... They have been diligently practicing!


Noah has been mesmerized with his bow ever since we bought it down at presleys about a month ago... His funny quote while we walked into the store was "Dad, you even just thinking about buying me a bow means your the greatest dad ever...."  his artwork lately has been of me and him shooting together... Im the one on the top with glasses on...


If there is anything I can do to make sure they have quality deer hunting experiences, I will do it whether it be at our farm or politically with better deer management in our areas... what can be or should we be doing?

So anyhow, this past week despite all the doom and gloom reports from above there has been some success... Justin's wife Katy harvested her first deer last week with her Honda Pilot over near wildlife prairie park... Just a few minutes past legal shooting light... However on the big buck front, 3 people I know have harvested very large bucks:



This one's from Bob Quinn...


Anyone else experiencing any of the things above or anyone finding more than normal big bucks cruising their farm?