Zooming In 7 (Season 2)
Show 7 – Greg in Texas
My Texas bowhunt took place in the very northeast corner of the state, near the small town of McLean. This was my first visit to this part of the Lone Star State, but I can assure you that it won’t be my last. I absolutely fell in love with the area, both because of the diversity of the habitat and, of course, because of the quality of the whitetails found here.
As this overhead view shows, there’s a fair amount of agricultural ground on the ranch where I was hunting. The vast majority of this agricultural ground consists of winter wheat fields. There’s also a fair amount of wooded ground on the ranch, although the cover in the area where I arrowed the old Texas buck consists exclusively of scattered clumps of thick cedar brush and tall yellow grass.
Directly to the east of this expanse of cover lays a winter wheat field. Outfitter Steve Roortvedt had informed us earlier that the field was the primary food attractant in the area. Based on this information and some thorough scouting, I decided to put up a ground blind right here. If my findings proved to be accurate, this would put us somewhere close to the route the bucks in the vicinity were using to travel from their bedding area, which I assumed was right here, to the wheat field.
As the footage from the first evening clearly showed, my hunches proved to be right on the money. I had indeed put the blind in the right spot. Unfortunately, the old buck showed up just seconds after cameraman Ben Kluge had informed me that he had run out of filming light. All we could do was sit and watch the buck as daylight faded.
Since I was confident that we hadn’t spooked the buck when we eventually climbed out of the blind after our hunt I decided to go right back and hunt the spot again the very next evening. Just like the previous day, Ben and I saw virtually no deer activity until the very last minutes of filming light. That’s when the old buck suddenly strolled into view right here, just 20 yards from the blind.
As the footage showed, the buck milled around in front of the blind for a while before finally ending up right here, a mere 15 yards away. Ben had just informed me that we were down to less than a minute of light when I took the shot. The buck made it only about 100 yards after the hit, and we recovered him near this clump of cedars right here.
Now I mentioned at the top that I absolutely fell in love with this part of Texas–both because of the habitat and the quality of the whitetails found here. As you can no doubt tell, the old buck was a HUGE bodied deer. In fact, the whitetail weighed in at a hefty 218 pounds! What’s more, a giant 8-pointer that Jake arrowed a few days later weighed in at 211 pounds. Those are big deer anywhere!!
Hey, make sure you join us again next time. I don’t know where on earth we’ll be Zooming In, but I do know that you’ll find it informative. See you here!!
