The progression to targeting bigger older bucks

In most of the 1980's thru 1990's, we averaged at least a dozen bucks a year at my camp. In the 1990's, we averaged even more bucks per year. Then in 1998, we killed 18 bucks and 34 does/fawns. None of the 18 bucks was noteworthy and all 18 racks went into the garbage. Of the 100 plus bucks killed in the 1980's, I think we only kept 3 racks, a couple small 8pt's and a 14" wide 6pt. The rest were spikes, forks and small 6pts. In October 1999, we were on a similar pace and I passed the first buck that had ever been passed on our property when someone had a buck tag, a yearling 6pt out of tree stand we called "old faithful" in an oak opening we call "flat lucky". While I don't remember 90% of the 100's of yearling bucks we killed in the 80's and 90's, I do remember every moment of passing that 6pt, as if it was in slow motion. I even remember my internal monologue when I thought "why in the hell did you just do that? You made a terrible mistake". Yet I passed it anyways.

The ease of killing a yearling buck had become a kin to shooting a chipmunk off the wood pile. If you fill enough antlerless tags and kill enough yearling bucks, you realize killing a button buck and a yearling buck is roughly the same on the challenge scale. Afterwards, I went to traditional bows, side hammer and flintlock ML's and I stopped hunting out of tree stands to add additional challenge. Unfortunately, I had shoulder surgery and eye surgery so I can no longer draw recurves or see iron sights. So now the challenge goes back to hopefully having reasonable huntable numbers of 3 or 4 year old bucks in the herd, in my local area.

I did lots and lots of out of state hunting, but in the past you could do so relatively cheaply. That's not the case anymore. We used to hunt an 80 sq mile ranch in Texas for I believe $200 a day per person and we'd see 50 bucks a day. That's why by buddy and I could drive down there between Christmas and New Years and hunt Texas in college. For a 3 day hunt it was like $1000 trip, with tags, access to the ranch, lodging and gas. And as we got to know the ranchers over time, we got late season cull tags and we could shoot as many deer as we wanted to clean.

So for me, it was the totality of yearling bucks killed, by me and everyone around me, that seemingly made killing yearling bucks have little intrinsic or aesthetic value, as far as the quality of they hunt. When a guy came back to camp and said he shot a spike, it got to the point where it got zero reaction from all the other guys at camp, because it was so common place.

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The progression to targeting bigger older bucks