Hunting mistakes and misses

[COOSEFAN]

This will be a good thread to keep tabs on!

 

Mistakes??? I've got too many and not enough time to sit here and write them all out!

 

I've got some good ones, first one that comes to mind is my most recent one that happened in Mexico and will haunt me for the rest of my coues hunting days!

 

I was with a ranch owner who didn't speak any english and I had just met him for the first time an hour earlier. My mexican friend was also with us and was my translator. My partner had previously done all the logistics with this rancher and hadn't filled me in yet on the details of this particular ranch. My partner also had told me that I could take a deer if I saw one but I didn't have the money with me at that time and really didn't have the money to be spending anyways. While driving down the road the rancher motioned to me that he sees big bucks in that spot and all of a sudden the biggest 3 point coues buck I've ever seen runs across the road! I slam the truck in park before it even stopped rolling, dug out my rifle, loaded it and took a knee next to the truck just as the buck stopped broadside at 120 yards! I held the crosshairs on him for a second then for some stupid reason I felt I needed varification from the ranch owner that I could shoot the buck! I pulled off the gun and tried calling for my friend in the truck but he couldn't hear me. I got back in the gun on the buck that was still there and was about to pull the trigger again but felt I really need to know for sure that I can shoot this buck so I pulled off again and called to my friend. This time he hears me and asks why I haven't shot!!!! I get back on the buck and sure enough he spins and trots away with my crosshairs steady on his tail! I should've ran the bullet up his tail pipe but I didn't. As I stood up, shaking and experiencing the most frustrating and disgusted emotions I've ever felt, I looked at the ranch owner and he had his hands up asking me why I didn't shoot!!!

 

I hunted that buck exclusively the next couple days and made another mistake when I shot a 100" class dwarf buck in the exact spot that appeared to be a giant at long range because of his small body. I didn't have a spotter with me and at 756 yards he looked like a giant in my rifle scope but only after walking up to him did I realize he was a midget and an expensive mistake! My client later killed the buck I "passed" up, and in a weeks time he had broken 2 tines off but still scored 117" even without the 2 tines! So, I guess I can say that I "passed" up a 130+ 3x3 buck at 120 yards.......and it'll haunt me for the rest of my life! JIM>

 

[firstcoueswas80]

This will be a good thread to keep tabs on!

 

Mistakes??? I've got too many and not enough time to sit here and write them all out!

 

I've got some good ones, first one that comes to mind is my most recent one that happened in Mexico and will haunt me for the rest of my coues hunting days!

 

I was with a ranch owner who didn't speak any english and I had just met him for the first time an hour earlier. My mexican friend was also with us and was my translator. My partner had previously done all the logistics with this rancher and hadn't filled me in yet on the details of this particular ranch. My partner also had told me that I could take a deer if I saw one but I didn't have the money with me at that time and really didn't have the money to be spending anyways. While driving down the road the rancher motioned to me that he sees big bucks in that spot and all of a sudden the biggest 3 point coues buck I've ever seen runs across the road! I slam the truck in park before it even stopped rolling, dug out my rifle, loaded it and took a knee next to the truck just as the buck stopped broadside at 120 yards! I held the crosshairs on him for a second then for some stupid reason I felt I needed varification from the ranch owner that I could shoot the buck! I pulled off the gun and tried calling for my friend in the truck but he couldn't hear me. I got back in the gun on the buck that was still there and was about to pull the trigger again but felt I really need to know for sure that I can shoot this buck so I pulled off again and called to my friend. This time he hears me and asks why I haven't shot!!!! I get back on the buck and sure enough he spins and trots away with my crosshairs steady on his tail! I should've ran the bullet up his tail pipe but I didn't. As I stood up, shaking and experiencing the most frustrating and disgusted emotions I've ever felt, I looked at the ranch owner and he had his hands up asking me why I didn't shoot!!!

 

I hunted that buck exclusively the next couple days and made another mistake when I shot a 100" class dwarf buck in the exact spot that appeared to be a giant at long range because of his small body. I didn't have a spotter with me and at 756 yards he looked like a giant in my rifle scope but only after walking up to him did I realize he was a midget and an expensive mistake! My client later killed the buck I "passed" up, and in a weeks time he had broken 2 tines off but still scored 117" even without the 2 tines! So, I guess I can say that I "passed" up a 130+ 3x3 buck at 120 yards.......and it'll haunt me for the rest of my life! JIM>

 

Thats the HEAVY beemed buck Troy killed right?! Yeah, I probably would have eaten my gun after that. That deer was a BEAST!!!!

[huntingfool]

On my very first coues hunt we had a small buck jump up at like 30 yards and stop and look at my dad and I. I had the tag and it was the first time we had hunted coues and this was like the 6th day of the hunt. It was border muley/coues country up north and the buck was a spike. It didn't look like a muley but we looked and looked for a tail...it had NO TAIL at all! Just a white rump. We were puzzled and that dumb spike stood there gawking at us for seriously a whole minute. We were perplexed until it took off; it had it's whitetail laid flat against its back the whole time! Flagged as it bounded over the hill! DARN! We caught up to it a minute later, it ran across a small canyon and stopped. I emptied my gun at it at like 200 yards, all misses. It stood there most of the time, and I finally hit close enough and it took off. This was before I carried shooting sticks. He tried to let me kill him, I botched it every way I could!

[knock 'em dead]

First Hunt ever...Archery Stink Pig January '10. First day spooked a group and ended up sitting 6 yards from a pretty good one. Fumbled while trying to knock my arrow, he stared me down the entire time. Didn't have a clean shot through the cedar in between us, he took off over the ridge and dissapeared. Second day got blanked!

 

The next weekend, we hiked into a bowl and came around a corner into another group of about 15 stinky bastards. My choice pig was broadside at 14 yards. I got so excited/jumpy that I shot underneath him...AT 14 YARDS!!! But I cut him, good blood at the scene...thinks were looking good. Found my arrow 10 ft later, to find blood on only one of the three blades of my Muzzy broadhead. That would be an amazing trick shot, but definitely wasn't a kill shot...

 

I'll git er done this year tho!!!

[firstcoueswas80]

This past weekend, when I was showing my little brother how to gut a deer I was telling him..."Ok, when you make your first cut you just barely cut through the skin and make sure you dont poke the gut sack." (I just had my Charles May profesinally sharpened) Wouldn't you know it the knife goes right through and pokes the gut and there goes allllll that yummy smell right into my face. My little brother starts to laugh, then he gets a wiff of it and his face changes... Good times!

[willhunt4coues]

This was about 2 years ago when me and my dad were jav hunting. We pulled up to this spot got out got set up and started glassing like 1000 yards away. We had just pulled off the dirt road and had part of the jeep in the road. Well darned thing happen we were sitting there and I go to move to get a better set up and there were pigs on the other side of the jeep walking up the road 10 feet away. I could just see that if someone was watching us they were saying TURN AROUND DUMB A$$E$. That day I never did get to shoot at one. LOL

[daryl_s]

Love the thread. Most of what I know comes from doing things the wrong way at some point or another.

 

Just a few that I can think of off the top of my head. I had a December tag in 2008 and knew where I wanted to hunt from my preseason scouting. When it came down towards the end of the year I decided I would go to work Monday and Tuesday and then try to fill my tag on Wednesday which was the last day of the season. My dad had the time off from work already so we decided he would go down on Monday and spend the next 2 days watching "my" deer. He calls me Monday morning at work and tells me he's been watching "my" deer for over an hour and that he's bigger than we thought. Later in the morning somebody else is shooting at my deer and he sees the buck run off and we never know if he was harvested or not. I hunted Wednesday and never saw a buck, tag soup. I should have gone hunting Monday.

 

The following October I hunted the same area and had a nice 90"+ buck right where I thought he would be. I got some video of him but decided to stay back until he bedded down instead of moving in right away. I watched him for over an hour until he bedded down. I made my move from a little over a half mile out and no sooner than I started I see a white blur bounding over the hill and gone. Two hunters walking right down the middle of the ridge on the skyline scared him off, they never even saw him. I should have slowly started making my move when I first saw him.

 

January of this year I am down in the same area again with my bow. I see two spikes, a doe and what I believe is the same buck I was after in October. I am up near the top of the hill and they are down in the lower area. Every single thing about the conditions was perfect for a stalk and it just felt like everything is finally going to come together. There was the slightest breeze in exactly the direction I needed it to be. It had rained all day the day and night before so the ground was very quiet. They were in very small rolling hills allowing me to come up from the opposite side of another hill and come out very close to them. So I stalk in and kick off my boots before I come up the backside of the hill. I wasn't exactly sure where I needed to come up but end up coming out at exactly the right spot. I had what I believed to be a 40 yard shot and this buck had no idea I was there. To this day I don't know where or how I missed this buck but I blew it. If I hadn't found a bone dry arrow with no blood or hair you wouldn't have been able to convince me that I missed this buck. I replayed that shot in my head a thousand times over and kicked myself every possible moment over the next few days and even weeks. I will never again hunt without a rangefinder.

 

From these mistakes I was able to do things a little different this time around and actually was able to drop this buck less than 40 yards from where I watched the other bed down last October:

 

http://forums.coueswhitetail.com/forums/in...showtopic=21692

 

This is just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to my mistakes but these are the most recent. I am sure there will be many more to follow. If you're not making mistakes then you're not out hunting enough.

[2 Full Curls]

This is a great thread...

 

Last August I was archery turkey hunting up on the rim. I had spent all morning down in a canyon chasing birds but was never able to get within bow range. The monsoons had been rollin through periodically so the woods were quiet and wet. At about eleven thirty I decided that I was ready for a mid-day siesta and a cold drink back at camp with dad. So I climbed out of the steep hole I had been hunting and hit the old loggin' road back to camp. When I am archery hunting I never go anywhere fast, and I am constantly keeping my eyes peeled. But when I got within eyesight of camp I paused and took a break. I put my bow in my off hand so I could use my other to get a drink from my pack. After a two second drink, I look up and there are two 10"+ toms broadside....8 yds. in the road in front of me. There was a stand of small jack pines to my right that they had come from, and none of us knew the other was there. As soon as I slowly started moving my bow to the correct hand, they caught the movement and booked it...... right towards camp. They ran twenty yds. from the campfire and my dad taking a nap in the pickup bed! I'll never forget it.

[Benbrown]

At my advanced age, there are many more of these than I can remember or care to admit to. One that I do recall was hunt in South Texas on a ranch with some really outstanding whitetails. I was a nonpaying guest (friend of the family). I never liked to sit in a deer blind and got permission to hunt a part of the ranch where there were no stands. I took a nice 5x5 that was probably the biggest whitetail I had ever taken up to that time. He dressed out at a few lbs under 200. One of the paying guests was really impressed and insisted that I guide him for a couple of days.

 

As we were heading out to the hunt area right at sunrise the next morning, we glimpsed a deer facing us, standing about half way out of a guajillo thicket. I quickly put the glasses on him and he was a nice square 4x4 with short brown tines, and his spread was quite a little bit beyond his ears. I never lowered the binocular to guesstimate the range. My "dude" asked. "Is he a shooter," and I said, "you bet!" He nailed the deer and, as we walked up to the dead deer (about 40 yards from where he pulled the trigger), I realized that we had shot a midget whitetail buck with a perfect rack that extended quite a bit beyond his ears, but he only weighed about 80 lbs. live weight! His outside spread was about 13 or 14". Fortunately, the ranch owner put that one in the cooler and sent the hunter out with another "guide" who could be expected to tell a dink from a trophy.

[loco4coues]

I've posted this before, but it seems appropriate for this thread. A couple years back I was hunting unit 27 in January. I had a treestand all set up, and deer had been moving through this area. I hiked in, in total darkness wearing the bare minimum of clothes, got to my stand and started layering up in the darkness. I had insulated coveralls, a thick parka, over who knows how many layers of clothes. The temps were in the low teens when the sun came up.

 

Around 10 AM, I caught a movement to my left. Sure enough, a small 3x3 buck walks right out from behind a juniper right in front of me. I had never shot a deer with my bow, and here, finally after years of hoping to kill a coues with my bow, is a nice little buck not 30 yards away, totally unaware of my presence. I attach my release to the string loop and go to draw...can't get more than halfway back. I'm trying not to move too much, but my muscles were so messed up from the cold, I could not get to full draw. I actually laid back in my stand trying to get the bow pulled back, and this buck is just standing there watching me struggle to get to full draw - I just couldn't get a full draw, no matter how hard I struggled. At this point my feet are sticking out, my bow is pointing up in the air, and I'm pulling at it as hard as I can.

 

If ever a deer has laughed his butt off at me, it was that morning. He simply walked off, as if nothing had happened while I contorted and twisted like crazy.

 

Moral of the story, if you're sitting a blind or treestand in cold temps, draw your bow from time-to-time, just to make sure you still can!

 

 

I was thinking about moving the poundage on my bow up a few pounds, now I'm not so sure I should.... Great story and thanks for sharing.

[loco4coues]

My first archery hunt was a javelina hunt when I was 14 years old. We were able to get in front of the herd on the game trail and they were headed right towards us. My dad told me to shoot the lead pig. I drew back and followed them, waiting for them to stop. They finally stopped as they caught a whiff of us- the lead pig was at about 2 yards from me. I was shaking so bad all I could hear was the release next to my ear "clink-clink-clink-clink" I didn't even look through the peep sight or anything. I shot and missed low! The pigs scattered and my dad started "woofing". He pointed to a pig that was standing broadside and told me 30 yards. I shot and literally shaved the hair of his back (you can see it on the video, thats right dad got it all on film, haha). I shot one more time at the same pig and shot 5 yards to the left, it wasn't even close. The rest of the pigs scattered out of range. As dad and I were talking about it a little piglet busts out right at our feet where I had missed the first pig, I jumped and almost dropped my bow, haha, good times....

[AzHuntAtty]

A couple weeks ago during the October coues hunt I missed an opportunity at a huge buck. I was sitting on a high ridge glassing with my 15's. I was seeing does but no bucks. About an hour into the morning I heard a faint noise - sounded like rocks falling. I looked at a bare ridge to the east of the ridge I was on and saw three mature bucks walking along the side of the ridge at 270 yards. Here's the mistake - my gun was still strapped to my backpack ten yards away. Long story short, by the time I had the gun ready to go the opportunity was gone. It was the biggest buck I've seen and would have been a chip shot. I guess I didn't deserve him.

[AZantlerhead]

Heres a Couple of my bigger goofs

 

Few years ago I dropped my percusion caps while getting in my truck leaving for a solo muzzy fall bear hunt, I saw three bears within the first two hours of my hunt ( the pack in ) wtf!!.....threw the useless gun in the brush for the weekend and went shed hunting...Did well...did not sleep well knowing I was defensless in dense bear country though, I didn't bring a sidearm either... I made more and bigger mistakes bear hunting the next year that I don't talk about much,,,allmost got myself and my dog killed...I don't bear hunt any more.

 

Last year I layed on my belly on a boulder doubting my Honey hole, at 1pm opening day had a rival world record muzzy buck( 130ish ) walk through my shooting lane( the whole reson I wanted to carry the muzzy ),,,, my gun was 10 ft behind me of course,,,I made noise while trying to get to it, and trying to keep my breakfast down,,, havent seen that buck again. on the third day of that hunt I missed a 110ish buck and he stood there stareing at me for about thirty seconds,,, i went to reload the smoke pole and he turned and trotted off...I think it was the fact that I didn't foul my barrel... but did rush my shot after stopping him with a bleat, so who's to say...I missed....no blood no indication of a hit...sept some rocks kicked up near his feet

 

This year opening morning got setup in my spot just before sunup....at about 8:30 I caught movement from the corner of my eye, it was a dandy buck that had just stood up from his bed a mere 80 yds from me and had been watching me all morning...he saw me see him and simply flopped back down,,,,dissapearing right before me besides the tips of his tines I had failed to notice all morning....I stood up to study his rack a little better through the grass he was hidden in....after about an hour and a half he stood up and just seemed to wait for me too shoot him...He was a young looking deer but probly pushing 90-95...it was opening day and I knew the ML WR was within a couple miles of me somewhere, but I figured I'd better shoot, as I'd had allmost two hours to size him up and knew this opp might not come again,,,besides that he was just awesome looking, allmost majestic, so I figured he'd make a great mount and I'd be proud to have his rack. I took forever to take the quartering to me shot,, when the smoke cleared he was thrashing belly up against a tree....this went on for 10-15 minutes...I thought surely any second he would die,,,,he then made an attempt to stand but fell back down...It finally occured to me this buck needed a second shot in him....I reloaded swiftly but did not have a shot as he was on the opposite side of a tree,,still thrashing and trying to recover..I ran as quikly as i could down the wash and up the other side to where he had been....He wasn't there and everything was silent...30 seconds later he comes up the side of the wash pulling a sneek move with head and tail down,,,allmost falling once...I tried to get on him but with the addrenaline and short but frantic hike up the wash my crosshairs floated from his head to his tail....I tried to get a rest on a limb or something but had nothing suitable....I tried to steady my sights freestanding on him again as he reached the top...nope...so I figured as slow as he was going I could run him down and put one in him, nope never saw him again....few stumble marks for a little ways and NO BLOOD AT ALL...nothing to follow...I looked for a couple hours but he was in the next county I guess...I said to myself again and again....what the heck just happened!! .........

Had no more opps the next 6 days...Stomping through my area in frustration the last day I found that all the fresh sign wason the shelf to my left and on the point behind me( Both out of view) instead of the heavy sign that had been in front of me the previous two years..I got busted by deer all around me all week and didn't know why , well the20-50 mph swirling wind didn't help but my lack of scouting didn't either.

 

Much more but those ones will allways haunt me.

[couesobsession]

Well, I'll share another. On my recent coues hunt, I got a case if buck fever so bad I missed a 120 class buck at shooting late opening morning. Granted a 200 yard running shot isn't easy, but it still hurts. I shot in front of him a good foot, and he reversed directions pretty fast so I shot again but actually hit one if his tines, his g2 I believe. I know this because my buddy shot him a couple days later, same buck, same area. Anyway, U still got a nice, big buddies 3x3 fir the freezer.

 

 

 

[briant_az]

I've posted this before, but it seems appropriate for this thread. A couple years back I was hunting unit 27 in January. I had a treestand all set up, and deer had been moving through this area. I hiked in, in total darkness wearing the bare minimum of clothes, got to my stand and started layering up in the darkness. I had insulated coveralls, a thick parka, over who knows how many layers of clothes. The temps were in the low teens when the sun came up.

 

Around 10 AM, I caught a movement to my left. Sure enough, a small 3x3 buck walks right out from behind a juniper right in front of me. I had never shot a deer with my bow, and here, finally after years of hoping to kill a coues with my bow, is a nice little buck not 30 yards away, totally unaware of my presence. I attach my release to the string loop and go to draw...can't get more than halfway back. I'm trying not to move too much, but my muscles were so messed up from the cold, I could not get to full draw. I actually laid back in my stand trying to get the bow pulled back, and this buck is just standing there watching me struggle to get to full draw - I just couldn't get a full draw, no matter how hard I struggled. At this point my feet are sticking out, my bow is pointing up in the air, and I'm pulling at it as hard as I can.

 

If ever a deer has laughed his butt off at me, it was that morning. He simply walked off, as if nothing had happened while I contorted and twisted like crazy.

 

Moral of the story, if you're sitting a blind or treestand in cold temps, draw your bow from time-to-time, just to make sure you still can!

 

I had the same thing happen to me on my Javelina hunt this year. I was sitting in a blind and I was in the shade and I was just freezing. I saw a pig coming to my right and as soon as he passed behind a bush about ten yards in front of me I tried to draw. Absolutely could not drawn my bow all the way back. I ended up shooting that same pig but man was I frustrated after that.