Big Buck
Tecomate is the "Big Buck" authority follow along as we hear stories from around the country.
Monday, February 04, 2013
Tecomate Bucks of La Perla 2012 – Part 2
The north wind blew at sunrise on the day that would end in success with the taking of my wide flaring La Perla 12. And the temperature was comfortably cool at daybreak, around 50 degrees. The wind direction was not ideal for our first choice location to begin hunting so we stayed on the move checking senderos for early morning rut action. Matt and I saw several good bucks but not the shooter we were after. As it turned out my 12 point would show up that afternoon as stated previously in “Part 1”. Meanwhile that morning, miles away at the opposite end of La Perla Ranch, David Morris took the wide spectacular typical 12 point that he had hunted for several days. This was definitely the same buck that David had passed up last season. This year the buck was even better than last. And this wide symmetrical 12 threw Dave quite a unique curve ball before it was all said and done. In short, Dave got his buck quickly and cleanly with a single well placed shot his Remington 700 XCR 7mm Rem Mag, typical David Morris. But watch for the 2012 La Perla Ranch hunt episode coming up next season on Tecomate TV. The fruitful ending of Dave`s La Perla Ranch hunt is a classic unexpected whitetail conclusion.
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Posted by
David Shashy on 02/04 at 01:05 PM
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Monday, December 10, 2012
SKYSCRAPPER - COMING FULL CIRCLE
Back in 1996, where this story begins, I dreamed of a day like I experienced last December, but I doubted that the dream would ever become reality. That year, the culmination of a lot of effort came to fruition when we signed a contract with an Iowa landowner for a membership-style lease on a 1,500-acre tract of land in Union County.
I was (and still am) a die-hard disciple of the QDM principle and had the fortune of witnessing first hand, what can happen when young bucks are passed in an effort to improve the buck age structure. My goal, since moving to Texas in 1988, was to apply Texas-style management to a deer herd back in my home state of Iowa. Finally, in 1996, the first leg of this long journey had been reached.
We immediately put in place buck harvest restrictions to insure that bucks had more opportunity to reach the older age classes. During the first few years of our lease, we concentrated our harvest toward does and shot very few bucks. We also installed a food plot program, a supplemental feeding program, and initiated what has since become a very intensive, infrared-triggered camera survey to census the deer herd. We started collecting harvest data from all harvested deer that included sending incisor teeth to Matson’s Laboratory for age estimation by the cementum-annuli technique. We purchased aerial photos, a hand-held GPS, and mapping software for plotting property boundaries, food plot boundaries, stand and feeder locations, and mineral lick and camera site locations.
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Thursday, July 26, 2012
Modern Muzzleloading for Big Whitetails
Muzzleloading has come a LONG way in the past 20 years. I can remember my very first muzzleloader - an old 45-caliber with a rabbit-ear hammer and iron sights that shot round balls and #11 percussion caps. During those early days you were lucky if your muzzleloader fired let alone hit a target. Therefore, I had little success at harvesting mature bucks with my muzzleloader when I first started muzzleloader hunting. Thanks to recent technology and some very innovative gun manufacturers, like Traditions Firearms, today’s muzzleloaders are serious big buck killing machines.
Due to the inherent unreliability and limitations of muzzleloaders 20 years ago, many hunters did a lot of deer scouting rather than deer killing during those early days of muzzleloader hunting. Today, many hunters, including myself, prefer to hunt with a muzzleloader over a modern rifle for a variety of reasons. First of all, today’s muzzleloaders are far more accurate and reliable than muzzleloaders of the past. In fact, misfires are now the rare exception rather than the rule. In the past, the effective range for muzzleloading whitetail deer was less than 75 yards.
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Posted by
Blaine Burley on 07/26 at 08:00 AM
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Tuesday, June 19, 2012
A Day To Remember
By Kristin Morris
My hunt took place on my family’s El Cazador Ranch in Jim Hogg County in Deep South Texas. My father and I had seen this deer two years earlier and knew this was the year to take him. Though he was old when we had first seen him, he had grown tremendously over the past couple of years.
Since I wasn’t going to have much time to hunt during the December rut, I had flown down from Auburn University, where I was attending college, to hunt during the bonus time granted my our Managed Lands Permit. The wide 10-pointer I eventually took was the primary buck we were looking for, but several other old bucks were also fair game. For a day and a half, we saw hardly any mature bucks. The bucks were fat and well fed and just weren’t moving. Then on the evening of October 20, our luck changed.
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Posted by Tecomate Wildlife Systems on 06/19 at 12:30 AM
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Monday, June 04, 2012
Big Buck Strategy – El Cazador Ranch
Growing big bucks is really pretty simple in concept – give’em plenty of nutritious food and let them live long enough to reach their maximum antler size. On my 3,000-acre El Cazador Ranch in South Texas, we have done just this and the results have been nothing short of amazing. In 10 years of management, we’ve harvested 23 bucks grossing over 170, six of which netted high enough to make the Boone & Crockett Record Book. Genetics determine size potential, but age and nutrition determine how much of that size potential is realized.
If you want big bucks, they have to have age. All things equal, it’s a simple fact that bucks get bigger with age until they reach a peak size, usually 5½ to 6½ years old, and then they begin to decline. On my ranch, years of experience have told us that our bucks typically reach their greatest size at 6½ years old: therefore, we try to carry our best “genetic” bucks to that age before we start to TRY to harvest them. This way, we know our best bucks
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Tuesday, March 13, 2012
Low Pressure Hunting - Part II
Don’t Break Routine
Deer are accustomed to the normal routine of a tract. If it’s a working farm or ranch, truck and equipment traffic is part of the everyday scene and causes deer little concern. Yet, they are very quick to notice and respond to a sudden increase in vehicle traffic and, certainly, foot traffic. When season opens, don’t suddenly start driving new parts of the place or seldom-used roads. Try to incorporate hunting access and activity into what would seem to deer to be routine ranch/farm traffic. On WHITETAIL’s Fort Perry Plantation, where trucks and tractors were always on the move, we drove our hunters directly to the blind and asked them to stay there, even if they shot a buck, until the vehicle returned to pick them up. If deer were bumped from the field or stand area, we wanted it to be from “routine” farm traffic, not the sudden appearance of people on foot, no matter how stealthy they could be. We didn’t loiter at the blind any longer than necessary. If possible, we even drove to the downed deer, usually at midday or after dark, to minimize foot traffic … and human scent.
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Tuesday, February 28, 2012
Low Pressure Hunting - Part I
As we stood glassing from a hill overlooking several distant deer-dotted alfalfa fields scattered along Montana’s Milk River, one of our party of five pointed to a pod of bucks in an isolated field, his voice cracking with excitement, and said, “I want to be right there, sitting on that field at daybreak tomorrow morning when season opens.”
Among nods of agreement, I knew that what I was going to say next would stir some dissention. “Let’s lay off the fields until the afternoon. If we try to hunt them in the morning, we’ll have to run the deer off to get to the stands. If we wait until midday, the deer we have left the fields and we can sneak into the stands without them being aware we’re there. That way, we’ll be hunting them totally unmolested. The slightest disruption could put the big bucks down. We’ve got to do this right.”
Before the protests could begin, I hastily blurted out the alternate plan, “Let’s set up near the river along the east and west boundaries in the morning and take advantage of any outside pressure that might push deer onto the ranch. Plus, we’ll be able to head off any interlopers who might have seen all those bucks on the fields.”
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Monday, February 13, 2012
El Tecomate Ranch - Part II
In my previous article, I talked about Gary Schwarz
In time, he came up with several options that could answer the call and finally settled on one mix as the staple on his ranch.
Gary calls it Tecomate Dual Deer Mix. The mixture consists of several types of winter grasses, including wheat, triticale, ryegrass and oats, and various legumes, such as Austrian winter peas, clovers, vetches and even alfalfa. With this mix, the grasses address winter carbohydrate needs and the legumes provide a leg-up on early spring protein requirements.
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Posted by
David Morris on 02/13 at 09:44 PM
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