By Kaleb Comstock
The 2023 season was shaping up to be far different than I expected/hoped it to be. This past summer in Nebraska, we encountered our third straight drought year, a deer hunters worst nightmare. With a drought, you always run the risk for EHD. Despite a drought, my summer trail cameras looked beyond promising at the river farm with multiple shooters including bucks I called Splitz and Half Rack. Two 5.5 year olds pushing 160” and a handful of great 3 year olds. The anticipation was high going into the season.
As the days went on and the bucks began to shed their velvet, I noticed all my cameras essentially went dead. I wasn’t too worried because deer typically shift their patterns. So I moved all my cameras over to mock scrapes and historical scrapes. Still, nothing on camera. The farmer began pulling crops in late September and sent me multiple pictures of dead deer from the combine. We found 4 deer dead in the beans. Three of the four were my solid 3.5 year old bucks. My fear became a reality, EHD was hitting my property. I still held out a shimmer of hope that Half Rack, who wasn’t on the property, was still alive and he would move down in late October, just like he did the previous two seasons. The second week of October I went to where I knew Half Rack was living to scout and see what there was for sign. What I saw about made me sick, Half Rack was laying in his bed, dead. EHD won again.
Back to the drawing board I went. I started scouting properties I hunted in the past, I hung more cameras. I got permission on a new 45 acre piece of ground. I had 19 trail cameras, with 10 of them being cell cameras spread out across 4 different properties, and I finally had one buck show back up, a buck I called Squigs. The only problem was Squigs was super inconsistent and I had zero daylight pictures of him. In early October I had Squigs on camera three nights in a row with a massive cold front pushing in. I thought for sure this was going to be my time to make something happen. Boy was I wrong. The opposite happened. Squigs went MIA for over three weeks. Zero sightings, zero trail camera pictures of him. I automatically assumed the worse and pretty much wrote him off.
I had made a new goal for myself this year. The last three years, I have wanted to shoot a deer with my recurve, but I usually don’t bring it to the tree that often. With no big shooters on camera anywhere and Squigs going MIA, I set my sights on the recurve. This was quite the challenge. Recurve hunting is hard, self-filming hunts is hard. Trying to do them together had been quite the tough task. I had several opportunities where I couldn’t get the deer stopped in frame. I also had two misses with the recurve, one miss was on me, the other miss was on a buck that ducked my arrow by over a foot.
November rolled around and I was still in the same situation. I had virtually no mature deer on camera that I wanted to hunt. This quickly all changed on November 4th. Squigs was back. Twenty-one days later, I finally got a picture of Squigs. I knew this was huge because in 2022, I had multiple encounters with Squigs during the rut. Over the course of the next 6 days, I had Squigs on two different cameras nine separate times. The biggest difference this year was he’s a mile north of where I had my encounters during the 2022 season.The morning of November 8 I got my first daylight picture of him, chasing a doe. I knew I had to hunt him after I got off of work. The November 8th evening sit was slow, I only saw two does from the tree. However, when I was walking back to the truck, carrying the decoy, I saw a big deer in the ag field. I pulled up my binoculars to see what it was. It was Squigs. He went from 200 yards to 80 yards in a matter of seconds. He was not happy there was somebody else in his territory. I knew he was close and rifle season was just two days away and the neighbors where Squigs had been living were rifle hunters. The pressure was on.
11-11-23
11/11, Veteran’s Day. It was a warm day and I sat all morning and didn’t see a deer. I really debated sitting the evening hunt but I knew I needed to be in a tree in November. It was opening day of rifle season so I wasn’t quite sure where I wanted to go. I had constantly been hunting Squigs to the north because that’s what my trail cameras were telling me. Out of the 20ish total pictures of Squigs, only one of them came from the south. However, I knew on 11-11-22, I had an encounter with Squigs out of the stand I call the Double Brow stand. Deer are usually a creature of habit, but it’s the rut so a lot of that goes out the door during this time of year. I gambled on the previous year’s encounter and decided to go sit south of where all my intel was and go to the double brow stand. I got in the tree late, around 4:00 with very little hope of even seeing a deer. The timber to the south has been a ghost town all year due to EHD. Around 4:40, I looked to the south and saw a doe coming towards me. Hot on her trail was Squigs. I couldn’t believe it. Squigs followed the doe all the way to 25 yards behind my stand. With the cameras rolling, I was able to execute the shot, sending an arrow into Squigs. I watched him run 30 yards and die from the stand. I was in disbelief at what just happened. Sit #30 proved to be the one for me.
Sit number 30 proved to be the one!
This season was turning into something far from what I had hoped it would be. In order to salvage the season, I set new goals for myself. I was continuing to actively scout as I hunted. I used previous knowledge and history to make decisions on where to hunt which led to the ultimate success of putting down the 5.5 year old buck named Squigs. So when things aren’t going your way, don’t give up. Set new goals for yourself, keep scouting, keep hunting, rely on history from previous years and most of all, keep enjoying the outdoors and being thankful we are able to do what we do.
