Nov 9, 2003 By Rod Schoener 7 min read

Archery deer season is winding down, and it looks as though this final week may be the best yet. Not only because the deer appear to be in full rut or are approaching that point, but because the weather will also be conducive to deer hunting.

Personally, I put bowhunting on a back burner last year, and I moved up to an in-line muzzleloader this fall.

For years, I was reluctant to even think about taking a doe before exhausting all options of bagging a buck.

Fully understanding the benefits of a closer buck/doe ratio and the need for more effective deer management, I started to come around to the idea of shooting antlerless deer.

When I was a kid growing up, many hunters bought doe licenses with no intent of ever using them.

My buddies and I bought antlerless deer licenses, and stomped the hills of Washington County surrounding our homes and usually never saw a deer.

Times sure have changed. Those same farms, where we killed countless limits of ringneck pheasants and never saw a deer, now have no pheasants but more deer than we ever envisioned or the farmers ever wanted, or still want for that matter.

Well, I have taken my rifle for a walk in the woods for some 30-plus years during the antlerless deer season.

Never wanting to cripple one by taking a running shot in timber, I very seldom pulled up on a doe. A couple of times I did, and then told myself it was too small or I was too far from the car and that it would take me hours to drag it out by myself.

Several years ago, I decided to finally shoot an antlerless deer after not killing a buck for nearly 10 years as I really wanted some venison for the freezer.

I had my chance and missed a big doe three or four times. After the season ended, I found out that I had a cracked scope mount, which had caused me to score poorly at a shoot a couple weeks earlier, but I couldn’t’ solve the problem as I would hit my target one time and miss badly the next.

Finally, I wrote it off to poor marksmanship until I missed the easy shots at the doe, causing me to check everything very carefully.

I solved that problem with new scope mounts, but still only walked my rifle around the woods during the next several doe seasons.

Last year my buddy and I went to Greene County on opening day to hunt on Game Lands 179 near Pine Bank.

The first thing in the morning I passed up several does, and a little later on I passed at shooting at another group of antlerless deer, knowing all along I had this phobia in the back of my mind about shooting does.

About 10:30 on that opening morning, I got my chance and bagged a buck.

That ended a several-year drought for me, and we headed out the next morning to hunt that and other areas in Greene County.

Every day I saw does, and every day I gave myself some excuse for not shooting at them. That went on for the remainder of the first week.

My buddy had to work the second week, so I headed out alone on Tuesday and went to Garard’s Fort with the intention of getting over this thing of not shooting antlerless deer.

I drove to Game Lands 238 and headed for an area where I always see deer.

With six to eight inches of snow on the ground, it was easy to see that there had been quite a few deer moving about the area for the past several days.

As a neared the woods, I looked back and several deer were crossing from the other side and heading in my direction in a slow trot.

As they made a swing around me and headed for another opening in the woods, I decided that I could take the lead doe while running at that pace for I cleanly killed my buck a week earlier under similar circumstances but at a much shorter distance.

Having confidence in myself, my Ruger 30.06 and my favorite 165 grain handload, I pulled up on the doe, determined how much I had to lead it and squeezed off.

She went right down. I was proud of the 80-yard shot, but even more so, I got rid of one bugaboo once and for all.

That was the first time I ever killed two deer in one year.

I’m not saying I’m ready to go out and stack them up like cord wood, but now I can kill an antlerless deer with a clear conscience, however, I would still rather harvest a buck.

I love the late flintlock muzzleloader season, but it has its drawbacks, which make it a tough time to harvest an antlered buck, or even an antlerless deer for that matter.

It is especially true since the deer are now being chased even that much more than in the past.

The early antlerless muzzleloader season posed a new challenge and offered me a chance to get afield in one of the best times of the year.

A perennial problem with the season so far has been the weather. It is too warm, and this year it was downright hot, making life miserable for man and beast.

However, early frosts did eliminate much of the foliage, and visibility was not a problem, where last year it was impossible to see 30 yards into the woods.

This year we spent the week hunting in Western Greene County, where I saw a balance of bucks and does with the bucks being the only deer to stop or slow down long enough for me to put the crosshairs on them.

I saw some healthy looking bucks, but not one that has to worry about the upcoming open deer hunting season as none had more than three points on a side.

Many days, as I waited for deer, I watched squirrels play all about me.

Even though acorns were not plentiful, walnuts, hickory nuts and beechnuts were in good supply, keeping the squirrels scurrying about.

I covered a lot of ground while sneaking through the woods and only flushed one brace of grouse all week.

I saw even fewer turkeys, driving one lone bird off the roost one morning and flushing one from some grapevines one afternoon.

The one that flushed from the grapevines was a lone, big gobbler that scared the heck out of me at first. It was the kind of encounter that a turkey hunter dreams of … a perfect in-flight shot at a magnificent long beard.

This is a great time of the year.

Not only are the last of the birds flocking up for their flight south, but the geese continue their migration also.

As I pulled into my driveway early Friday morning, I could hear the honking of geese overhead but they were obscured from view by low clouds, haze and misty rain.

It would have been nice to have them silhouetted against a harvest moon.

But this is still the best time of year get out and enjoy the great outdoors.

Rod Schoener is the Herald-Standard outdoors writer.